Inside, he saw the nervous waiter and smiled at him. He saw the young girl who'd known Merrill in some way at some other time. He saw the heavy girl with the neon-green eyeshadow, the Head Den Mother, who was briefing a table of disciples. What he wasn't quite prepared for was the great-bearded prophet who sat almost hidden behind the door - like the toughies who check IDs in America, or the wise-ass ticket-takers at dirty movies. When the prophet spoke, he bellowed, and Bogus wheeled around suddenly to see who was shouting.
'Merrill Overturf!' the prophet boomed. 'Well, did you find him?' Whether it was the volume of the voice or the fact that it rendered Trumper motionless, frozen in an awkward pivot stance, almost all the Hawelka customers seemed to think the question was directed to them; they froze too, suspended over their coffees, mired in their rummed teas, beers and brandies; fastened, unchewing, to whatever they'd been gnawing.
'Well, did you?' the prophet asked impatiently. 'Merrill Overturf, you said, wasn't it? Weren't you looking for him? Did you find him?'
All the Hawelka waited for an answer. Bogus balked; he felt as if he were a reel of film being rewound before he was finished.
'Well?' said the neon-green girl softly. 'Did you find him?'
'I don't know,' Trumper said.
'You don't know?' the prophet boomed.
With a sickening sympathy in her voice, the neon-green girl begged him, 'Here, come and sit, you. You've got to get this off your mind, I think. I can tell ...'
But he whirled himself and his bulky suitcase toward the door, hitting the waiter in the groin with it and causing that natty, agile man to fold - maintaining, for just a moment, a neat balancing feat with the sliding coffees and beers on his tray.
The prophet made a grab for Bogus at the door, but Bogus slipped by him, hearing the prophet announce, 'He must be on something ...' Just before the door closed, he heard the prophet call, 'Ride it out. You'll come down ...'
Outside the Hawelka, someone in the shadows touched his hand with something like affection.
'Merrill?' Bogus asked in a whimper.
'Gra! Gra!' the man said, turning like a quarterback and thrusting a parcel, Whunk!, in Trumper's stomach. When he straightened up, the man was gone.
Stepping to the curb, he held the parcel up to the light; it was a firm, white-papered package, tied up with white butcher's string. He undid it. It looked like chocolate in that neon light, smooth and dark, queerly sticky to the touch; it gave off a minted smell. A mentholated slab of fudge? Queer gift. Then he bent closely over it, sniffed it deeply and touched it with his tongue. It was pure hashish, a perfectly cut rectangle slightly larger than a brick.
A clamor rose in his head as he tried to imagine what it was worth.
In the fogged-up window of the Hawelka, he saw a hand rub a peepsight out to the street. A voice inside announced, 'He's still there.'
So then he quickly wasn't. He didn't intend to go back out on the broad Graben; it was just the direction he happened to jog in that brought him out on to this glittery whoreful street. He crammed the hashish brick into his suitcase.
He didn't intend to speak to anyone, either; it was just that when he saw the lady in the fur coat with the matching muff, he saw she'd changed her clothes. No more fur coat, no more muff; she wore a spring suit, as if it were warm.
He asked her if she had the time.
27
How is Anything Related to Anything Else?
RALPH WAS ATTEMPTING to explain the structure of his film by comparing it to a contemporary novel, Helmbart's Vital Telegrams.
'The structure is everything,' he said. Then he quoted a blurb from the book jacket which said that Helmbart had achieved some kind of breakthrough. 'The transitions - all the associations, in fact - are syntactical, rhetorical, structural; it is almost a story of sentence structure rather than of characters; Helmbart complicates variations on forms of sentences rather than plot,' it read.
Kent nodded a lot, but Ralph was more anxious that Trumper and Tulpen understand him. The comparison to Helmbart's work was supposed to cast some needed light on Tulpen's editing and Trumper's sound tracking. 'Do you see?' Ralph asked Tulpen.
'Did you like that book, Ralph?' Tulpen asked.
'Not the point, not the point, not the fucking point!' said Ralph. 'I'm interested in it only as an example. Of course I didn't like it.'
'I thought it was awful,' Tulpen said.
'It was almost unreadable,' said Trumper, marching off to the bathroom with the book under his arm. In fact, he hadn't even looked at it yet.
He sat in the bathroom surrounded by messages, due to the fact that the phone was in the bathroom. Ralph had moved it there when he became suspicious of the number of long-distance calls, which none of them would admit to making. He was sure that people were dropping in off Christopher Street to make long-distance calls. They sneaked in, according to his theory, when he and Bogus and Tulpen and Kent were busy in the other rooms of the studio. But someone dropping in like that wouldn't dream of looking for the phone in the bathroom.
'Suppose they drop in to use the bathroom?' Trumper had asked.
But the phone was installed there, anyway. The walls, the flush-box lid, the mirror and the shelves were dotted with reminders, phone numbers, urgent requests and Kent's garbled translations of messages.
Taking the phone off the hook, Trumper opened Vital Telegrams. Ralph had remarked that the success of the structure made it possible to open the book at random and understand everything immediately, no matter where you began. Trumper opened it in the middle and read Chapter 77 from beginning to end.
Chapter 77
From the moment he saw her, he knew. Still, he persisted.
We felt at once that the ball-joint system was all wrong for the blivethefter. Why, then, did we force it?
The very second the goat was slain, we saw we were in for it. Pretending otherwise was absurd. Yet Mary Beth lied.
There was no sense whatsoever to the socket wrench being put to such a use. But it just might have worked.
There was nothing in the least amusing about the vile disembowelment of Charles. Strange we weren't shocked when Holly laughed.
With his feet as they were, Eddy could not have had much hope. To have seen him, though, you would have thought he still had toes.
'Don't come near me!' Estella wailed, holding out her arms.
We knew that the thought of chickpeas with bagels defied the concept of spreading. Still, they were both brown.
There was, of course, no logic to the dwarf's fear of Harold's rather large cat. But if you've ever spent some time down on your knees, you're surely aware of how differently things appear from down there.
That was Chapter 77. Curious about the vile disembowelment of Charles, Trumper read it again. He liked the bit about chickpeas and bagels. He read the chapter a third time and was irked that he didn't know what was wrong with Eddy's feet. And who was Estella?
Ralph knocked on the bathroom door; he wanted to use the phone.
'I understand the dwarf's fear of Harold's rather large cat,' Trumper told him through the closed door. Ralph went away, swearing.
What Trumper had some difficulty understanding was what relation Helmbart's work had to Ralph's film. Then he thought of one; perhaps neither of them meant anything. Somehow that made him feel better about the film. Relaxed, he approached the toilet. But he was too relaxed; he'd forgotten to pinch himself open. A hose with an obstructed nozzle is difficult to aim. He pissed in his shoe, jumped back and elbowed the phone into the sink. Wincing, he awkwardly peed his way back to the toilet. In his condition, although it hurt to go, it hurt worse to stop.
So much for relaxing, he thought. He was reminded of one of the many lessons to be learned from Akthelt and Gunnel, the forbidding story of Sprog.
Sprog was Akthelt's bodyguard, armor bearer, valet, knife sharpener, head huntsman, chief scout, favorite sparring partner and trusted whore fetcher. When they were visiting captured tow
ns, Sprog tasted everything that Akthelt was served before Akthelt would eat it.
Old Thak had given Sprog to Akthelt for Akthelt's twenty-first birthday. Akthelt was more pleased by Sprog than by any of his horses, dogs or other servants. For Sprog's birthday, Akthelt gave him a highly favored captured Greth woman named Fluvia. Akthelt had been quite taken by Fluvia himself, so you can see how much he thought of Sprog.
Sprog was not a Greth. There were no captured Greth men; only Greth women were captured. Greth men were forced to dig a large pit, then were stoned senseless, flung into it and burned.
One day Old Thak had been returning from a war along the coast of Schwud when his scouts rode up to him and reported that the beach ahead was blocked by a long rowboat, in front of which stood a man holding a huge driftwood log like a light mallet. Old Thak rode ahead with his scouts to see this phenomenon. The man was only about five feet tall, with curly blond hair, but his chest seemed to be about five feet around too. He was neckless, wristless and ankleless; he was simply a great chest with almost jointless limbs and a face as featureless as an anvil topped by blond curly hair. A driftwood log two feet thick rested lightly on his shoulder.
'Ride over him,' Old Thak told one of his scouts, and the man charged this strange stumpy apparition who had blocked the beach with a rowboat. The giant dwarf swung the driftwood log like a fungo bat against the horse's chest, killing the animal instantly, then tore the scout out of the tangled stirrups and folded him up, breaking his back easily. Then he picked up his driftwood racket and stood in front of his rowboat again, staring down the beach to where Old Thak was watching with the other scout.
Trumper remembered thinking that the other scout must have been shitting his pants at that moment.
But Old Thak was not so wasteful as to sacrifice another scout. He recognized great bodyguard potential when he saw it, so he sent the scout hightailing it back to the legion. Thak wanted the thing alive.
About twenty men with nets and long gaffs eventually captured the super troll who blocked the shore of Schwud. It was a lieutenant of these men who first called the creature Sprog. Da Sprog - a rough translation would be the Devil's Toad - a kind of super toad who impersonated the Devil, or through whom the Devil hopped around on the earth, was a fixture of their religion.
But all that was nonsense. Sprog was as easy to train as a falcon, and he became as loyal to Old Thak as Thak's best dog, Rotz. So it was a demonstration of fatherly affection when Old Thak parted with Sprog and made a gift of him to his son Akthelt.
Trumper interrupted his memory of the tale to wonder if it had been at this point in life when Sprog had begun to relax and think that he had it made. Probably not, he reflected, because Sprog suffered some kind of inadequacy complex during his first few years with Akthelt. Old Thak had been less demanding, and Sprog had found the master-dog role comfortable. But Akthelt was Sprog's own age and tended to be more familiar with servants; in fact, Akthelt liked to drink with Sprog, and Sprog no longer knew what his place was. He was very loyal to Akthelt, of course, and would have done anything for him, but he was also treated just enough like Akthelt's friend to be confused. Equality is a rare and minor theme in Akthelt and Gunnel, though it emerges in its typically disruptive fashion here.
One night, Akthelt and Sprog got very drunk together in the tiny village of Thith, and then staggered home to the castle through an orchard, having contests to see who could uproot the biggest trees. Sprog won, of course, and perhaps that irritated Akthelt. Whatever the reason, they were crossing the moat arm in arm when Akthelt asked Sprog if he would be hurt if Akthelt slept with Sprog's new wife, Fluvia. After all, they were friends ...
Perhaps the confusion was suddenly lifted from Sprog's life by this proposal. He must have realized that Akthelt could have simply taken Fluvia whenever he wanted to, and maybe he thought that by asking permission Akthelt was bestowing equality on Sprog.
Which apparently Sprog was not prepared for, because he not only gleefully told Akthelt to take his pleasure with Fluvia, but went barreling off to the royal quarters to take his pleasure with Akthelt's Gunnel. Akthelt had said nothing whatever about that. Obviously, Sprog had read the situation wrong.
Trumper could imagine poor Sprog rocketing down the labyrinthine corridors to the royal quarters like a five-foot bowling ball. That was when Sprog relaxed.
Ralph came and beat on the bathroom door again, and Trumper wondered what was on his mind. He looked at the book in his hands, somehow expecting it to be Akthelt and Gunnel, and was disappointed when he saw it was only Helmbart's Vital Telegrams. When he opened the door, Ralph followed the phone cord to the sink. He didn't seem surprised to find the phone there; he dialed it in the sink, listened to the busy signal in the sink and hung up in the sink.
Jesus, I should keep a diary, Trumper thought.
That night he tried. After he had made love to Tulpen, questions were raised. Analogies leaped to his mind. He thought of Akthelt stumbling in on the dark Fluvia, who was expecting her thick Sprog. Fluvia had been frightened at first because she thought it was Sprog. Fluvia and Sprog had an agreement never to make love when Sprog was drunk, because Fluvia was afraid he might break her spine. There was also an untranslatable word that had to do with how Sprog smelled when he drank a lot.
But Fluvia quickly guessed who was making love to her, perhaps because her spine wasn't breaking, or by his royal odor. 'Oh, my Lord Akthelt,' she whispered.
Again Trumper thought of poor, deceived Sprog barreling down to the royal quarters, lusting after Gunnel. Then he thought of babies and contraceptive devices and making love to Biggie as compared to making love to Tulpen. His diary was blank.
He remembered how Biggie always forgot to take her pill. Bogus would hang the little plastic dispenser from the light cord in the bathroom so that she would think of contraception every time she pulled the light on and off, but she hadn't liked the idea of the pills hanging out in public. Whenever Ralph was in the house, she got especially angry about it. 'Take your pill today, Biggie?' Ralph would ask her, coming out of the bathroom.
Tulpen, on the other hand, had an intrauterine device. Biggie, of course, had had an ill-fated IUD in Europe, but she left it there. Trumper had to admit that there was an added something about the IUD. You could feel it in there, like an extra part, a spare hand or tiny finger. Every so often it poked. He liked it. It moved around, too. With Tulpen, he never knew where he was going to come in contact with the string that felt like a finger. In fact, on this particular night he hadn't come in contact with it at all. It worried him, and remembering that Biggie lost or dissolved hers, he had asked Tulpen about it.
'Your device,' he whispered.
'Which device?'
'The one with the string.'
'Oh, how was my string tonight?'
'I never felt it.'
'Subtle, huh?'
'No, really, are you sure it's OK?' He worried about it often.
Tulpen was quiet under him for a while; then she said, 'Everything's fine, Trumper.'
'But I couldn't feel the string,' he insisted. 'I nearly always feel it there.' Which wasn't very true.
'Everything's fine,' she repeated, curling up against him.
He waited for her to fall asleep before getting up to try his hand at beginning a diary. But he didn't even know what day it was; he couldn't have guessed the date within a week. And his head seemed so cluttered with things. There were a million images from the film on his mind, both real and imagined. Then Helmbart's puzzling passage about Eddy's feet returned to haunt him. And there was Akthelt and Gunnel to consider; he couldn't seem to get beyond the image of Sprog barreling through the castle, his hopes erect.
He did manage a sentence. It didn't seem to be a diary sort of sentence; in fact, it was a real cliff-hanger of an opening line. But he wrote it in spite of himself:
'Her gynecologist recommended him to me.'
What a way to begin a diary! The question struck him: How is a
nything related to anything else? But he had to begin somewhere.
Take for example ... Sprog.
He watched Tulpen curl into a tighter ball on the bed; she tugged his pillow to her, scissored it between her legs and then slept quietly again.
One thing at a time. What happened to Sprog?
28
What Happened to the Hashish?
IN EAST GUNNERY, Biggie, your mother put us in separate rooms, even though that forced your mother to sleep with Aunt Blackstone and put your father on the hall sofa. And we forgot about poor Couth waiting for word in the lower field. He spent the night in his airy Volkswagen and woke up in the morning as stiff as a spring-back chair.
But there wasn't that much unpleasantness around the dinner table after the announcement - excepting, of course, the difficulty in making deaf Aunt Blackstone understand the conditions. 'Pregnant,' you said. 'Aunt Blackstone, I'm pregnant.'
'Rent?' said Aunt Blackstone. 'Rent what? Who's renting? What's to rent?'
So the incriminating news needed shouting, and when Aunt Blackstone finally got it, she couldn't see what all the fuss was about. 'Oh, pregnant,' she said. 'How nice. Isn't that something?' She fixed her gaze on you, Biggie, marveling at your metabolic wonder, glad to know the young were still fertile; at least there was one thing about the young that hadn't changed.
We were all quite understanding of your mother, tolerating her taking it for granted that we sleep in separate rooms; only your father was bold enough to imply that we must have slept together at least once before, so what was being saved? But he let it drop, seeing, with the rest of us, that your mother needed to be sustained by some formality. Perhaps she felt that though her daughter had been violated and stained beyond childhood, there was no reason why her daughter's room couldn't remain pure. Why tarnish the teddy bears on the headboard of the bed, or all the little trolls on skis, lined up so innocently along the dresser top? Something needed to be left intact. We could all see that,
And in the morning, we met in the bathroom. I knocked Aunt Blackstone's teeth into the sink; they chattered noisily around and around the bowl, a mouth on the roam. This made you laugh while you clipped your toe-nails over the tub - my first taste of domesticity.