And then I can still smell his dog-end, but he’s not there any more.
From the dark, behind me, comes a gust of wind, and with it just a faint flavour of greasepaint.
“Well,” says Ike Thermite softly, “that is quite a story.”
. . .
RHEINGOLD is fading away behind us and Ike Thermite—who is, despite making his living by painting his face and falling over imaginary roller-skates, very smart—has asked me to drive. I can look in the rear view mirror of the little bus and see, past the bobbled fabric seats and the rounded windows plastered with the traces of tour stickers and smears of greasepaint, the horizon receding behind me. There’s no chatter in the bus. The mimes—obviously—are quiet. Some of them are sleeping, like scary whiteface children; they make little snuffling noises and one of them murmurs “Buster! Put that down!” and rolls over to drool onto his spare beret. The rest just sit and watch the scenery or the middle distance. When we pass anything of note—a truck stop or a lonely house or even a lamp post shining down on a little mountain of rubbish and disregarded newspapers—their heads turn in unison to watch it go by, their wide black eyes and puddingbowl haircuts tracking the patch of light until it slips past the hind edge of their window and fades into the dark. I am driving a colony of owls.
The road ahead of us is straight and clear, and there’s not much in the way of a speed limit out here, nor much of a police force even if there were. My only limitation is the engine of the Matahuxee Mime Combine’s bus, and while the bus was essentially dead when it arrived in Rheingold, it has since been loved-up by K of the sarong, who knows the Blacksmith’s Word (new edition) and speaks fluently the language of the camshaft. He opened the bus’s bonnet and whispered with his hands, was covered in spurting black stuff and hydraulic fluid and miserable, grainy water, and pronounced it sound but grievously abused. He and K—the latter very fetching in a boiler suit, poster girl for gender-bending lust—stripped, lubed and serviced it, an operation requiring many richly erotic rubbings and cleansings and complex tête-à-têtes. They sorted out the ignition sequence, dealt with the plugs and the alternator, and several other matters of high occult wisdom. They then lectured Ike Thermite for a few moments on the right way to take care of a motor vehicle, as exemplified by exactly not what he had obviously done to this point, and scurried off for some post-maintenance coitus. I hadn’t even realised, until that moment, that they were lovers.
Ike Thermite says nothing to me until Rheingold is a faint whisper of sodium orange bravely gleaming on the far side of the horizon line. He lets me get some distance from the place of my awakening so that, although I have not escaped my demons, I have at least left behind the place where last they made themselves felt. And then, in the secure, hypnotic darkness of the road, Ike Thermite suggests that the steering pulls a bit to the left. After a moment I tell him that I think K sorted that out, and he says well, maybe. And we don’t say anything for a bit. And then Ike Thermite says that he’s known K for some time and likes him very much, but has always secretly suspected that he was as mad as a box of frogs.
To this I reply that I have, knowing K only for a short time, reached very much the same conclusion, but that I can’t pin down the precise point at which K’s version of what is departs from everyone else’s, and Ike Thermite suggests that this is because everyone else is also a bit mad, but in more overtly acceptable ways. I feel able to agree. We giggle a bit at the idea that K is just the most cheerily obvious of a planet of loons, and Ike shares with me his small supply of chewy fruit sweets, which he seems to have secured from one of the ladies of Rheingold on a promise of greater delights when next he passes through. I hadn’t really thought of Ike as a babe-magnet up to this point. The notion of a mime having sex is somehow fundamentally wrong. I tell him so, and this sets off another round of helpless giggling, and one of the wakeful mimes lurches over and signs to me firmly, and somehow rather waspishly, that I need to concentrate on the driving.
And finally Ike Thermite says:
“That is quite a story.”
I almost ask “What story?” but don’t, because I realise in time that this would be the single stupidest question ever asked in the history of the world.
“Yes,” I say.
“Seems like you have some things to do.”
“Yes.”
Ike Thermite nods. It’s not the freaky mime nod, it’s a contemplative human nod. “Where are you going first?”
This is a very good question. I want to talk to Leah. I can’t. I don’t know yet what I can tell her. Maybe I can talk to Jim Hepsobah. Maybe Sally Culpepper would broker a meeting. Maybe Sally would talk to Egon and Egon could talk to Leah. Or maybe Gonzo has pronounced me a monster, a slayer of men and a bad egg, and my friends are not friends any more. I put my trust in the solidity of Jim Hepsobah and in Sally Culpepper’s wit. They will know what to do.
“That way, towards the mountains,” I tell Ike. “I know someone.” And please, let it be true.
“We have an itinerary,” he says. “We have engagements.”
I nod.
“It so happens, however, that they are mostly over there in a general sort of way. And none of them is pressing.” He pauses, looks at me.
“What about the others?” By which I mean, what about K and K (the lovers) and K (the Highlander), and the sheep dogs, and the Indian runner ducks, and the assorted other Ks presently taking down the circus tent and due to join us tomorrow or the day after.
Ike shrugs. “They can manage without us for a bit.”
Ike Thermite is offering to go out of his way to help me. Honest faces lie. What do mime faces do? Mime faces are pale and strange. They mock you. I do not answer.
Ike Thermite rubs his eyes. I can hear the grit in them.
“Ask yourself a question,” he says. “Looking around you, do you see anyone who strikes you as a basically joyful person? I mean, is there anyone on this bus who habitually wears red or orange? Yellow? Blue? Any colour other than black?”
There is not. But K and his lot are many-coloured. They are perky even.
“K,” Ike Thermite says, “used to be a medical professional. Then, because he was promoted, he became an administrator, and finally he became an executive. He worked for the System. He lived and breathed it. He was very good at it. He was married, and he had a family. And one morning he woke up and he realised that he hadn’t seen them for two months. He didn’t know, even, which city they were in. They might be in the main house in New Paris, or in the apartment in Constantinopolis, or in the pool house at Tavistock Villas. So he started checking his personal in-tray, which was about four feet high. He found some bills and some junk mail and some cards for his birthday the year before, and finally he found a letter from a lawyer telling him they’d all been killed in a crash. Apparently it was quite a big one—in all the newspapers and so on. But he hadn’t known they were travelling and he hadn’t been watching the news, because it wasn’t part of his professional life, and his job demanded he put his personal stuff in a separate part of his mind and switch it off. Which he did, because that was the right thing for all of them. He was being a professional. Maybe he was doing it in order to be a Dad, but that’s something else, that’s personal motivation, and he wasn’t supposed to be thinking about that on the clock. So. Turns out he’d missed the funerals because he was doing what he was supposed to be doing, being professional. Now . . . you might expect me to say that he quit on the spot. He didn’t. And if he had, you might say he’d had some kind of nervous breakdown. Which he didn’t.
“What K did—what Joel Athens Lantern did, because that was K’s name once upon a time, and I can tell you that because no one of that name exists any more—was file a request for some personal time and go back to work. Because that was what he knew was the professional thing to do—and if he wasn’t a father any more, or a husband, the least he could do was be a good professional. He had all these patterns in his head for behaviour. Ways of being,
each with its own little set of priorities and responses. But he’d somehow swallowed all of them under his professional hat, and now that was all he had left. So he defined himself by work. And then, a little bit later, he was so appalled by that decision—how cold, how not-human it was, how it was an anti-Dad decision—that he walked out of his office and got onto the first bus which would take him, which was this one, and wandered off into the world and never looked back. He called himself K from then on, and gradually he got a few other people to do the same, so that they would always have to stop and think about the people and the personal relationships and the context in order to understand which of them you were talking about. It’s confusing, so they have to use their heads and examine everything. They can’t be tricked by labels. In other words, K is called K so that he never becomes mechanical again, so that he has to consider his humanity every time he speaks to someone.”
Ike Thermite sits back in his seat and flaps his hand, dispersing the tension as if it were a sweet wrapper stuck to his forefinger.
“What I am telling you,” he says, “is that you are surrounded by people who know what it is like to have a bad day. And we will help you, because we choose to.”
At which I feel very small, and I say “Thank you.”
We drive on. The road feels open now, not closed, and the mime mobile is strong with torque and freshly cleansed spark plugs. The wagon of Dr. Andromas appears in the mirror behind us, and Ike Thermite, unlike his brother mimes, seems to derive some satisfaction from its presence.
“Who is he?” I ask Ike, because K wouldn’t tell.
“Andromas?”
“Yes. And why did he help me? Why is everyone afraid of him?”
Ike Thermite ponders.
“You’ve got the wrong idea about Andromas,” he says at last. But try as I might, I cannot get him to tell me any more.
IT WAS in former days the practice of James V. Hepsobah (Sergeant), during the quiet periods between missions, to remove the hair from his head by means of a sharpened edge. He had seen at first-hand the inutility of flowing locks in the combat zone, when his personal mentor and senior officer, Gumbo Bill Faziel, was sucked head first into the business end of an aircraft engine after leaping from a plane during a mismanaged political assassination, with the consequence that Gumbo Bill came to be spread over fourteen villages and towns in a fine ochrecoloured layer, and the plane itself tumbled from the sky like a swingball cut off from the centre post. Gumbo Bill may or may not have been the greatest covert military operative of the late twentieth century, but no one could have faulted his fine coiffure until the moment when its in-theatre failings became horribly apparent.
The peculiarities of his life being what they were—night boat rides and tropical camps and free-fall insertions—Jim often had to do his depilation in places which were not fully equipped for barbering. As a consequence of this, he established an inflexible method for the task: he would first smear his head with a plant extract which, while possessing many of the nutritive and hypo-allergenic properties of the more expensive commercial products, smelled not of sandalwood or spice, but rather of leaf mulch and wet fur, and thus would not give him away when the wind changed during an operation. Second, while the balsam was working on his scalp—opening the pores and making the fine fuzz of hair stand on end—he would test his crescent-shaped boot knife for sharpness and occasionally stroke the blade with a special stone to achieve a proper razor finish. Next, he would hold the handle of the knife lightly but firmly in the three bottom fingers of his right hand (aikidoka-style), rest his index finger on the spine of the knife and cradle it in the palm of his left. Finally, using his two thumbs as guide rails, he would move the whole stable and predictable parcel across his scalp from front to back, allowing the skin and bone to dictate the movement of the blade. In four long, slow strokes, he would complete his task, and not waves nor clear air turbulence nor minor quakes could make him draw blood. Bone Briskett once saw Jim shave in a typhoon, or so he claims—but Bone is an inveterate teller of tall tales and regards any man who is voluntarily bald as a lunatic.
When Sally Culpepper told Jim that they were dating—Jim not being quick enough on the uptake to suit her in this context—she also took control of his shaving regimen. Sally ordained that—unless they were in the field—Jim would use a soap which did not smell like a muskrat’s armpit, and would allow her to perform the task, as watching him gave her the willies. When they moved in together, and while Sally waited for Jim to read and act on the next set of orders regarding their relationship (i.e., the trip they will shortly be making to some manner of church or civil place of ceremony and pomp), she added a further guideline that she would perform this function twice weekly, in the living room, to whatever music most suited her mood, and that Jim would wear a suit for the occasion. The precise motivation behind this decree was occult. I had not in honesty wished it clarified, in case there was sex involved. It explains, however, what I see as I walk in through the front door of the house they share.
Jim and Sally do not lock their door. In the first place, there’s no one hereabouts to make trouble. In the second, they have little enough to steal. In the third, anyone who could threaten either of them in any serious way would not be deterred by a door. It is a rule among the Haulage & HazMat Civil Freebooting Company that you only pitch up at sociable hours—these being flexible—but also that you damn well do pitch up rather than not. If it’s a bad moment, you’ll know. If it’s not, you’re welcome, the beer’s in the fridge.
Jim Hepsobah is wearing a pinstripe. It’s not a grey pinstripe; it’s a very dark brown, with red. It’s positively Nathan Detroit. It’s the suit Humphrey Bogart is wearing in all those black-and-white movies where it simply doesn’t occur to you to ask. He lies back in a genuine barber’s chair, and one half of his head is covered in foam. A big white napkin or towel (it’s made of untextured cotton; people do make towels from that stuff, but nobody ever actually got dry with one) is draped over the top half of his body to catch the drips, and his eyes are closed in deep, sensuous bliss. It’s disturbing (intimate) but not nearly as disturbing as the next bit.
Sally Culpepper stands behind him. The razor she holds is like a wire or a glass filament, and her strokes are deft and slow. Not one bristle will escape her. She is doing not only Jim’s head, but his chin as well. She is wearing a barber’s coat and has her hair slicked back in fine vintage style. The coat comes down to mid-thigh, and under it she is wearing stockings. I am unable to say what else she may or may not be wearing, because as soon as I realise that I am looking at Sally Culpepper in what might loosely be termed a state of undress (although in fact actual nudity would be considerably less filthy, less fascinatingly and blazingly lewd) I spin round and face the other way, so that, as I address them both, I am in fact backing into the room and blushing—or, I very much fear, flushing.
I stammer for a moment, because my eyes and my mind, by that much-beloved phenomenon of image retention, can still see Sally’s legs—thighs—moving as she stepped around Jim, crossing and uncrossing, whispering past one another in those endless stockings with their purple trim and crosshatched net. Images of shadow and skin, deeper mysteries than mere legs, unresolved in that one glance but now inevitably untangled by the more primitive and unashamed parts of my brain, burn themselves into me. I do not want Sally Culpepper specifically, but her body, glimpsed in this moment of playful desire, is the flag my own has chosen to remind me that I have not ceased to be sexual, or romantic, that my urge to have monster sex has not vanished simply because I have been abandoned and shot. Indeed, perhaps the reverse is true. Until now I have simply sat on that part of myself, or maybe it has been asleep.
Not any more. It’s probably a good thing I am at this moment standing with my back to them.
Ludicrous as my behaviour is, and fabulously uncool, it may well save my life, because it is so plainly not an attack that it apparently tempers Jim’s first reaction upon seeing me
, which is to reach beneath the napkin (or towel) on his lap and produce a very real, Al Capone–looking gun. I pray, heartily, that Sally Culpepper is not going to put the knife to my throat. The combination of danger and sex would probably leave me irretrievably perverse. Mercifully, she does not. Instead, I hear some distracting rustlings and swooshings, and when Jim Hepsobah tells me to turn, I find him standing on his feet and her a bit behind him and to the left, wearing a pair of chequered trousers with braces, and a white shirt. This is the rest of her barber’s outfit, I suppose, and the braces do fascinating things which I cannot entirely ignore, but the danger of my—for example—grunting with lust when I open my mouth to speak is gone. Sadly, the danger that Jim Hepsobah will shoot me remains.
Jim glowers at me.
“Who the hell are you?” he demands. He says it flat. There’s no doubt he means it exactly the way it sounds.
It’s not the question I was expecting. It catches me somewhat between the eyes. To begin with, this is Jim talking—after Gonzo, the first man to whom I would give my trust, my buddy—but at the same time, it’s not Jim, or not my Jim. This is the Jim Hepsobah strangers see: a big powerful man with a talent for war. Sergeant Jim: do not mess. This man is asking me, in defiance of a decade-plus of shared history, who the hell I am. It’s a mismatch. He knows who I am. He was there. Although, quite apparently, he does not know. At the same time it is, on a level far beyond the one where Jim is asking it, a bloody good question. If I am not Gonzo Lubitsch’s best friend and trusty wingman; if I am not Leah’s husband; if I am not these two things by which I have defined my life, who am I? “Victim” is not an identity I particularly covet. Vice president, i/c strategy and planning, Haulage & HazMat Civil Freebooting Company, of course—but not if Jim doesn’t know me any more. Reluctant soldier. Former ideological anarchist (with reservations and the understanding that it was only for the sex). Student of the School of the Voiceless Dragon (now defunct). Lonely child in a sandpit. It seems, in fact, that I am not very much of anything any more. I have gone as if I never were.