Or saw something.
“Maybe he didn’t see what I saw,” he said aloud. “Maybe he just saw her lying there. Maybe she fell. Maybe—” He thought, Maybe I should go back.
“Who didn’t see what?” Mary Anne Dominic asked, and then flushed bright scarlet. “I didn’t mean to poke into your life; you said you’re in trouble and I can see you have something weighty and heavy on your mind that’s obsessing you.”
“I have to be sure,” he said, “what actually happened. Everything is there in that house.” And on these records, he thought.
Alys Buckman knew about my TV program. She knew about my records. She knew which one was the big hit; she owned it. But—
There had been no music on the records. Broken stylus, hell—some kind of sound, distorted perhaps, should have come out. He had handled records too long and phonographs too long not to know that.
“You’re a moody person,” Mary Anne Dominic said. From her small cloth purse she had brought a pair of glasses; she now laboriously read the bio material on the back of the record jackets.
“What’s happened to me,” Jason said briefly, “has made me moody.”
“It says here that you have a TV program.”
“Right.” He nodded. “At nine on Tuesday night. On NBC.”
“Then you’re really famous. I’m sitting here talking to a famous person that I ought to know about. How does it make you feel—I mean, my not recognizing who you are when you told me your name?”
He shrugged. And felt ironically amused.
“Would the jukebox have any songs by you?” She pointed to the multicolored Babylonian Gothic structure in the far corner.
“Maybe,” he said. It was a good question.
“I’ll go look.” Miss Dominic fished a half quinque from her pocket, slid from the booth, and crossed the coffee shop to stare down at the titles and artists of the jukebox’s listing.
When she gets back she is going to be less impressed by me, Jason mused. He knew the effect of one ellipsis: unless he manifested himself everywhere, from every radio and phonograph, jukebox and sheet-music shop, TV screen, in the universe, the magic spell collapsed.
She returned smiling. “‘Nowhere Nuthin’ Fuck-up,’” she said, reseating herself. He saw then that the half quinque was gone. “It should play next.”
Instantly he was on his feet and across the coffee shop to the jukebox.
She was right. Selection B4. His most recent hit, “Nowhere Nuthin’ Fuck-up,” a sentimental number. And already the mechanism of the jukebox had begun to process the disc.
A moment later his voice, mellowed by quad sound points and echo chambers, filled the coffee shop.
Dazed, he returned to the booth.
“You sound superwonderful,” Mary Anne said, politely, perhaps, given her taste, when the disc had ended.
“Thanks.” It had been him, all right. The grooves on that record hadn’t been blank.
“You’re really far out,” Mary Anne said enthusiastically, all smiles and twinkly glasses.
Jason said simply, “I’ve been at it a long time.” She had sounded as if she meant it.
“Do you feel bad that I hadn’t heard of you?”
“No.” He shook his head, still dazed. Certainly she was not alone in that, as the events of the past two days—two days? had it only been that?—had shown.
“Can—I order something more?” Mary Anne asked. She hesitated. “I spent all my money on stamps; I—”
“I’m picking up the tab,” Jason said.
“How do you think the strawberry cheesecake would be?”
“Outstanding,” he said, momentarily amused by her. The woman’s earnestness, her anxieties…does she have any boy friends of any kind? he wondered. Probably not…she lived in a world of pots, clay, brown wrapping paper, troubles with her little old Ford Greyhound, and, in the background, the stereo-only voices of the old-time greats: Judy Collins and Joan Baez.
“Ever listened to Heather Hart?” he asked. Gently.
Her forehead wrinkled. “I—don’t recall for sure. Is she a folk singer or—” Her voice trailed off; she looked sad. As if she sensed that she was failing to be what she ought to be, failing to know what every reasonable person knew. He felt sympathy for her.
“Ballads,” Jason said. “Like what I do.”
“Could we hear your record again?”
He obligingly returned to the jukebox, scheduled it for replay.
This time Mary Anne did not seem to enjoy it.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
“Oh,” she said, “I always tell myself I’m creative; I make pots and like that. But I don’t know if they’re actually any good. I don’t know how to tell. People say to me—”
“People tell you everything. From that you’re worthless to priceless. The worst and the best. You’re always reaching somebody here”—he tapped the salt shaker—“and not reaching somebody there.” He tapped her fruit-salad bowl.
“But there has to be some way—”
“There are experts. You can listen to them, to their theories. They always have theories. They write long articles and discuss your stuff back to the first record you cut nineteen years ago. They compare recordings you don’t even remember having cut. And the TV critics—”
“But to be noticed.” Again, briefly, her eyes shone.
“I’m sorry,” he said, rising to his feet once more. He could wait no longer. “I have to make a phone call. Hopefully I’ll be right back. If I’m not”—he put his hand on her shoulder, on her knitted white sweater, which she had probably made herself—“it’s been nice meeting you.”
Puzzled, she watched him in her wan, obedient way as he elbowed a path to the back of the crowded coffee shop, to the phone booth.
Shut up inside the phone booth, he read off the number of the Los Angeles Police Academy from the emergency listings and, after dropping in his coin, dialed.
“I’d like to speak to Police General Felix Buckman,” he said, and, without surprise, heard his voice shake. Psychologically I’ve had it, he realized. Everything that’s happened…up to the record on the jukebox—it’s too goddamn much for me. I am just plain scared. And disoriented. So maybe, he thought, the mescaline has not worn completely off after all. But I did drive the little flipflap okay; that indicates something. Fucking dope, he thought. You can always tell when it hits you but never when it unhits, if it ever does. It impairs you forever or you think so; you can’t be sure. Maybe it never leaves. And they say, Hey, man, your brain’s burned out, and you say, Maybe so. You can’t be sure and you can’t not be sure. And all because you dropped a cap or one cap too many that somebody said, Hey this’ll get you off.
“This is Miss Beason,” a female voice sounded in his ear. “Mr. Buckman’s assistant. May I help you?”
“Peggy Beason,” he said. He took a deep, unsteady breath and said, “This is Jason Taverner.”
“Oh yes, Mr. Taverner. What did you want? Did you leave anything behind?”
Jason said, “I want to talk to General Buckman.”
“I’m afraid Mr. Buckman—”
“It has to do with Alys,” Jason said.
Silence. And then: “Just a moment please, Mr. Taverner,” Peggy Beason said. “I’ll ring Mr. Buckman and see if he can free himself a moment.”
Clicks. Pause. More silence. Then a line opened.
“Mr. Taverner?” It was not General Buckman. “This is Herbert Maime, Mr. Buckman’s chief of staff. I understand you told Miss Beason that it has to do with Mr. Buckman’s sister, Miss Alys Buckman. Frankly I’d like to ask just what are the circumstances under which you happen to know Miss—”
Jason hung up the phone. And walked sightlessly back to the booth, where Mary Anne Dominic sat eating her strawberry cheesecake.
“You did come back after all,” she said cheerfully.
“How,” he said, “is the cheesecake?”
“A little too rich.” She added, “But good.”
/>
He grimly reseated himself. Well, he had done his best to get through to Felix Buckman. To tell him about Alys. But— what would he have been able to say, after all? The futility of everything, the perpetual impotence of his efforts and intentions…weakened even more, he thought, by what she gave me, that cap of mescaline.
If it had been mescaline.
That presented a new possibility. He had no proof, no evidence, that Alys had actually given him mescaline. It could have been anything. What, for example, was mescaline doing coming from Switzerland? That made no sense; that sounded synthetic, not organic: a product of a lab. Maybe a new multi-ingredient cultish drug. Or something stolen from police labs.
The record of “Nowhere Nuthin’ Fuck-up.” Suppose the drug had made him hear it. And see the listing on the jukebox. But Mary Anne Dominic had heard it, too; in fact she had discovered it.
But the two blank records. What about them?
As he sat pondering, an adolescent boy in a T-shirt and jeans bent over him and mumbled, “Hey, you’re Jason Taverner, aren’t you?” He extended a ballpoint pen and piece of paper. “Could I have your autograph, sir?”
Behind him a pretty little red-haired teenybopper, bra-less, in white shorts, smiled excitedly and said, “We always catch you on Tuesday night. You’re fantastic. And you look in real life, you look just like on the screen, except that in real life you’re more, you know, tanned.” Her friendly nipples jiggled.
Numbly, by habit, he signed his name. “Thanks, guys,” he said to them; there were four of them in all now.
Chattering to themselves, the four kids departed. Now people in nearby booths were watching Jason and muttering interestedly to one another. As always, he said to himself. This is how it’s been up to the other day. My reality is leaking back. He felt uncontrollably, wildly elated. This was what he knew; this was his life-style. He had lost it for a short time but now—finally, he thought, I’m starting to get it back!
Heather Hart. He thought, I can call her now. And get through to her. She won’t think I’m a twerp fan.
Maybe I only exist so long as I take the drug. That drug, whatever it is, that Alys gave me.
Then my career, he thought, the whole twenty years, is nothing but a retroactive hallucination created by the drug.
What happened, Jason Taverner thought, is that the drug wore off. She—somebody—stopped giving it to me and I woke up to reality, there in that shabby, broken-down hotel room with the cracked mirror and the bug-infested mattress. And I stayed that way until now, until Alys gave me another dose.
He thought, No wonder she knew about me, about my Tuesday-night TV show. Through her drug she created it. And those two record albums—props which she kept to reinforce the hallucination.
Jesus Christ, he thought, is that it?
But, he thought, the money I woke up with in the hotel room, this whole wad of it. Reflexively he tapped his chest, felt its thick existence, still there. If in real life I doled out my days in fleabag hotels in the Watts area, where did I get that money?
And I would have been listed in the police files, and in all the other data banks throughout the world. I wouldn’t be listed as a famous entertainer, but I’d be there as a shabby bum who never amounted to anything, whose only highs came from a pill bottle. For God knows how long. I may have been taking the drug for years.
Alys, he remembered, said I had been to the house before.
And apparently, he decided, it’s true. I had. To get my doses of the drug.
Maybe I am only one of a great number of people leading synthetic lives of popularity, money, power, by means of a capsule. While living actually, meanwhile, in bug-infested, ratty old hotel rooms. On skid row. Derelicts, nobodies. Amounting to zero. But, meanwhile, dreaming.
“You certainly are deep in a brown study,” Mary Anne said. She had finished her cheesecake; she looked satiated, now. And happy.
“Listen,” he said hoarsely. “Is my record really in that jukebox?”
Her eyes widened as she tried to understand. “How do you mean? We listened to it. And the little thingy, where it tells the selections, that’s there. Jukeboxes never made mistakes.”
He fished out a coin. “Go play it again. Set it up for three plays.”
Obediently, she surged from her seat, into the aisle, and bustled over to the jukebox, her lovely long hair bouncing against her ample shoulders. Presently he heard it, heard his big hit song. And the people in the booths and at the counter were nodding and smiling at him in recognition; they knew it was he who was singing. His audience.
When the song ended there was a smattering of applause from the patrons of the coffee shop. Grinning reflexively, professionally in return he acknowledged their recognition and approval.
“It’s there,” he said, as the song replayed. Savagely, he clenched his fist, struck the plastic table separating him from Mary Anne Dominic. “God damn it, it’s there.”
With some odd twist of deep, intuitive, female desire to help him Mary Anne said, “And I’m here, too.”
“I’m not in a run-down hotel room, lying on a cot dreaming,” he said huskily.
“No, you’re not.” Her tone was tender, anxious. She clearly felt concern for him. For his alarm.
“Again I’m real,” he said. “But if it could happen once, for two days—” To come and go like this, to fade in and out—
“Maybe we should leave,” Mary Anne said apprehensively.
That cleared his mind. “Sorry,” he said, wanting to reassure her.
“I just mean that people are listening.”
“It won’t hurt them,” he said. “Let them listen; let them see how you carry your worries and troubles with you even when you’re a world-famous star.” He rose to his feet, however. “Where do you want to go?” he asked her. “To your apartment?” It meant doubling back, but he felt optimistic enough to take the risk.
“My apartment?” she faltered.
“Do you think I’d hurt you?” he said.
For an interval she sat nervously pondering. “N-no,” she said at last.
“Do you have a phonograph?” he asked. “At your apartment?”
“Yes, but not a very good one; it’s just stereo. But it works.”
“Okay,” he said, herding her up the aisle toward the cash register. “Let’s go.”
23
Mary Anne Dominic had decorated the walls and ceiling of her apartment herself. Beautiful, strong, rich colors; he gazed about, impressed. And the few art objects in the living room had a powerful beauty about them. Ceramic pieces. He picked up one lovely blue-glaze vase, studied it.
“I made that,” Mary Anne said.
“This vase,” he said, “will be featured on my show.”
Mary Anne gazed at him in wonder.
“I’m going to have this vase with me very soon. In fact”—he could visualize it—“a big production number in which I emerge from the vase singing, like the magic spirit of the vase.” He held the blue vase up high, in one hand, revolving it. “‘Nowhere Nuthin’ Fuck-up,’” he said. “And your career is launched.”
“‘Nowhere you should hold it with both hands,” Mary Anne said uneasily.
“‘Nowhere Nuthin’ Fuck-up,’ the song that brought us more recognition—” The vase slid from between his fingers and dropped to the floor. Mary Anne leaped forward, but too late. The vase broke into three pieces and lay there beside Jason’s shoe, rough unglazed edges pale and irregular and without artistic merit.
A long silence passed.
“I think I can fix it,” Mary Anne said.
He could think of nothing to say.
“The most embarrassing thing that ever happened to me,” Mary Anne said, “was one time with my mother. You see, my mother had a progressive kidney ailment called Bright’s disease; she was always going to the hospital for it when I was a kid growing up and she was forever working it into the conversation that she was going to die from it and wouldn’t I be sorry
then—as if it was my fault—and I really believed her, that she would die one day. But then I grew up and moved away from home and she still didn’t die. And I sort of forgot about her; I had my own life and things to do. So naturally I forgot about her damn kidney condition. And then one day she came to visit, not here but at the apartment I had before this, and she really bugged me, sitting around narrating all her aches and complaints on and on…I finally said, ‘I’ve got to go shopping for dinner,’ and I split for the store. My mother limped along with me and on the way she laid the news on me that now both her kidneys were so far gone that they would have to be removed and she would be going in for that and so forth and they’d try to install an artificial kidney but it probably wouldn’t work. So she was telling me this, how it really had come now; she really was going to die finally, like she’d always said…and all of a sudden I looked up and realized I was in the supermarket, at the meat counter, and this real nice clerk that I liked was coming over to say hello, and he said, ‘What would you like today, miss?’ and I said, ‘I’d like a kidney pie for dinner.’ It was embarrassing. ‘A great big kidney pie,’ I said, ‘all flaky and tender and steaming and full of nice juices.’ ‘To serve how many?’ he asked. My mother sort of kept staring at me with this creepy look. I really didn’t know how to get out of it once I was in it. Finally I did buy a kidney pie, but I had to go to the delicatessen section; it was in a sealed can, from England. I paid I think four dollars for it. It tasted very good.”
“I’ll pay for the vase,” Jason said. “How much do you want for it?”
Hesitating, she said, “Well, there’s the wholesale price I get when I sell to stores. But I’d have to charge you retail prices because you don’t have a wholesale number, so—”
He got out his money. “Retail,” he said.
“Twenty dollars.”
“I can work you in another way,” he said. “All we need is an angle. How about this—we can show the audience a priceless vase from antiquity, say from fifth-century China, and a museum expert will step out, in uniform, and certify its authenticity. And then you’ll have your wheel there—you’ll make a vase before the audience’s very eyes, and we’ll show them that your vase is better.”