But, Larry, do you believe …
I believe that Buddha was a frog. And the frog is Buddha. Look at frogs meditating on their pads and tell me they arent monks. A hush falls over the bookies. They step aside to let him pass. Mother Mary may have been a frog, as well. That would explain the Immaculate Conception.
Diamond starts toward the door, you on his heels. As you brush by Ann Louise, your hand shoots out and grabs her nose. You twist it until it feels like a gum wrapper between your fingers, and she yeows with pain.
It would have been a great exit, a potential candidate for the Exit Hall of Fame, except that TV spoils it, as TV has spoiled so much. Diamond, mumbling something about Baby Jesus being a tadpole, has taken only three or four steps, you have barely let go of Ann Louises crumpled snout, when another news bulletin snuffs a sombreroed bloodsucker in mid-bite. With a mixture of relief, amusement, and annoyance, the reporter comes on camera to announce that Yamaguchis anticancer device has been recovered. It was in his room all along. Under the bed. Unofficially, police are saying Dr. Yamaguchi consumed a couple too many cups of sake at dinner, and when he came back to his hotel, he knocked over a table with his attachE case on it, and the instrument rolled under the bed.
Looking rather sheepish, Yamaguchi is shown holding up an object that resembles a translucent twig. The brokers shush Ann Louise, who is hysterical, so they may hear more clearly what the doctor has to say for himself, but Yamaguchi just sways from side to side and giggles.
The guys fried, for Gods sake, the bookie from PaineWebber says with disgust.
So? Were well on the way ourselves.
Yeah, but were not famous scientists. Were not some genius whos supposed to have the cure for cancer.
The guy the worlds counting on.
Precisely. I dont trust that flaky Nip.
If we get a strong opening in the foreign markets tomorrow night, youll smootch him where the rising sun dont rise.
Did you see what that little slut did? Ann Louise is sobbing and rubbing her nose, but nobody is paying attention.
The Fathers a frog, the Sons a tadpole, the Holy Ghost is swamp gas, announces Larry Diamond. He grabs your hand, and with him tugging you along, you complete your exit.
NINE FORTY-TWO P.M.
Out on the street, Diamond is beaming again. He pitches a coin to an armless woman, who catches it in her cleavage. It drops through and rolls south on Sixth Avenue. The rich boys stole my brassiere, she explains. She chases the coin down and snatches it up with her teeth. Diamonds face, which at times can be frighteningly fierce, is radiant now with an unearthly joy. The way things keep changing, back and forth, back and forth, you feel like Alice in Wonderland.
He has your hand in his. A waning but still yeasty moon bumps its golden beer belly against the more ascetic solar plexus of cityshine. Although the cool, dry air ripples with siren and shriek and car alarm, you can hear somewhere a Jews harp playing Strangers in the Night. Diamond is either drawing you into his embrace or your feet have become toy trucks, wound up tight and pointed in his direction. You close your eyes as your face nears his.
If you was to eat dog shit and then shit it out, would you ave dog shit or human shit?
Good grief! You reach in your purse, fully intent on treating the royally appointed vagrant to a taste of good American Mace, but Diamond looks the Queens wino in the eye and says sincerely, I believe it would depend upon the sauce.
The little man tilts his derby in salute. And the wine as well? Hmmm. An interesting solution, guvner, to a perplexing problem.
With a wince of pain, Diamond straddles the Vespa. Climb aboard, he says. Ill give you a lift to your car. The Queens wino snares the coin that he flips.
Youre going, then?
Appears Im waiting for something, after all, he says. Im waiting to make contact with Dr. Yamaguchi-and I cant wait a whole lot longer.
What is it, Larry? You are talking to the back of his head as the motor scooter bounces over the curb and into traffic-what there is of traffic in the financial district after business hours.
Just another hard-luck story. And, unfortunately, one of the more unromantic ones.
You have cancer. Dont you?
I was the guy who went in to get the boil lanced.
Of the colon?
Of the rectum.
Oh, Larry.
I warned you it held a minimum of romance.
Larry. Im so sorry.
Oh, if it isnt one thing its another. Somethings always trying to knock us off the pad. Twisters father, Wide Place in the Road, has been treating me, and up to now the tumors been under control. This evening, however, the little dickens let its hair down and decided to rock and roll.
He parks the scooter alongside your Porsche, but you stay aboard. Why didnt you tell me? Thats awful. What can you do?
Yamaguchi holds the trump card. I have to wait for him to play it. Meanwhile-he lowers his lids lasciviously-would you like to come over to Thunder House and see my slides of Timbuktu?
For better or for worse; out of career ambition, passion, compassion, or general confusion, you have every intention of saying yes, but when he turns and leans his face into yours, as you brace for his kiss, his breath envelops you in an effluvium of burnt sugar, the exact confectionery aroma the intruder brought into the ladies room.
You pull away and dismount.
Ive, uh, ah, got to check on Q-Jo, you stammer. Got to notify the police if shes not back. Call around the hospitals. Stuff like that. Although you do not mention it, you also need to call a certain party in San Francisco. Belford is probably eating his knuckles by now.
Diamond smiles. Doubtlessly a wise decision. I wish you luck. He guns the Vespa. Thanks for a lovely evening. Too bad you didnt partake of the frog legs, though. As he speeds away, still talking, you catch the words Easter, Host, and Holy Communion.
TEN P.M.
It is indicative of your state of mind that you drive past Continental Place without bothering to gaze up at the ninth-floor windows of the luxury condominium that you have so coveted and for which you must deliver a down payment within a week or else lose it and your earnest money, to boot. You feel as if your brain, which only a few days ago sat like a well-fed hen on a nest of warm numbers, hatching schemes and clucking in waltz time, has been painted with radium and smacked with a flyswatter. It is a wonder you find your way home.
After ascertaining that Q-Jo remains at large, you telephone the missing persons bureau at police headquarters and are left on hold so long three more of your hairs turn gray. Eventually, you are permitted to file a preliminary report, although you must appear in person on Monday before it can officially become a case.
You reach Belford Dunn in his room, almost out of breath from pacing the carpet. In an effort to tint a black lie a whiter shade of pale, you relate that while there has been no real sign of AndrE, you think you might have heard him in the maple tree outside your window. When Belford gets excited and threatens to fly home at once, you backtrack and say it could have been a raccoon or your imagination. You urge him to stay on for the interdenominational sunrise service in Golden Gate Park and for the meeting with a French consulate flunky, whom the consul general, distracted and rather inebriated when Belford finally intercepted him in Sonoma, promised to send by the hotel on Sunday afternoon.
Are you tired, Gwen? You sound-I dont know-funny.
Must be this PMS.
The sarcasm eludes him. Oh, dear. I should have remembered. Poor baby. Im sorry.
Good grief!
You kick off your shoes and flop onto the bed-landing, of course, among millions of mites. Had you any inkling that your bedding was alive with arthropodic crablets, chomping away on flakes of your dead skin, you would be so disgusted you would probably choose to lie on the floor. Yet every one of us, including the rich, the pious, and the royal of blood, sleeps each night in colonies of such mites. The ultimate witnesses, the most intimate voyeurs, these mites. What books they
might author, what tales they could tell! Imagine the memoirs of a multitude of minuscule malcolm lowrys, expatriates in a martex mexico, soused on dandruff tequila, living and writing under the volcano of love. Jolted by mattress-quakes, buried by thigh-slides, swept away by flash floods of seminal lava, they cling to the linen with their petite pincers, recording with literary objectivity our orgasms, our fevers, our pillow talk, our dreams. Who knows more of our secrets? Who? Nightly, and often by day, they sail with us in the lunar barge, their flake steaks marinated in our tearwater, their breakfast boiled in our sweat, the winds of our farting at play in their hair. They are familiar with wife and mistress, husband and lover, hot-water bottle and fetish, favorite sitcom and favorite drug; have memorized confession, recrimination, prayer, delirium, and that sweet name we cry out in our sleep. Our babies are conceived-and born-in their midst; our parents-and someday we ourselves-die in what passes for their arms. Yes, all this: but the mites do not betray us. If they gossip, it is only among themselves. Perhaps they see an order in our messy bed-lives-our tossings and turnings, moans and nightmares, snacks and snores and trading of partners-that we have not discovered yet. Perhaps they regard us as glorious, even; as agents of the raw miraculous, capable at any moment-not in spite of our folly but because of it-of a transcendence that exceeds transformance. As a rule, we do not sing in our beds. We have no need. The mites sing for us. Sing of us. They are our Greek chorus, our geek chorus, choirs of microscopic angels ever ready to dance on the head of a pin. Their appetites are ghoulish, their hunger divine. They are what they eat.
Excerpt from a bedmite tome:
Shortly before eleven on the night before Easter, our hostess, Gwendolyn Mati (fully clothed, unfortunately), lay herself down in our city to gather her wits, to collect her thoughts, to sort things out-things ranging from rectal cancer to sugary aromas, from missing friends to the possible demise of that powerful and enduring conviction that every generation of Americans could and would move beyond the social and economic station of its predecessor. However, being chaotic, overwhelmed, worried, frazzled, exhausted, severely disappointed yet strangely free, her various thoughts coagulated, her mind went to test-pattern, and she slipped rather quickly into slumber. Within minutes, she commenced to dream. A voice spoke to her in her dream, spoke so loudly and distinctly (although it dragged its syllables contemptuously through its proboscis, in the manner of that bulbous old comedian on the late, late show) that we heard it above our traffic and crunching, as clearly as if it were there in the sheets. Startled, Ms. Mati reared up in bed. And in a low, wondering whisper, she repeated the statement we all had overheard.
The Fools journey ends on Sirius C.
FIVE -THIRTY A.M.
Bandaged in dirty clouds and seeping rabbit milk from a wound in its side, the sun rolls the stone from the tomb of night, to emerge-pale, blinking, but triumphant-into Easters yard, somewhere between Coca-Cola and IBMmmm. As you become more fully conscious and it dawns on you what day this is, your spirits are both gilded with hopes of resurrection and shaded by fears of sacrificial death; and this in spite of the fact that thanks to Q-Jo Huffington, Easter is a cipher to you now, another round hole into which the square peg of your conditioning cannot fit.
According to Q-Jo, Easter was an ancient pagan festival named for the Saxon goddess Eostre, Eostre being a regional pronunciation of Astarte, the principal creator/destroyer worshipped by Indo-European cultures for tens of thousands of years: Mother Nature in her fundamental, unexpurgated, paradoxical, bud-sprouting, blood-guzzling guise. Well, that old business-gone now and good riddance-is to your taste thoroughly barbaric, not to mention funky. It has the whiff of the atavistically agrarian about it; of wet wool, afterbirth, wood smoke, and dung heap. And sweat, tubs of stinking sweat; sweat of horse, sweat of husband, sweat of brutal labor and crude, unromantic coupling. Furthermore, even if one is not a puppet of the church, as you, much to Belfords chagrin, clearly are not, one would have to be pretty cynical to believe that early Christian spin doctors appropriated the Eostre festival in an effort both to usurp the charm it held for the peasant population and to weigh in with a manufactured miracle.
Oh, it might ring true to Larry Diamond, him with his rants about dental suppression and torched libraries in Africa somewhere; Diamond and Q-Jo are rather alike in that regard. One thing about Q-Jo, however, she is not one of those ninnies who goes about proclaiming that if we would only force God to submit to a sex-change operation, everything would be cake and pie in the land. Her opposition to latter-day goddess worship is the main reason the Huff has so few friends among others in her field. She contends that the Divine is no more female than male, that it is without gender, beyond gender; that while it may have its male and female aspects, those are merely two facets of the infinitely faceted infinitude it presents to the world, and that any impulse to ascribe gender to the Divine is a foolish display of chauvinism that vainly attempts to place limits on that which is limitless. Or words to that effect.
She makes sense on a certain level, you suppose, but why would people want to agitate themselves with unanswerable questions long out of date-unless, of course, its their version of Washingtons teeth. Theres trouble enough these days just eluding violence and servicing ones debt. Concepts of God, celebrations of his and/or her holidays, have evolved over the centuries, have changed profoundly since their primitive beginnings, but the struggle to survive has remained constant. Survival: thats the bottom line, on Easter or any other day. The next line up is genteel survival; survival with authority, comfort, and good taste-a goal far easier to imagine today than in Eostres time, although, as recent events have demonstrated, still maddeningly elusive.
Q-Jo also said, as long as you are on the subject, that if each of us, in secret, were allowed to ask God one question, absolutely nobody would ask, Are you a man or a woman? or What colors your skin? proving that issues of gender and race are ultimately trivial. Most likely, we would inquire of God: Any chance of getting out of here alive? Wherell I be when Im no longer around? Will I ever see so-and-so again? Whats the punch line? or Cat got your tongue?-questions we rarely ask one another because our intellectual betters consider them sophomoric and because we are privately unconvinced that any mortal, including clergy, can provide encouraging answers based upon more than circumstantial evidence.
Well, its too early in the morning for this nonsense, although you must say you feel surprisingly refreshed. You slept fully clothed, there was a voice in your head louder than any dream, and at some point in the night you woke up and masturbated for the first time in so long even the mites cant remember it-traditionally, you have fantasized about Cary Grant while abusing yourself, but last night, when the white pony rode over the hill, you whispered a name that sounded suspiciously less like Cary than Larry, an aberration you would just as soon forget-yet you are not merely rested but strengthened; prepared, you naively believe, for the events of the day.
You patter to the kitchen to pour yourself a glass of tomato juice. Inside the refrigerator are what are left of the eggs you purchased for Belfords breakfast on Friday. Were there children in your building, you might donate the eggs to their little festivities. Maybe Q-Jo is right about Easter. What could the coloring and hiding of feminine fertility symbols possibly have to do with the drama surrounding the crucifixion of Christ? Unless, perhaps, omelets were served at the Last Supper. Think of it, the most famous meal in history and nobody has a clue what was on the menu. It must drive gourmets wild. You and your brother hunted eggs once in your parents drafty downtown loft. That unlikely Easter Bunny, Freddy Mati, painted them for you. Each one solidly, uniformly, existentially black.
FIVE-FIFTY A.M.
One thing is as clear as the bathwater in your sunrise soak: you have a choice between submitting to your fate, in which case you will end up either a jobless pauper or a marriage-license whore, or taking the offensive. The latter involves, as you see it, an oil-futures play: betting that the price of crude
will rise short-term, decline long-term; and placing that wager with the International Petroleum Exchange shortly after it opens for trading in London at one a.m. tomorrow, Seattle time. Should you elect to roll the petrol dice, there are a couple of possibilities. With Larry Diamonds help, you might be able to buy on margin, although since your credit is as thin as the gold on a pawn shops balls, an electronic caper of that nature would be risky and a wee bit fraudulent. If it went awry somewhere, it could land you in the steel hotel. Considering your already shaky position, it would seem incumbent upon you to engage in a legitimate cash transaction. Of course, if your back were really to the wall… .
Nevertheless, you should investigate, at least, potential sources of cash. You glug an amber oyster of shampoo onto your head, and by the time you have lathered half your black hairs and two-thirds of the gray ones, you have run through the list.
One. Were you to unload, at a loss, every remaining instrument in your personal account, you might raise, at the most, nine or ten grand. Peanuts. Peewee peanuts. Dwarf juice, and you are not referring to some condensation of Sirius B.
Two. Belford, despite his foolhardy philanthropies, must still have funds salted away. He would have to. He is going to need money to live on while he is in school studying to be a stupid social worker. You would guess him to have upwards of a hundred, a hundred and fifty thou in a sweet little bank somewhere. But while he might be persuaded to part with a hunk of it to a threadbare, wild-eyed Lutheran missionary who recites Bible stories in a Midwestern monotone to the uninterested in, say, Timbuktu, fat chance of him lending any to you, although you would pay him back-with interestin a matter of months, guaranteed.
Three. Lastly, there is Diamond himself. That was quite a wad he was flashing last night. The thing is, although he certainly is not ostentatious on any other level, it could have been a show roll. It could have been every cent he has in the world. With a loose cannon such as Diamond, one never knows. Like Milken and many of the other naughty boys of the eighties, the gifted bookies who were punished for being too good at capitalism for capitalisms own good, Diamond doubtlessly had many a fine sparkler concealed in his lunch bucket when he was bounced out of the emerald mine. True, he apparently has not worked in nearly a decade, he putts about on a rusty scooter, dresses like a grunge rocker, and lives under a bowling alley, but one could scarcely say conclusively or with conviction that he hasnt got a pretty pile of rubles in the cookie jar. Question is, would he be willing to do a deal with you? It is hard to imagine an old fire horse not responding to one last bell. Yet, Diamond seems totally and genuinely absorbed with other interests, strange matters that bespeak a loss of practical faculties, the festerings of an infirm mind. He might even be dangerous. To you, personally. He is so … so sexual! And not in a responsible or judicious way. Furthermore, he is-or is pretending to be-seriously ill: yet another complication.