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

  “Goddamned demons aren’t bad enough, the cops have to shag after my ass, cat won’t come near me . . . ”

  “But there is danger, Gnossos.”

  “Right, boogiemen all over the place. Now tell me something I don’t already know.” He covered his toes with the shawl. “Here, Apricot, c’mon, baby.”

  “I’d be afraid too, if it’s any consolation.”

  “You wouldn’t either, man, you’d know what it was all about. And why kill her, anyway? Where’d this kill business come out of? She’s got squat to do with that kind of shit. Straight old government major, no schemes, no anything. Here, Apricot, goddammit.”

  “It always implies death, this breed of vision. You’ve felt its presence before, you know the odor, certainly.”

  “But then why not me, man? Why all Kristin out of the blue? She’s really not into any of that scene. And what the hell’s the matter with this cat anyway, doesn’t he dig old buddies?”

  “If it were you, the experience might have been paralyzing.”

  “It wasn’t exactly a picnic in the country.”

  “But you feel better now?”

  “Less threatened, but no better. Liable to crap my corduroys any minute.”

  Blacknesse again grinning slightly. “I was thinking of your apartment. You wouldn’t want to go back there tonight?”

  He reconsidered the stink of ammonia and decomposition. “Man, I’m not going near it.”

  “That’s not precisely what I meant—”

  “Bet your ass. Goddamned feenies scratching around, looking for veins to eat. Might get their wires crossed, fall on the wrong throat.”

  “I only wondered if there may have been something additional, even causal, lying around.”

  “In the pad? To make the whole thing happen?”

  “Something, say catalytic.”

  Gnossos thought a moment and without much comprehensive scrutiny answered: “Your painting, maybe.” The figure cutting off its head, holding the severed self with a hesitant hand.

  “A picture of mine?”

  “I don’t know, I just said it without thinking. It fell on top of me the night Pamela came by with that knife.”

  Blacknesse eased forward on the cobraskin stool. He slid one leg out of the full lotus and sighed wearily, pinching the ridge of his nose, rubbing his eyes. For a moment he considered the ping-pong ball, then looked up. “Who knows? Perhaps. One way or the other, you’ll be safer here tonight. We’ll put you in Kim’s room.”

  “It’s okay with Beth? I mean, she digs what’s happened?”

  “I told her only what you said on the phone, no specific details. I’m afraid it might upset her.”

  “Hey, man, shit, this is my hangup. I’ll stay with Heff or someone. I just thought you’d be able to straighten my head a little—”

  “Don’t be foolish, Gnossos, you could be in danger. If there’s any chance of error, you’re better off here. I have good reasons.”

  He wrapped the shawl around his shoulders again and shuddered.

  “Take this candle. I’ll look for a match. And would you trust a suggestion?”

  “Maybe.”

  Blacknesse was loosening his mandarin collar as he crossed the room. “Should it come back, for any reason at all, don’t turn away.”

  “Again, man? It comes again, it can have me.”

  “No, please, that would gain nothing. You must try to defy it, stand up and make it go back into the cave.”

  “Shit, man, it’s after her, remember?”

  “Just in case.”

  “No promises, I’m liable to fake it. You got a shotgun, old butcher knife you’re not using?”

  Blacknesse frowned and lit the candle. “Beth has probably put out extra blankets. If you need anything else, I’ll be down here in the studio.”

  “It’s late, man, don’t you ever sleep?”

  “There’s a book of photographs I want to look through.”

  “I just don’t want to go up alone, man, it’s dark.”

  “Not that dark, Gnossos. I told you you’ll be safe here.”

  Thanks a lot. Maybe call Rosenbloom, get a Sten gun. Little flame-thrower action, whoosh, monkey-cinders.

  In the middle of the night he woke up talking. Over and over again, first in sleep and then in semiconsciousness, he had been saying “fuck you” out loud. Not that the monkey had returned, because it hadn’t, but why take chances. Stakes are terminal, play your hand, lose, and zap, no more stakes. (When it made its move it had seen them both. Across the ether regions in their dovetailing mind’s eye, it had chosen her. Yet should it change its plan, he was lost, and Calvin’s final suggestion boiled protectively through his dreams.) So he found himself on his back, again soaking from head to foot, trying maledictions for defiance. It was Kim’s room, and the candle flame flickered on her twelve-year-old things, ivory figures, ballet shoes. She lay next to the window, blond hair cushioning her cheek, body covered by an Indian robe. Waking, he knew why he was there. Her company had a fragrance of Innocence.

  “Fuck you,” he said anyway, arms around his shoulders. He watched the shadows fluttering on the wall, then gathered enough nerve to glance beneath the bed.

  But no monkey came. He lifted his fist free of the covers and shook it at the window to court his fear. “Come on, how about it?” Suppose it did, though. Yellow, rabid fangs, cross-eyes, leathery blue face, gnarled claws searching for his jugular. He sat up in bed and shook both fists together, the blanket twisted around his chill-damp legs, bare feet sticking out. “Come on, if you’re coming. I’m right in the old sack, come get me.”

  As it dawned on him that the challenge was one-sided he became exhilarated. He jumped up on the cot, waving his arms. But the blanket tangled around his ankles and he lost balance, teetered, and fell over sideways on the floor. He thrashed his fists wildly as he went down, and screamed, “Fuuuuck yoouuu!!”

  “Gnossos,” came the voice.

  He jerked around, the blanket now over his head like a cowl, and remembered he was naked. He peeked through a fold and found Kim crouched on her bed, knees up, holding the Indian robe for protection. She was watching him in sleepy surprise. He had an appalling erection.

  “Is that you, Gnossos?”

  He covered himself quickly but not quickly enough. Her eyes had time to fix the object forever in her mind. “Go back to sleep, man, it’s only me.”

  “Daddy said you’d come, I remember now. Were you dreaming? Why are you on the floor?”

  “Shh, go to sleep, see you in the morning. You’re really having a nightmare, bad for your nerves. One, two, three, count sheep, four, five—” He got up and made for the door.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Seven, eight—little walk, moonlight exercise, gather mushrooms, it’s all right. Go to sleep now, all a bad dream, nine, ten . . . ” He picked up his paisley shawl and tied it around him like a Sramana’s loincloth, prancing into the hall on goat feet, a finger to his lips for silence, doing the antic hay.

  Outside the moon was full. It gave him a feeling of partial possession as he leered at the stars with his imaginary horns. He wove his way through the somber Blacknesse swamp, flicking fingertips at the dangling masks, hissing at purple and vermilion stumps, muttering nonsense oaths and allegiances, spitting curses at whatever phantoms might be hovering over his spine like monster malarial mosquitoes.

  At the stream he could go no further, and he sat down to tear up handfuls of grass and watch the water. Calvin had charmed the bees and the kingfishers here, had rolled his eyes and reiterated for Gnossos his surprisingly fundamental ethos.

  What kind of ethos, man?

  A simple kind.

  So tell me.

  You’ll listen?

  I’ll try is all.

  So I could dwell in alternative forms.

  Forms, man?

  Objects.

  How?

  I had to learn. If a bird flew past, a heron or a crane
, I could take it within me, fly over rivers, dive for its food, suffer its delicate pain. If a stone waited in the desert, I could enter its fiber, take the heat of the sun, cool in the dawn, feel the wind etch my features, collapse into dust, mingle with the wind. If a cobra lay killed, I could enter his flesh, decay, have the skin shed from my pulp, be eaten by flies, turn back to the earth.

  That’s pretty spooky, man.

  In those same ways, my soul would be troubled. You relieve the mind of the burden of image, Gnossos. You put aside experience. Guilt or fear. Even hunger or love. Can you see that, perhaps?

  Maybe, man, I don’t know. Keep talking.

  You lose what you are, you go into other things. Flesh, marble, skin. Rope, hair, and bone. There’s the ethos.

  I don’t understand.

  Rebirth.

  Ah.

  It’s a simple one. It only takes the telling.

  “No.”

  “What?”

  “It’s wrong.”

  He turned his attention from the gurgle of the stream and found Beth standing behind him, barefoot, in a sari. Her body was clearly outlined against the night but her features were obscure and the wind blew her hair across her eyes.

  “It’s wrong that you’re here. You’ll do yourself harm.”

  “What are you doing, Beth? It’s the middle of the night. Did you hear me get up?” He was shaking from the cold and was suddenly uneasy that he’d been followed without his knowledge. She lifted a cautious finger for answer and pointed in the direction of the house. There was a furious tension implicit in the gesture.

  “Nothing,” she told him. “Not even the suspicion of a meaningful answer will he give you. Nothing, Gnossos.”

  Gone mad. Raving under the moon. “Who? What time is it? What are you walking around for, anyway, dressed like that?”

  She looked at his loincloth and laughed sarcastically. “So pathetically blind.”

  “What blind?”

  “About Calvin, you little fool. My Brahmin specter of a husband.”

  The wind tossed the hair over her cheeks, her mouth, but she made no effort to arrange it. Her sari blew back and her legs gleamed quickly in the vague light. When it happened, Gnossos could not keep from looking. They were the color of talcum. “What specter?” he asked, to cover the glance. “What’s going on?”

  “You’re opening a wound in your side.”

  “Hey please, Beth, go away, all right? I’m trying to get into a little something.”

  “Oh damn him,” she whispered cruelly, closing her eyes. “Just goddamn him, anyway.”

  He rubbed the prickly flesh on his thighs. “What’s up, man, I’m just trying to hang around by the water here, figure things out.”

  “You’ll kill yourself, that’s what.”

  “What kill? Everybody’s talking kill all of a sudden. Listen, there’s a maniac monkey cruising around tonight, case you haven’t heard.”

  She shook her hair back over a shoulder and dropped to her knees beside him; then suddenly, impulsively, with the same quick gesture Grün had used to grab his arm, she took his head between her hands and stared directly into his eyes. For a moment there was no sound but the wind and the murmur of the stream.

  “Why are you here?” came the question. “I mean now, sitting on this bank, why? Tell me.”

  Don’t lie. “I don’t know.”

  “Yes you do.”

  “To get into something, then.”

  “What?”

  Don’t lie. “Forms. Objects, creatures—”

  “Stone,” she interrupted, mocking. “Herons and fish.”

  He took her hands away gently, but with gnawing anger. “Hell, man, you asked me, right?”

  “Calvin’s ethos.”

  “Yeah. So what?”

  Again she held him, moving her fingers instead of remaining so intensely still, pushing his hair back over his ears. “It drives you away, Gnossos. It forces you away from what you are.”

  He was embarrassed but he let it go. “Look, Beth, really, man, it’s the middle—”

  “Listen to me. You can’t stay wherever it takes you, you have to come back.”

  “Leave me alone, will you?”

  “You have to come back, are you even listening?”

  He blushed furiously, “Yeah I’m listening.” Then, after a suitable silence, “Say it again.”

  “Go into as many pebbles or artichokes as you choose, but you have to return to what you are. The torment is inside you to begin with.”

  “Torment?”

  “He’s sitting up all night looking through pictures of monkeys, did you know that, did he tell you?”

  “Oh wow, man—”

  “But goddammit, Gnossos, he’s simply not going to find yours because, if you’ll pardon the intrusion on your solidarity, you’ve made it yourself!”

  “It’s after Kristin, hey, it ain’t after me. It’s her goddamned demon as much as mine.”

  “You’ve made it yourself, Gnossos, you,” still holding him. “He’ll never find it in occult compilations.”

  “What are you putting him down for, what the hell’s this all about? You’re supposed to be into the same things, he’s your goddamned husband!”

  “I’m sick of him,” she hissed in a forced whisper. “I’m sick to death of him.” Her hand pulled his own into her sari, into the fold that had blown suddenly open in the wind. She pulled it over her belly, down under her navel, down where she had something to say.

  Oh no, man, dear sweet Mary, I’m holding her thing.

  But almost as quickly she gave the hand back and stood. The sari closed over the fold. Gnossos was still sitting in the full lotus, his hand held foolishly in the air.

  “Pebbles and bones?” she asked him, still mocking. Then turned and went back through the swamp, disappearing in the somber darkness of the trees.

  Until he could no longer see her, Gnossos remained on the damp grass, staring, not able to move. For a delicate moment he considered going after her, yet the part of him that wanted to dwell in bees and fish faltered, and he passed.

  It was not a simple matter, getting up and staggering back across the country fields and roads to the apartment on Academae Avenue. But the menace had gone by degrees out of the night; the demon seemed comfortable, if frustrated, in his cave; and there was really very little else to do.

  When he got there, exhausted and feverish, Proctor Slug was waiting in his prowl car, asleep at the wheel. He awoke as Gnossos shuffled up the flower-lined path in his loincloth, but only wrote something on a pad and failed to utter so much as a cynical good morning.

  That’s right, baby, from under the drowsy lids. Later. But much later.

  16

  The anonymous typewritten letter barely questioned Kristin’s fidelity, but Gnossos sat like a cross section of preoccupied stone on the floor of Oeuf’s antiseptic salon. She stood tenuously by his side, leaning away from him, wearing gray, summerweight knee-socks.

  Nurse Fang waited at bedside attention with a Pitman notebook under her arm. Juan Carlos Rosenbloom guarded the reinforced door, playing with a straight razor. Heff paced a carpeted zone of neutrality between Jack and Judy Lumpers, keeping them apart. Dean Magnolia occupied a plushy red-leather loveseat, which had not been there before, fingering silica marbles. Byron Agneau, wearing shades, gazed longingly at Nurse Fang. George Rajamuttu mumbled incoherently in the corner, sipping from a sixteen-ounce glass of gin and grenadine, through double heavy-duty soda straws. Fitzgore, twenty pounds slimmer, lay on a stretcher along one wall, eating honey. And Oeuf—under his tailored John Lewton pajama tops—wore a sea-island shirt and English challis tie.

  Gnossos, however, gave most of his extrasensory attention to the red-leather loveseat, the very presence of which provoked a discomforting suspicion.

  But before he could identify its cause, there came a coded knocking on the door and Rosenbloom sprang to act as sergeant at arms. Drew Youngblood was waiting in brown loa
fers, sweatsocks, pressed chinos, and a clean white shirt (the sleeves held up by rubberbands). He smiled at the group of nervously expectant faces, nodded the silent affirmation they’d been waiting for, and produced a damp proof of the following morning’s Sun, which he stretched across his chest. The pages smelled of printer’s ink and Youngblood looked like the cat with the key to canary headquarters:

  “I think Gnossos ought to be the one to read it.”

  “God yes,” from Lumpers.

  But Pappadopoulis eased his crumpled baseball cap forward on his eyebrows and pulled up his knees. “I pass, gang. Try Juan Carlos, why don’t you?”

  Rosenbloom saluted and waited for the go-ahead from Oeuf. He got it from Kristin instead, took the proofs, swept away his ten-gallon hat, scanned the room for attention, and tried valiantly to be intelligible.

  “‘Miss Panghurt’s Stateming.’ Thas the headline only.”

  “Whart?” asked Rajamuttu.

  “The statement,” translated Agneau, turning away from Nurse Fang, fingering his shades to get her attention.

  “Thas only the headline,” said Rosenbloom.

  “Whose pang hurts?” asked Fitzgore feebly from his stretcher. “I’ve been ill.”

  “Come on, you guys,” from Jack, “we ain’t got all day, Heff an’ me have to pack.”

  Gnossos watched Kristin with microscopic intensity and read anxiety into her every gesture.

  “Undor the headline,” continued Rosenbloom, “he say, ‘The adminestrating has approve with two-thirds majorities the new proposing for apartmings in Lairvilles.’”

  “Whart?”

  “‘We feel tha’ the presence of coeds in excess of the new restrictings would be conducive to pettings and intercourse.’”

  There were murmurs of satisfaction from Magnolia and Oeuf.

  “Thas the en’ of the paragraphs. Then he go to say—”

  “C’est assez,” from of all people Kristin, half under her breath. Gnossos’ mouth dropped open.

  “He go on to say—”

  Heff stopped pacing and looked at Rosenbloom, “Conducive to what, man?”

  “Pettings and intercourse. But like I say now, thas only the firs’ paragraph. Affer that he still go on—”

  “Sounds like you’re in the money,” said Jack to Judy.