And so I drove on, without incident. But even through the treated glass of the windshield I could see and sense the atrocious lancings and poppings in the ruined sky. It gets to you. Stare at the blazing noon of a high-watt bulb for ten or fifteen minutes then shut your eyes, real tight and sudden. That’s what the sky looks like. You know, we pity it, or at least I do. I look at the sky and I just think … ow. Whew. Oh, the sky, the poor sky.
Happy Farraday had left a priority clearance for me at Realty HQ, so I didn’t have to hang around that long. To tell you the truth, I was scandalized by how lax and perfunctory the security people were becoming. It’s always like this, after a quiet few weeks. Then there’s another shitstorm from Section C, and all the writs start flying around again. In the cubicle I put my clothes back on and dried my hair. While they okayed my urinalysis and x-ray congruence tests, I watched TV in the commissary. I sat down, delicately, gingerly (you know how it is, after a strip search), and took three clippings out of my wallet. These are for the file. What do you think?
Item 1, from the news page of Screen Week:
In a series of repeated experiments at the Valley Chemistry Workshop, Science Student Edwin Navasky has “proven” that hot water freezes faster than cold. Said Edwin, “We did the test four times.” Added Student Adviser Joy Broadener: “It’s a feature. We’re real baffled.”
Item 2, from the facts section of Armchair Guide:
Candidate Day McGwire took out a spot on Channel 29 last Monday. Her purpose: to deny persistent but unfounded rumors that she suffered from heart trouble. Sadly, she was unable to appear. The reason: her sudden hospitalization with a cardiac problem.
Item 3, from the update column of Television:
Meteorological Pilot Lars Christer reported another sighting of “The Thing Up There” during a routine low-level flight. The location: 10,000 feet above Lake Baltimore. His description: “It was kind of oval, with kind of a black circle in the center.” The phenomenon is believed to be a cumulus or spore formation. Christer’s reaction: “I don’t know what to make of it. It’s a thing.”
“Goldfader,” roared the tannoy, scattering my thoughts. The caddycart was ready at the gate. In the west now the heavens looked especially hellish and distraught, with a throbbing, peeled-eyeball effect on the low horizon—bloodshot, conjunctivitic. Pink eye. The Thing Up There, I sometimes suspect, it might look like an eye, flecked with painful tears, staring, incensed.… Using my cane I walked cautiously around the back of Happy’s bungalow. Her twenty-year-old daughter Sunny was lying naked on a lounger, soaking up the haze. She made no move to cover herself as I limped poolside. Little Sunny here wants me to represent her someday, and I guess she was showing me the goods. Well it’s like they say: if you’ve got it, flaunt it.
“Hi, Lou,” she said sleepily. “Take a drink. Go ahead. It’s five o’clock.”
I looked at Sunny critically as I edged past her to the bar. The kid was a real centerfold, no question. Now don’t misunderstand me here. I say centerfold, but of course pornography hasn’t really kept pace with time. At first they tried filling the magazines and mature cable channels with new-look women, like Sunny, but it didn’t work out. Time has effectively killed pornography, except as an underground blood sport, or a punk thing. Time has killed much else. Here’s an interesting topic sentence. Now that masturbation is the only form of sex that doesn’t carry a government health warning, what do we think about when we’re doing it there, what is left for us to think about? Me, I’m not saying. Christ, are you? What images slide, what specters flit … what happens to these thoughts as they hover and mass, up there in the blasted, the totaled, up there in the fucked sky?
“Come on, Sunny. Where’s your robe.”
As I fixed myself a vodka-context and sucked warily on a pretzel, I noticed Sunny’s bald patch gently gleaming in the mist. I sighed.
“You like my dome?” she asked, without turning. “Relax, it’s artificial.” She sat up straight now and looked at me coyly. She smiled. Yeah, she’d had her teeth gimmicked too—by some cowboy snaggle-artist down in the Valley, no doubt. I poled myself poolside again and took a good slow scan. The flab and pallor were real all right, but the stretch marks seemed cosmetic: too symmetrical, too pronounced.
“Now, you listen to me, kid,” I began. “Here are the realities. To scudbathe, to flop out all day by the pool with a bottle or two, to take on a little weight around the middle there—that’s good for a girl. I mean you got to keep in shape. But this mutton routine, Sunny, it’s for the punks. No old job ever got on my books and no old job ever will. Here are the reasons. Number one—” And I gave young Sunny a long talking- to out there, a real piece of my mind. I had her in the boredom corner and I wasn’t letting her out. I went on and on at her—on and on and on and on. Me, I almost checked out myself, as boredom edged toward despair (the way boredom will), gazing into the voided pool, the reflected skyscape, and the busy static, in the sediment of sable rain.
“Yeah, well,” I said, winding up. “Anyway. What’s the thing? You look great.”
She laughed, coughed, and spat. “Forget it, Lou,” she said croakily. “I only do it for fun.”
“I’m glad to hear that, Sunny. Now where’s your mother.”
“Two days.”
“Uh?”
“In her room. In her room two days. She’s serious this time.”
“Oh, sure.”
I rebrimmed my drink and went inside. The only point of light in the hallway came from the mirror’s sleepless scan-lamp. I looked myself over as I limped by. The heavy boredom and light stress of the seven-hour drive had done me good. I was fine, fine. “Happy?” I said, and knocked.
“Is that you, Lou?” The voice was strong and clear—and it was quick, too. Direct, alert. “I’ll unlatch the door, but don’t come in right away.”
“Sure,” I said. I took a pull of booze and groped around for a chair. But then I heard the click and Happy’s brisk “Okay” … Now I have to tell you that two things puzzled me here. First, the voice; second, the alacrity. Usually when she’s in this state you can hardly hear the woman, and it takes an hour or more for her to get to the door and back into bed again. Yeah, I thought, she must have been waiting with her fingers poised on the handle. There’s nothing wrong with Happy. The lady is fine, fine.
So in I went. She had the long black nets up over the sack—streaming, glistening, a crib for the devil’s progeny. I moved through the gloom to the bedside chair and sat myself down with a grunt. A familiar chair. A familiar vigil.
“Mind if I don’t smoke?” I asked her. “It’s not the lung-burn. I just get tuckered out lighting the damn things all the time. Understand what I mean?”
No answer.
“How are you feeling, Happy?”
No answer.
“Now listen, kid. You got to quit this nonsense. I know it’s problematic with the new role and everything, but—do I have to tell you again what happened to Day Montague? Do I, Happy? Do I? You’re forty years old. You look fantastic. Let me tell you what Greg Buzhardt said to me when he saw the outtakes last week. He said, ‘Style. Class. Presence. Sincerity. Look at the ratings. Look at the profiles. Happy Farraday is the woman of men’s dreams.’ That’s what he said. ‘Happy Farraday is the—’ ”
“Lou.”
The voice came from behind me. I swiveled and felt the twinge of tendons in my neck. Happy stood in a channel of bathroom light and also in the softer channel or haze of her slip of silk. She stood there as vivid as health itself, as graphic as youth, with her own light sources, the eyes, the mouth, the hair, the dips and curves of the flaring throat. The silk fell to her feet, and the glass fell from my hand, and something else dropped or plunged inside my chest.
“Oh, Christ,” I said. “Happy, I’m sorry.”
I remember what the sky was like, when the sky was young—its shawls and fleeces, its bears and whales, its cusps and clefts. A sky of gray, a sky of blue, a sky of spice.
But now the sky has gone, and we face different heavens. Some vital casing has left our lives. Up there now, I think, a kind of turnaround occurs. Time-fear collects up there and comes back to us in the form of time. It’s the sky, the sky, it’s the fucking sky. If enough people believe that a thing is real or happening, then it seems that the thing must happen, must go for real. Against all odds and expectation, these are magical times we’re living in: proletarian magic. Gray magic!
Now that it’s over, now that I’m home and on the mend, with Danuta back for good and Happy gone forever, I think I can talk it all out and tell you the real story. I’m sitting on the cramped veranda with a blanket on my lap. Before me through the restraining bars the sunset sprawls in its polluted pomp, full of genies, cloaked ghosts, crimson demons of the middle sky. Red light: let’s stop—let’s end it. The Thing Up There, it may not be God, of course. It may be the Devil. Pretty soon, Danuta will call me in for my broth. Then a nap, and an hour of TV maybe. The Therapy Channel. I’m really into early nights.… This afternoon I went walking, out on the shoulder. I don’t know why. I don’t think I’ll do it again. On my return Roy appeared and helped me into the lift. He then asked me shyly,
“Happy Farraday—she okay now, sir?”
“Okay?” I said. “Okay? What do you mean, okay? You never read a news page, Roy?”
“When she had to leave for Australia there. I wondered if she’s okay. It’ll be better for her, I guess. She was in a situation, with Duncan. It was a thing there.”
“That’s just TV, for Christ’s sake. They wrote her out,” I said, and felt a sudden, leaden calm. “She’s not in Australia, Roy. She’s in heaven.”
“—Sir?”
“She’s dead, God damn it.”
“Now I don’t know about none of that,” he said, with one fat palm raised. “All it is is, I just hope she’s okay, over in Australia there.”
Happy is in heaven, or I hope she is. I hope she’s not in hell. Hell is the evening sky and I surely hope she’s not up there. Ah, how to bear it? It’s a thing. No, it really is.
I admit right now that I panicked back there, in the bungalow bedroom with the chute of light, the altered woman, and my own being so quickly stretched by fragility and fear. I shouted a lot. Lie down! Call Trattman! Put on your robe! That kind of thing. “Come on, Lou. Be realistic,” she said. “Look at me.” And I looked. Yeah. Her skin had that shiny telltale succulence, all over. Her hair—which a week ago, God damn it, lay as thin and colorless as my own—was humming with body and glow. And the mouth, Christ, lips all full and wet, and an animal tongue, like a heart, not Happy’s, the tongue of another woman, bigger, greedier, younger. Younger. Classic time. Oh, classic.
She had me go over and lie down on the bed with her there, to give comfort, to give some sense of final safety. I was in a ticklish state of nerves, as you’d imagine. Time isn’t infectious (we do know that about time) but sickness in any form won’t draw a body nearer and I wanted all my distance. Stay out, it says. Then I saw—I saw it in her breasts, high but heavy, their little points tender, detailed, time-inflamed; and the smell, the smell of deep memory, tidal, submarine … I knew the kind of comfort she wanted. Yes, and time often takes them this way, I thought, in my slow and stately terror. You’ve come this far: go further, I told myself. Go closer, nearer, closer. Do it for her, for her and for old times’ sake. I stirred, ready to let her have all that head and hand could give, until I too felt the fever in my lines of heat, the swell and smell of youth and death. This is suicide, I thought, and I don’t care.… At one point, during the last hours, just before dawn, I got to my feet and crept to the window and looked up at the aching, the hurting sky; I felt myself gray and softly twanging for a moment, like a coathanger left to shimmer on the pole, with Happy there behind me, alone in her bed and her hot death. “Honey,” I said out loud, and went to join her. I like it, I thought, and gave a sudden nod. What do I like? I like the love. This is suicide and I don’t care.
I was in terrible shape, mind you, for the next couple of months, really beat to shit, out of it, just out of it. I would wake at seven and leap out of the sack. I suffered energy attacks. Right off my food, I craved thick meat and thick wine. I couldn’t watch any Therapy. After barely a half-hour of some home-carpentry show or marathon dance contest I’d be pacing the room with frenzy in my bitten fingertips.I put Danuta at risk too, on several occasions. I even threw a pass in on little Sunny Farraday, who moved in here for a time after the cremation. Danuta divorced me. She even moved out. But she’s back now. She’s a good kid, Danuta—she helped me through. The whole thing is behind me now, and I think (knock on wood) that I’m more or less my old self again.
Pretty soon I’ll rap on the window with my cane and have Danuta fetch me another blanket. Later, she’ll help me inside for my broth. Then a nap, and an hour of TV maybe. The Therapy Channel. I’m happy here for the time being, and willingly face the vivid torment, the boiling acne of the dying sky. When this sky is dead, will they give us a new one? Today my answering service left a strange message: I have to call a number in Sydney, over in Australia there. I’ll do it tomorrow. Or the next day. Yeah. I can’t make the effort right now. To reach for my stick, to lift it, to rap the glass, to say Danuta—even that takes steep ascents of time. All things happen so slowly now. I have a new feature with my back. I broke a tooth last week on a piece of toast. Jesus, how I hate bending and stairs. The sky hangs above me in shredded webs, in bloody tatters. It’s a big relief, and I’m grateful. I’m okay. I’m good, good. For the time being, at any rate, I show no signs of coming down with time.
THE LITTLE
PUPPY
THAT COULD
The little puppy came bounding and tumbling over the fallow fields. Here he comes, bounding, tumbling. Like all the most adorable little puppies, this little puppy had large pleading brown eyes, wobbly half-cocked ears, and loose folds of flesh on the join of his neck. His coat was a subtle gray (like silver in shadow), with a triangle of white on his chest, like a shirtfront, and white tufts on each paw, like socks, like shoes, like little spats! He was a bit plump, this little puppy, it had to be said—but adorably so. Puppy fat, not doggy fat. He had been running and running for days and days. Where had the little puppy come from? Where was the little puppy heading, and so eagerly? His proud tail high, his front paws gaily outthrust, his—whoops! Over he goes again. Then he’s up, undismayed, bounding, tumbling, toward huge discoveries, toward wonderful transformations. Of course, the little puppy had no idea where he had come from or where he was heading. But he was going to get there.
Now, the puppy probably sniffed or sensed the village before he saw it—the fires, the crescents, the human place. In truth, his eyesight was not all that reliable, floppy, tousled, subject to passionate distortions of fear and desire. But he saw something new out there, shape and pattern, evidence, a great manifestation pressed or carved upon the random world through which he bounded. The little puppy tumbled to a halt, then wriggled himself upright. He knew at once that he had found the place that his heart sought—his destination. Down in the round valley he could descry moving figures, and circles within circles, and, at their crux, a flaming parabola shaped like a scythe: a swan neck, a query of fire! The little puppy stood there, anxiously snapping his jaws. His head craned forward, urging the little puppy on, but his paws just jostled and danced. His tail started wagging, hesitantly at first, then with such reckless vigor that he almost pulled a muscle in his plump little rump. On he bounded, nearer, nearer, down through the dawn shadows, almost flying, his young blood aflame—until he saw a human group moving stolidly from a gateway in the low palisade. Now the little puppy really turned on the speed. He hurtled toward them, then leapt into the air and swiveled, skidlanding back-first at their feet—the four paws limply raised, the shivering tail, his soft belly exposed in reflexive surrender and trust.
And nothing happened.… The puppy awoke in a pool of bafflement and hurt. He hadn’t be
en asleep or anything, but life was like that for the little puppy, it all being so much more fervent down there, so pressing, so sudden. The people just stood there in a stoical arc, six or seven of them; some faces wore fear, some disgust; none showed kindness. At last the puppy climbed sadly to his feet and looked up at them with beseeching eyes, his worked jaw forming a question. His question was your question. Why should they want to act this way toward a little puppy, his puzzled heart full of bruised love, a puppy made for cuddles and romps? And the people had no answer. They too (the puppy seemed to sense) were full of confusion, full of pain. Wishing to comfort them, and hoping there had simply been some sort of misunderstanding, the little puppy crept forward again, in trembling supplication. But now the people began to turn away. The men mumbled and sneered. One woman wept; another woman spat—spat at the little puppy. Blinking, he watched them go through the gate. It was strange. The little puppy didn’t know much but he did know this: that the people were not unkind. No, they were not. They were not unkind.