Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me Read online

  “Minstrels, baby,” explained Heap, playing with a string on one of the bamboo window shades, “Poets. Beautiful cats.”

  Gnossos went to the window and looked out. Parked at the curb was a Volkswagen bus full of zombis. Glass fogged from the inside, shape of bodies moving. Oh bad-ass scene, get them out of here.

  “Look, man,” he said finally, pointing the forefinger of each hand at the noses of the men opposite, “I cool it here, dig? You never knew anybody so cool. I’m Emir Feisal in Constantinople in 1916, dig, that’s how cool I am. This whole scene,” with a gesture to include the Lairville complex as well as the university itself, “I keep at thirty-seven degrees Fahrenheit. Average.”

  “Jeeschris’,” yelled Fitzgore, still half asleep, “whyn’hell don’ somebody tell me wha’timesit?”

  “You see him?” asked Gnossos, leaning across the black plywood table, plucking the dangling wire to one side so he could be closer to Mojo’s twitching face. “You see that innocent mother with the red hair; you see him waking up in that bed?” With an exaggerated, lying whisper, “He is the nephew of J. Edgar Hoover.”

  Heap’s hand was suddenly on the doorknob, Mojo’s was going up and down on his belly.

  “And I am very, very cool, if you dig. Boy, am I cool.”

  “Naturally,” said Mojo, hanging on, “I don’t want to jeopardize whatever little things you have going here, but if at the same time you could in any way manage to fill out this party with what you might call our kind of people, after all, Richard Pussy was very impressed—”

  “JEESCHRIST!” yelled Fitzgore.

  “Let’s split,” said Heap.

  “It would be worth your while, so to speak—”

  “Later, man,” said Gnossos, letting the lamp swing back, winking at them, jerking his head at Fitzgore, who was stumbling to his feet.

  “Yes, of course,” said Mojo, “later. And my monographs, feel free to peruse—”

  Gnossos closed the door firmly behind them, slid the brass bolt, and watched through the window as Heap slithered to the bus and got into the driver’s seat, Mojo waddling behind him, some mysterious figures in the back stirring with the activity, rubbing pale, puffy fists against the fogged glass in order to see the outside world. Here and there a face, white as a mushroom, wrinkling in the light.

  “Holy Jesusmotherchris’,” complained Fitzgore. “What’n hell kinda roommate you, anyway, Paps? Guy’s gotn’eleven o’clock, roomie won’t tell ’im the right Jesuschris’ time.”

  “Get dressed.”

  “Wha’TIMEZIT?”

  “Nearly eleven, c’mon hurry up, I want a ride to class.”

  “Why’nhell did’n you wake me up inna firs’place?”

  “Let’s GO, man,” stepping out of his fraternity-stolen sweatpants and shirt, walking through the kitchen, closing his eyes to the piles of unused vine leaves, moldy egg-and-lemon sauce, empty jars of feta, and sticky coathangers that had been used for shish kebab skewers. He paused in front of the bathroom door, stared at it for a moment, then sighed and went in. Got to keep plugging, so to speak.

  “Who were those guys?” called Fitzgore, dressing.

  “Selling vacuum cleaners.”

  “Jesus.”

  Gnossos had the brown package of Mixture Sixty-nine in his hands. He turned it over absently, sniffing at it now and again as he sat on the pot. How did they find me? That talk about the Buddha. Suppose they really know him? Oxshit. Suppose anyway. And Motherball. Worth it for the connection?

  “Paps?”

  “What?”

  “How’s it going in there?”

  “How’s what going?”

  “You know.”

  Sadistic wart. Still hates me for that dinner. Asking me every morning. Don’t answer.

  “Paps?”

  Restraint, think of something else. Mojo, ugh, almost an odor of evil.

  “Paps?”

  “What the hell do you want, anyway; and hurry up, it must be after eleven already.”

  “I just want to know about your, unm, condition.”

  “No, I haven’t shit yet!”

  “Oh.”

  “What the hell do you mean ‘oh’?!”

  “I just thought you might have. I’m almost ready. What’s taking you so long if you’re not moving your bowels?”

  “Oh gaaaaaaaaaaa . . . ”

  Gnossos wandered naked back through the kitchen, jumping wildly as his foot squashed a slimy lichee nut and his mind mistook it for a snail. He was pulling on his heavy corduroy trousers when Fitzgore asked, “When are you going to do something about that hermetically sealed window of yours? Let a little fresh air in here at night, place smells like a bluemold factory.”

  “The window stays.”

  “It’s too stuffy this way.”

  “Got to seal out the boogiemen, keep it moist and warm.”

  “You’re just spooked ’cause the English girl came and tapped at it one night.”

  “That’s right, man, simple as that. Now come on, get your jacket.”

  “I mean, she doesn’t have to make an issue just ’cause you made love to her.”

  Gnossos stopped while zipping up his parka. Measuring his words, he said: “You and Heffalump, no shit. I wasn’t making love to her, I was FUCKING her. The difference is kind, not goddamned degree.”

  “Semantics. Anyway, I think she’s still hot for you. Was she any good? I’m secretly kind of hung up on her.”

  “Why oh why,” asked Gnossos, his eyes imploring the ceiling, his arms extended in supplication, “do I have so many innocuous crosses to bear?”

  He spent the remainder of his distracted morning doing implicit differentiation in the company of twelve blooming engineers with brush cuts; then sacrificed a silver dollar for a bowl of bland chili, a Red Cap, a Brown Betty, and a cup of tea. The cinnamon stick was his own and nobody questioned the color of his money. A good thing too. The afternoon slipped by in the Quonset astronomy lab, where he made mud pies on the pretext of reconstructing the craters of the moon. Gets one out among the wandering galaxies, frees the mind from terrestrial concerns. Blooey.

  After dark he looked through Ramrod Hall, checked the billiards room, stopped at Larghetto Lodge, trotted across the swaying suspension bridge, stalked the courtyards of the girls’ dorms, and searched all over Lairville, trying to find Heffalump, who was only now beginning to shake off the shock of being busted out. Wise mother, though, hanging on in Athené, existence through academic osmosis, eluding the asphalt seas outside.

  Gnossos left a note at Guido’s, telling Heff to go to David Grün’s the following evening. Share the spoils of the day’s hunt, get the word on Mojo. Make the party?

  There was no one in the pad when he returned, so he made a fire, undressed, and mixed himself a paregoric cocktail with Schweppes and bitters. He also played some easygoing eight-bar blues on his Hohner F, and rolled a slender joint from Mixture Sixty-nine, with an eye to a later nightcap. Study break, he ho.

  But Pamela came in the after-dinner hush, sobbing and moaning down Academae Avenue, an Italian switchblade, abalone handle, tucked cleverly away in the folds of her muff. Gnossos, lying awake with L’Hopital’s Rule, had paused with a finger at the expression:

  “The relation holds,” he was saying again and again in a susurrant murmur, “whether a is finite or infinite.” Let a be Gnossos. Then what’s the catch, baby?

  The last limit, teased his reason, must first exist, the word becoming manifest just as he heard a spasmodic whimpering outside the sealed window and felt a chill from groin to scalp. He peered carefully and saw Pamela’s slender form silhouetted against the snow. She wore only a flimsy peignoir and seemed to have tossed the muff into the air. Her bony arm high like the Statue of Liberty. Torch, he wondered, still involved with the calculus. But then he scrambled off the bed with a shriek, his hands over the crown of his head, as her sudden change of position revealed the object in her hand. A brick from the Larghetto Lod
ge pile. He heard the grunt of effort, then a thick, splintering crash, the window shattering into the room, the brick flopping ahead of it, thudding against the wall, knocking the Blacknesse painting from its precarious nail. Gnossos rolled away from the toppling canvas, terrified as the nearly decapitated profile rushed at his own. He banged against the foot of the bed, another whimper reaching his ears. Pamela’s switchblade was clacking open through the devastated glass, her hand wielding it potently in a search for his flesh. He leapt to his feet, tripped over the painting, and fell on his back. She had vanished from the window.

  The door.

  He sprang across the room, cocked his heel against the plywood table, and sent it sliding over the floor as the handle turned and Pamela thundered in, cleared the obstacle with a bound, clutched the peignoir against her throat, and holding the knife by its blade, got ready to throw. Her hair was set in pincurls and pulled the brow away from her face, so her skin looked polished and hideously taut. Her feet clad in silk bedroom slippers, wet and filthy from the melting snow. Another grunt and the knife sang across the long room, Gnossos going over backward again, this time voluntarily, the blade hissing a path over his chest and sinking into the dangling rucksack, pinning it to the French doors.

  “Oh,” she said in frustration, looking for still another weapon, glancing about furiously, not seeing Gnossos’ body flying through the air toward the middle of her own, the fingers outstretched like a dive-bombing Captain Marvel’s.

  “Ahhhhhhhh!”

  They crashed together over the table, against the front door, and rolled to a stop, Pamela’s knee thrashing, pumping in a wild attempt to cleave his manhood.

  “What’s the matter?!” he screamed, ducking her nails.

  “OH,” she grunted instead, driving the heel of her hand against his stubbly chin to throw him off. He reached around her neck from behind and pressed the ball of his thumb against her nose until she bellowed and ceased.

  They lay back, each of them panting, Gnossos stealthily shifting his grip to a hammer lock, Pamela belly to the floor, face buried in the Navajo rug. “Now look—” he began, but the audacious imposition of his even daring to speak sent a jolt of adrenalin rushing through her blood. She kicked free with a snap that went the length of her body, then sprang to the wall, removing one of Fitzgore’s just-delivered copper hunting horns. It had no mouthpiece and she ran it at him like a lance, again looking to castrate. Gnossos seized the end and pulled it, deciding what the hell, giving her a choppy left hook in the belly, which stopped her immediately. She sat down on the floor with an oomph sound.

  He watched her for a moment, the way he might have watched a simmering tin of nitroglycerin, then shoved his hair over his ears, pulled the knife out of the punctured rucksack, and sat down opposite, pointing the tip of the blade in the direction of her mouth, speaking softly: “Now look, I know you’ll probably find this very difficult to believe and all, but if you now try to so much as get up once from where you are or especially to come after me again, I’m going to cut off your lower lip. You got that?”

  “He’s killed himself!” she shrieked wildly. “He’s dead, you lousy son of a bitch, he’s killed himself!”

  “Who?” asked Gnossos. His stomach suddenly swam with dread. “Who killed himself? What are you talking about, man?”

  “Oh, Simon, you bastard, my fiancé, oh poor Simon.”

  Gnossos relaxed the grip on the stiletto. “Are you putting me on?”

  “Ohhhhh, Siiiiimon . . . ”

  “Hey, for God’s sake, you’re not serious?”

  She choked and was silent.

  “Why, man? What for? What did you tell him?”

  “About you,” she screamed. “Oh, you lousy son of a bitch, about you, that I was in love with you! OH, SIMON!” She sprang and this time her knee got him. She picked up the knife and raised it above her head just as George and Irma Rajamuttu stepped into the room, each with a gin and grenadine, their jaundiced eyes calmly inquisitive.

  “We thought you might be having a particular party,” said George.

  “Simonnn,” she wailed, collapsing on the butterfly chair.

  But the door opened again, almost immediately, and Fitzgore stepped in, books in hand. He looked around the apartment and his jaw fell open. “What the hell’s going on? Who broke my new copper hunting horn?”

  Gnossos shrugged his shoulders, still on guard, not really knowing what to say, nursing his groin. The Rajamuttus grinned insanely. And Pamela, in a moment of embarrassed anguish, bleated like a lamb and stumbled to the door.

  “Hey,” Gnossos said, but she was gone. He tried following but his testicles were having none of it and he groped toward the couch.

  Later that night, while roaming the streets in a hopeless attempt to pace away an oily guilt, to purge the accusing picture of Simon sucking an exhaust pipe, he looked into his rucksack for a vial of paregoric to soothe his agitated nerves. But instead he found the Code-O-Graph, neatly sprung in two where it had been sitting, with all innocence of inanimate purpose, in a bed of rabbit’s feet. While he was turning it over in his hands it discharged its secret little Captain Midnight spring with a sudden boing, shuddered, and lay lifeless forever.

  6

  The broad, low-ceilinged gambling hall of a Las Vegas hotel, sour with the predawn odors of stale smoke and all-night people, cigarettes doused and floating in abandoned tangerine cocktails. Here and there snoozing bodies exhaling fumes, crushed paper hats dangling off their ears by rubberbands, lips parted, pressed adhesively against imitation pigskin sofas. Vast muffled silences. The telltale rumble of some not very distant air-conditioning brain, its throbbing pulses muted in the pastured expanse of viridian carpet. Mammoth crystal chandeliers poised over the deserted gaming tables, never threatened by the rustle of a wind, never to sway or tinkle. The weary group at the blackjack board, alone except for slumbering bodies and early cleanup men, who carried vacuums across the carpet, miles of wire trailing behind them, unplugged.

  Eighteen, said the drunken movie star, how’s that? His queerly familiar face pale against the splotched green of his dinner jacket, stained by the grasshopper he still held loosely in his hand.

  Show him, honey, said the Radcliffe muse.

  Why not?

  The Oklahoma oil-cowboy watching intently, white Stetson down over his eyes, pausing a moment with his hands beneath the dress of the first strawberry blonde, fingers under the elastic of her lace panties, on her ass.

  Hurry an’ show him, said the second strawberry blonde, there ain’t much time.

  Gnossos with a bottle of Metaxa and a plastic magenta straw in his left hand, cards in his right; tennis sneakers, no socks, summer corduroys, stolen boy scout shirt, rucksack over one shoulder; leaning forward as if to guard from an overhead blow, flicking his four cards down on the aqua-felt tabletop, and saying as gently as possible:

  Nineteen.

  Pausing to check for capitulation before bringing the last stack of three hundred silver dollars from the movie star’s side of the table. Grinning as his ear was licked by the approving tongue of the Radcliffe muse. He tucked his chin against her shoulder.

  Jus’ like in the movies, said the movie star, smile paralyzed in place by decades of exposure to high-frequency arc spotlights, ultraviolet lamps, Las Vegas sun. The Oklahoma oil-cowboy laughing an appreciation for the all-night diversion, his strawberry blonde squirming back against the heavy palm for a little more.

  ’Sthe game over, Sylvia? asked the other one; we gotta hurry up, there ain’t much time.

  Gnossos questioning the movie star with an easygoing gesture, waiting for the loser to end the game. The star, in turn, popping the maraschino into his mouth for effect, shrugging, saying, Game’s over.

  Okay, from Gnossos, telling the drowsing waiter at the bar: Six martinis, birdbath, chilled glasses, Gordon’s gin, cocktail onions. Wipe the rims with lemon peel. Big tip. Grinning again as the Radcliffe muse licked his other ear.


  Hurry, urged the strawberry blonde, we only got five minutes.

  Shut up, Harriet, from the first one, squirming. There’s a whole ten minutes to go.

  They were standing on the perimeter of an expansive, seemingly endless salt flat, its parched surface cracked and fissured. Each of them staring at a single point on the horizon, delicately poising chilled martinis in their hands. The oil-cowboy with his Stetson eased over on the back of his head, a thumb hooked in a tooled fiesta belt; the strawberry blondes fingering bracelets and rings; the movie star cocking a well-trained eyebrow, striking a pose; the barefoot muse twisting the ends of her long, freely falling hair; Gnossos trembling, lips quivering, trying to control his voluntary muscles, tugging against the weight of silver in his rucksack. From the east, the ocher and orange sun bleeding profusely, steadily, into the semidark transparence of the dawn.

  They waited, not speaking, standing line abreast, staring. They all knew it would happen, they had shuffled into the night’s end to be witnesses, but when it occurred they were nonetheless surprised.

  The sky changed, the entire translucent dome stunned by the swiftness of the shimmering atomic flash. The light drove their once tiny shadows to a terrifying distance in the desert, making them seem like titans. Then it shrank, the aurora crashing insanely backward, like a film in reverse, toppling, swimming into a single white-hot bulge, a humming lump, a festering core. It hovered inches above the horizon, dancing, waiting almost as if it were taking a stoked breath, then swelled in puffing spasms, poking high into the stratosphere, edging out the pale skyrocket vapor trails at either side, the ball going sickly yellow, the shock wave releasing its roar, the entire spectacle catching fire, blazing chaotically, shaming the paltry sun.

  In the echo, there was silence.

  Then the movie star said, Cheers, raising his glass by the stem in a reverent toast.

  It’s absolutely fabulous, said the first strawberry blonde.

  Gorgeous, said the second.

  Show like that costs money, said the oil-cowboy.