Inside, she has redecorated. It’s odd. She has (understandably) removed all my things. They are probably in the garage, stuffed into a vagabond’s kettle and a red hanky on a stick. She has replaced them, not with new, but with old. My comfy armchair, ragged and tumbledown and had from an artist’s studio in Berlton, in which I used to sit and in which on more than one occasion we have made precarious love, has gone. In its place there is one of those weird wicker things which look infinitely more cosy than they are, which creak when you sit on them, and smell of grass in damp weather. Gonzo slumps into it and reaches, blind, for a pair of furry indoor boots which wait alongside. At some point they have been chewed by a dog, which is mysterious because we don’t have one. But Gonzo does have one. A faithful hound comes lolloping in from elsewhere (a room which ought to be the kitchen, but it appears in fact to be a den, a plush Gonzo-space of spice and sandalwood, off-limits without special invitation to women of any kind).
In my mind I can see one home—mine—and with my eyes I see another. This corner is empty because the ghastly vase we put in it broke—but it’s not empty. There is a set of shelves jammed into it, covered in old sporting trophies and yearbooks from the Soames School, all bound between hard covers to preserve them. Here there was a little occasional table (although it was really a perpetual table, in that we never moved it or thought about putting it away) on which were Leah’s photographs from her nursing days and my pictures of us. Now, there is a faux-mahogany tallboy displaying garish red and gold china, slightly chipped. At one end, a ghastly stuffed toy wearing a T-shirt saying “Love Me Like a Bunny, Baby!!!” is scrunched up against the wood. I seem to remember Gonzo winning it from one of those machines with a claw which supposedly reaches down into the box and retrieves a prize, but which actually rummages around limply before dropping anything heavier than a weaselfart and coming up empty. It took him seventeen goes, I think, and then he won the bunny rather than the cow. The cow was wearing a shirt which said “Got Horn?”
Leah brings beers, and we talk inconsequences until I can’t stand it, and I excuse myself and stand on the veranda wondering what on Earth to do. Should I storm out? Confront them both? Confront them singly? Talk to Leah in a forgiving, husbandly way, or with wrathful, god-like disdain? Could I manage either? I have no idea.
Inside, Gonzo is telling her about the day, the accident, the plink and the fear. I can’t hear the words, but I know the tone, the awestruck “How in the hell we lived, I’ll never know,” and then his voice deepens, and I know he’s telling her about the torrent of vile, impossible crap which fell on us and what happened or didn’t happen. She glances out at me, pale with worry. I see her lips move in a question: “Is he . . .” And I turn away before I can see her ask if I am okay, because no, I am not okay, I am in hell.
Perhaps that’s it! Perhaps I have not been betrayed; I have been cast away. Perhaps I was transported to a parallel world in that moment. A vast rift of energy and broken matter threw me, Buck Rogers style, into a realm unfamiliar and fearsomely strange. Except that I know it didn’t. I just got damp. And so I weep because it seems like the only thing to do, and after a bit I can feel Gonzo’s eyes on me through the window, but when I look round, he is climbing the stairs to bed. To my bed, no doubt. The big one made from giant slices of local trees and sanded by hand in the forecourt. My marriage bed. And then, in the doorway, there is Leah, and I wait for her to say something to make it all all right. Perhaps we are in some weird, impossible plot, an undercover operation by trained professionals, and they have asked her to play this role to defray suspicion, because Gonzo, Special Operations Gonzo, is being put into play against some threat to the world. I will be the ace in the hole, the secret, and Gonzo will be invulnerable because of me and this bizarre deception.
Leah looks at me but she does not explain. Worse, her face is filled with a terrible sympathy. She knows what I am hoping for, but she cannot give it, cannot offer me anything at all. Except pity. And this she does, in a breaking voice, as she steps close to me and kisses me lightly on the cheek.
“I’m so sorry,” Leah whispers. “There’s a bed in the den.” And she goes inside and follows Gonzo upstairs.
I sleep in a Zedbed in my own unrecognisable house. I sleep quite well, which is infuriating. The following morning Leah brings me toast. She smells of jasmine and Gonzo. I find reasons to be busy until ten, when Gonzo and I climb into the truck. We are taking it to see Malevolent Pete the mechanic before we rejoin Sally and Jim. All trucks in the company pool must be approved and frequently serviced by Malevolent Pete. It is our law. And I cannot help feeling that Gonzo wants some us-time, which is definitely in order.
Leah waves us off.
I have decided two things: the first, that it is impossible for me to hate two people I love for loving one another (quite untrue); the second, that I am less frightened of talking to Gonzo about this than I am of hearing it from my wife. The conversation I have with Gonzo will be hurtful and there will probably be shouting. The one I have with Leah could twist my ribs apart and burst my heart like a water balloon. And so I wave through the passenger-side window at Leah, and she waves back at both of us, biting her lower lip. Gonzo takes us out of heaven and back into the world. The feeling of relief is the worst good feeling I have ever had.
Pete’s garage is in a town called Baggin. It’s a frontiersy kind of place, gunslinging and macho but basically okay, and they make their own branded cigars there for added grit. The town smells of tobacco all day and all night, and the western end has a brewery too. Baggin is about a day away along the Pipe, but there’s a short cut: a more-or-less stable road through the Border, takes about two hours. Gonzo and I have pretty much waltzed through the worst thing that can happen to you in terms of Stuff exposure, and we’re okay, so it’s just a question of dangerous men out there, and we’re officially dangerous too. The weather forecast is fine, anyway—good winds driving the Stuff away from us. So the fork in the road gives Gonzo no pause, and he takes us into the Border. He doesn’t have to glance my way. He knows what I would say. He must also know that I am trying to frame my questions, get away from my (hate, horror, fury, screaming hideous gut-eating devils of pain) emotions so I can ask what’s going on in a clear, gentle way, as between men of good character and intent. And so it must come as a surprise to him—as it does to me—when it boils out of me at the fifty-mile marker when I spill my drink.
Slick, sickly goo glugs down over my stomach, and I can feel it soak the material and prickle against my skin. It is loathsome. It feels vile. It feels like yesterday. I hate it.
But instead of yelling about the fizzy sugar stuff on my shirt and trousers, I turn on Gonzo and I yell incoherently at him, and then it all comes out. Everything I love, he has taken, and he is my friend, but there are some sacrifices he should not ask, how long has it been going on? Does Leah love him, or have I been perpetrating some terrible sexual inadequacy I have no notion of? Did I skip a lesson at the Soames School? Doze off during a lecture on erogenousnesses vital to the maintenance of faithful relationships? Or was there a class on post-ethical friendship which I somehow did not attend? What, in short, does Gonzo William Lubitsch think he is doing sharing mattress-whoopee with my wife?
And it is only when I say these words, which are after all magic words, that Gonzo seems to pay any attention at all. It is at this point that he half-turns to look at me with a kind of sick curiosity. I say them again in case he has not understood. And Gonzo flinches. This result pleases me, and I say it over and over and watch him shrink like the lying sod he is, until finally I am raw enough that I pause to gulp some air, and he says:
“So. You want a beer?”
Which is the most weirdly comforting thing I have ever heard. Of course I want a beer. Clearly, he has an explanation. He is unfussed by what he has heard. This whole business is some ill-conceived prank gone wrong, or yes, that strange undercover operation I could not be warned of in advance. It is a test, and I/we ha
ve passed, and George Copsen, who is not dead at all, will now appear from behind the curtain to make sense of everything. Gonzo reaches in the back for the beer, must have stashed some there before we left the house. I am still feverishly seeking Copsen’s hiding place, and I conclude that it must be extra-dimensional: Professor Derek has been at his tricks again, in some even more remarkable way. And indeed we have crossed into some kind of weird, inappropriate place, because when Gonzo’s hand emerges from behind the seat, he is holding not a beer but a decent-sized gun. It is a handgun in workman-like grey, and he does not offer it to me but compounds his error by pointing it at my head.
In fact, he does not point it at my head. He just generally points it at me, but when I look into its one good eye, and catch the glint of the nominally soft-nosed (but actually irretrievably solid and lethal) slug in the chamber, all I can imagine is the thing going off and my brain sluicing backwards onto the expensive upholstery. And hence I think of it as at my head, despite its being aimed loosely at my torso.
Twenty hours ago Gonzo was a cartoonish hero-lout, a perpetual boychild with the body of a Hercules. He drank beer from the bottle, liked his steaks and his women raw, and would have stepped without hesitation between a puppy and a speeding truck for no better reason than a fuzzy sense of the way things oughta be. This Gonzo is a new deal: a nervous, glazed bastard with designer shakes and a greasy, halfregretful expression which tells you he doesn’t really care a damn. This Gonzo is not your friend, he’s just this guy you met a few times; granted, you like one another, but in the final analysis, if there’s a shark in the water he hopes you get eaten whole, and that you’re fat enough to satisfy the fish or stick in its salty white throat and choke it with your masticated leg. This is a guy who will kill you on the off-chance that sharks cannot vomit.
“Get out of the truck,” Gonzo tells me. He waves the gun, eyes mostly on the road. His peripheral vision will tell him if I move, those old biological hardwirings spotting muscles and hinges moving relative to one another and producing the basic response: he’ll fire the gun. And so I stay extremely still. The gun wobbles anyway, and for a moment it is pointed down and a little behind me. Now, instead of imagining my head bursting open, I see what will happen if he discharges the gun in that direction: the slug penetrating the enormous fuel tank, stimulating the stored chemical energy into a bright gasp of heat. For a fraction of a second the whole thing will look like one of those weird little static globes the hippie scions had at Jarndice, and then it will look like the beginning of a model sun. We will not actually witness this, because our eyes will be burned from their sockets and our brains will follow them into oblivion before ever we have a chance to apprehend the mechanism by which we die.
Thinking this, I am willing or even eager to leave the truck. It seems this will resolve what has become a rather twitchy situation. I feel somewhat hard done by; it is I, after all, who has been grievously wronged. Gonzo is guilty (and if I had any doubts on that score, they have rather faded away) and by rights ought to be contrite. Although perhaps that is how it goes: anger is easier, after all. I must have sinned against Gonzo in the past. Everyone distractedly injures their friends from time to time. I wonder briefly which of my unknown transgressions so deeply offended him as to bring us here. It must have been a howler. Or perhaps he is in love with Leah, and she with him, in the tradition of weak-ass romance Jim Hepsobah so abhors. I remember Leah’s apology last night, her discomfort. “I’m so sorry.” But not sorry enough to repent, to abjure. No. There is more to this. Please, God, it is more than it seems.
In this brief meditation I have lost the opportunity to assail Gonzo in a fast-moving truck while he is driving with one hand and holding a pistol in the other, and this is not entirely a matter for regret. He speaks again:
“Get out.”
All Gonzo needs to do to achieve my departure is stop the truck, or at least bring it to a speed where I won’t splinter anything more vital than the grommets on my shoelaces when I hit the ground running. I tell him so. It is possible that I am unclear. For answer, he points the gun at my body and pulls the trigger more times than I would have thought possible.
At long last, I get shot.
I wonder briefly whether it counts if you get shot by a friend instead of by an enemy, and then I realise that those definitions have now become confused.
The experience of repeatedly getting shot in the gut at close range is pretty much as advertised. The only thing is I don’t pass out. Having finally gotten shot, I am damn well going to live the experience. I am thrown from the truck, Gonzo’s boot striking my chest above the entry wounds, exquisite pain. I catch the wind, billow like a kite. My back bends limply forward until my spine is at maximum arc, my arms are out beyond my shoulders and head, the new orifice in my stomach creased, agony beyond nausea. I am totally and utterly one of those weird images by Warhol: Silhouette of a Gunshot Victim, silkscreen print, one in a series intended to mimic the fractional motion of twenty-four frames of cinematic film. I am printed in black on yellow, reproduced as a T-shirt. I am this year’s Che Guevara. A single second separates me from the asphalt.
I do not pass out.
I strike like a break-dancer doing one of those impossible belly flips. I bounce. My eyelashes brush the ground, frail antenna sensing so much: dry, dry road, dust and gravel, a kernel of wheat, the slight tackiness of the surface. I smell oil and heat, desert grass and something cloying and rich which I cannot name. Then I am standing upright, flying in that position towards the accelerating truck. The pain rides my shadow, my angel’s wings. Bones have broken somewhere, I know it, but I am totally unable to say which ones. My legs touch the road, pass through the surface, fall into the ground. The earth is too soft to support my weight. It is candyfloss. I am a titan. Only if I lie down can it hold me, the greater surface area compensating for my remarkable weight.
I lie down, but I do not pass out. It seems to me that it would be okay to do that now, because the bouncing is over, but I have forgotten how. There ought to be a darkness waiting, a coma, perhaps a merciful death. If these things are present they are on strike or lazy, or I’m a second-class passenger and the unconsciousness car is currently occupied by premium travellers.
I lie with my face pressed to the uncomfortable heat of the asphalt and a small stone pricking my ear. It annoys me more than I can say. And as if this wasn’t bad enough, now I am hallucinating. A person in a top hat is screaming at me to wake up, which is ludicrous because I am awake and fully aware of this awful mess. The person shakes his head and actually goes as far as to slap me to get my attention. He slaps like a girl. Hah! I have been shot. Mere slapping cannot harm me! I feel no pain. I tell him so. He has big round eyes like a cow. Perhaps he is a cow. Most likely, a friendly cow has come to sit with me while I die. He is not weeping on my face, he is licking it with bovine simplicity. He is desirous of conversation or a biscuit, or maybe he just wants to help a fellow mammal. A comradely cow. I wonder if it will make him sad when I expire. Perhaps I should wait a bit, until he is gone. Shall I wait, Comrade Cow? Yes, the cow says. Wait. Wait.
I wait. It is cold here, in the sun. I shiver. The cow wraps me in slender arms (my hallucination, my rules, nyahh) and lays me in her cow lap. All cows are girls, or at least, all cows with laps. Boy cows have no available lap space, owing to their masculine construction. Wait, says Comrade Cow. Just wait.
I lie there in this damned uncomfortable position for seven hours, nine minutes and eight seconds. I know this because I count them. Comrade Cow sits with me all the way through, does not stop talking that entire time, and does not let me fall asleep, which I would love to do. I become a Cow-ist (to rhyme with Mao-ist and Dao-ist). I live for Comrade Cow. And then finally a bulbous, carrot-shaped silver Airstream bus appears in my field of vision like a road-going whale, and from its belly—via the mouth or driver’s-side door—out jumps Jonah, and starts shouting and giving orders, although he is very fat and appears to be wear
ing a sarong, and they roll me over onto a stretcher and do magic things to make me better, but these, alas, I do not get to observe, because when Jonah sees that I am fully conscious he starts swearing and they fill my body with a fearsome, blue-white cold which proceeds from my hand to the rest of my body, and I realise, from the sudden lack, that the pain has been with me all the time.
I pass out.
Chapter Eleven
The wrong afterlife;
the Devil;
all the fun of the fair.
WHEREVER I AM, it is the good kind of place. Well, small caveat: it is conceivable that I am dead, but other than that, it is the good kind of place. There are fields. You might term them pastures, although there are no actual cattle (poor Comrade Cow is lonely, somewhere), and hence no cattle-related by-products which might make you unwilling to run barefoot through them. These are fields of the sort envisaged as eternal rewards. In the distance there are mountains, but they aren’t mountains like my home—my old home—they are bigger, bluer and snowier, and as a consequence of this, looking at them doesn’t hurt. Nothing does, actually, which is jolly welcome. And there are shepherdesses. If you visit a museum almost anywhere in the world, you see shepherdesses like this; the fantasy is hard-wired into the lechers of our race. These shepherdesses are on the blowsy, wistful end of the filthy dream spectrum. They are, to be honest, nymphs. They titter, and they move in a way which can be described only as flitting. (Flitting is a form of locomotion which involves running on tiptoe, wiggling and bouncing, and having your clothes very nearly fall off.) They are winsome, albeit in a knowing way which suggests practice. When I look at them, they look back from beneath heavy lashes. When I look away, they pout. If they suspect I am able to see them in the corner of my eye, they stretch languorously, and make little whimpering sounds as of a person with a pleasant itch which needs careful scratching. It appears that I am a pagan.