‘Have you seen Noble, by the way?’ Woody asked, raising his voice to be heard. Bob, staring deadpan at me, winked. As did Earl Elstob, wandering in, when Charley asked him: ‘What? Back awready, Earl?’
‘Ah, I think he—’
‘Yup, well, huh! as one rabbit – shlup! – said t’other: This won’t take long, yuh huck! did it?’
‘Last I saw,’ said the guy in the chalkstripes, ‘your coz was in high gear – even his gold eye was lit up and blinkin’ like a turn signal!’
‘I see. Well, Noble deserves a little fun. If you see him, tell him I’ll call him in the morning.’
‘What I – huff! whoo! – hate,’ Vic rattled on fiercely, ‘is fucking contrivance! Triviality, obfus … obfuscation …’
‘Poor old Jack the Forker,’ said Scarborough morosely, coming in from the living room with Gudrun. ‘Still at it, is he?’ He held a bottle up to the light. ‘Tenor’s farewell,’ remarked Gudrun. She was smeared randomly with greasepaint, though her hands were principally scarlet: as she rubbed her nose (‘ … All that – wheeze! – “all-is-vanity” horseshit!’), she moustachioed herself. ‘Bah!’ Scarborough pitched the empty bottle over his shoulder impatiently. It hit the doorframe, clattered into the TV room.
‘There’s more underneath—’
‘I want … lucidity … Authen – gasp!—’
‘Uh, huh! you seen sister?’
‘What do you suppose this one could do?’ Gudrun mused, looking Bob over.
‘Ole Glad’s relaxin’, Earl! Don’ worry, you juss zip up there’n ’n joy yourself.’
‘Well, he sure as hell can’t dance,’ muttered Scarborough, squatting.
‘Yuh, I thought I’d just leave it open so’s I don’t hafta – huh! – lose time!’
‘Could you repeat that?’ Gottfried asked, bending toward Vic. It was true, I saw it now: he did have a tape recorder.
‘What I want … in art … is a knowing …’
‘Everything’s … changed …,’ Mavis intoned gravely. She was on her feet now, leaning against the wall, legs spread wide, eyes staring zombielike into some remote distance. Bunky’s young friend, back and breathing heavily, took a swig from the brandy bottle, handed it to the older man. ‘I seem to remember … a statue …’
‘Say, yuh know what’s – yuh huh! – worse’n pecker tracks on your zipper?’
‘… A knowing moral center!’
‘… Of ice … with mirrors for eyes …’
‘Well, who doesn’t?’ snapped Howard, glancing contemptuously down at Vic (‘… And a little man where the heart should be …’), Gottfried sidling in between the two men with his mike. ‘But that’s simply too narrow a view of art. Every act of creation, no matter how frivolous it might seem, is, in its essence, an act of magic!’
‘Ah, that’s very good,’ said Gottfried, stopping up one ear against Mavis behind him. Gudrun clapped her scarlet hands, as Scarborough, rummaging around in the shelves below, came out with a bottle of Tennessee sourmash. ‘But by “magic” do you mean—?’
‘… Showing his behind …’
‘No, goddamn it, that’s … too narrow a view … of action!’ Vic cut in, snorting and spluttering. ‘It takes a long … a long – shit! can’t seem to …’ As he sucked in air, it made an awesome bubbly sound, rattling through him as though ripping everything apart in there. His eyelids fluttered open, but his eyes were rolled back, unseeing, half-screened by his unruly gray hair. ‘… A long time to find out … that the only magic in the world … is action!’
‘… With a wart on it …’ Mavis pushed herself away from the wall and stood there, her feet planted far apart, rocking unsteadily.
‘God, that poor devastated sonuvabitch has had it,’ murmured Bunky’s gigolo friend, taking the brandy bottle back. It was true. Vic looked feverish now, an unnatural flush in his craggy cheeks, his breath coming in abrupt little gasps. The gigolo, taking a deep swig and pushing the bottle away (‘Is there anything left to eat?’ Gudrun asked, accepting a tumbler of whiskey. ‘If I toss this down the void, it’ll take me with it!’), belched and said: ‘He’s gonna get put beddybye tonight with a fucking shovel, that one!’
‘Don’t count on it,’ laughed the older man, picking up the bottle again. Vic tongued his swollen lips – Howard was carrying on grandly about art as ‘man’s transcendence of the specious present, his romance with eternity, with timelessness’ (‘But then what about Malcolm’s tattooed prick?’ Kitty interrupted) – and his eyelids fluttered again. ‘Doesn’t exist!’ he bellowed. ‘I beg your pardon?’ said Gottfried. ‘Yes, it does,’ Kitty insisted. ‘I’ve seen it.’ ‘I think some strawberry shortcake passed me, going into the living room.’ ‘Eternity!’ ‘Doesn’t sound like the right thing to go with bourbon.’ ‘What’re they up to in there now?’ the man in the chalkstriped suit asked Scarborough. ‘Another … fucking illusion!’ Vic yelled. It was pathetic to watch him. ‘I once knew a guy,’ this was Bunky’s older friend, putting the bottle down after a long guzzle (‘And the present is …’) and carrying on, ‘got shot like that and took days to die.’
‘… Is not specious … goddamn it!’
‘Some kid’s grisly visit-to-the-underworld spasm,’ Scarborough replied (‘That guy’s death rattle alone lasted eight hours!’), ‘called “Rec Room Resurrection,” or some such shit,’ and Gudrun reminded him: ‘He’s still just a boy, such things are important to him right now. He’ll grow out of it.’
‘Did I … only imagine it?’ Mavis asked herself, rocking gently.
‘What you’re trying to say, as I understand it,’ Gottfried interposed, leaning toward Vic with his mike, ‘is that action is a sort of rude language, emanating from the reflex centers of the—’
‘I’M NOT FINISHED YET!’ roared Vic, startling us all. ‘Sorry,’ whispered Gottfried, having reared back into Howard, and Mavis, still mumbling hollowly to herself, added: ‘And am I … imagining it now … ?’ Earl Elstob was wheeling about, doubled over, yuck-yucking noisily: someone told him to shut up. ‘Huh – ?’ We waited. This was it. Or might be. Vic sucked in air, let it rattle out again. There was a trickle of blood at his lips: he licked at it. ‘What was I … ?’ His eyelids fluttered open, his eyes rolled down out of their contemplation of the top of his skull, searching for me. ‘Is … is that you, Gerry … ?’
I squatted in front of him and his eyes closed again. ‘Yes. Take it easy, old man. It’s all right …’
‘Don’t … shit me it’s all right, goddamn it … I know better. Listen … is one of those – oof! damn … ! – one of those cops around?’
‘Yes, but—’
‘This is important, goddamn it!’ Mavis had lumbered slump-shouldered away, rocking heavily from one foot to the other, still half-dazed, but the rest of us were crowding around, watching Vic. He wheezed and snorted laboriously. ‘Ignore him, he’s a stupid and intolerant monomaniac,’ Howard declared petulantly, but in fact it was Howard who was being ignored. ‘Can he … hear me?’
‘Sure.’ I glanced up: Bob watched Vic without emotion, leaning against the sideboard.
‘All right. Tell him … tell him I did it … I killed them!’
‘What? Killed who, Vic?’
‘All of them, goddamn it!’ He struggled to sit up, but his coordination was gone, and the effort seemed to be tearing him apart. ‘Ros, Roger …’
‘Vic, listen, you don’t know what—’
‘Who else?’ he groaned. ‘Who else, goddamn it – I can’t think—!’
‘You mean Tania?’
‘Yeah, that’s right … Tania, stabbed her … too!’
‘She wasn’t stabbed, Vic.’
‘Strangled, I mean!’
‘She was drowned.’
‘Drowned, that’s what I … what I – choke! – said!’
‘Hey, listen, nice try, Vic, but—’
‘No! I held her under, I – just look at my hands … ! They’re the hands … of a murderer, they – w
hat – ?!’ His chin shot up, one leg straightened, a shoulder twitched. ‘Where are they? My hands, Gerry! Where are my goddamn … hands—?!’
‘Here, Vic, easy … !’
‘You see?’ sniffed Howard.
‘Jesus,’ somebody muttered softly, ‘someone oughta put the poor bastard outa his misery!’
‘Oh shit,’ Vic was weeping, ‘I can’t … I can’t feel them … I can’t feel anything!’
I glanced up at Jim, who shook his head sadly. Howard looked disgusted. ‘You’d be doing him a favor,’ the police officer said.
‘What?’
‘It’s true, Gerry,’ said Jim quietly. Indeed, it was very quiet all around, broken only by Vic’s rasping breath, the ice tinkling brassily in someone’s glass, Earl’s chronic sucking noise. The cop took his revolver out of his holster, checked the chambers. ‘It’ll only get worse for him.’
‘A drink!’ he yelled, making us jump. ‘For chrissake, Gerry—!’
Jim handed me his own glass. I sniffed it. ‘Is it—?’ ‘He won’t know the difference.’
‘Where is everybody—?’
‘Right here, Vic.’ I held the glass to his lips. He sucked and slobbered, most of it ending up as a kind of bloody foam that dribbled down his chin and shirtfront like baby drool. ‘Easy now …’
‘More!’ he demanded, jerking his head about, batting the glass with his nose, thumping his head on the wall. Once, when I was very small (I was thinking of this now, watching Vic try to keep his head up, his eyes open), we found a dead tomcat in my grandmother’s backyard. A few nights later, she incorporated him into her bedtime story about the climb to heaven. The cat was not well-suited for this climb and I probably fell asleep very near the bottom, but I did hear the preamble and remembered it still. Interested in a lady cat next door, the tom had come out to serenade her and had got shot by an irate neighbor who didn’t want his sleep interrupted. At the entrance to the stairway, there was a kind of ticket-taker, like the ones outside carnival rides and circus tents, and the cat complained to him about the injustice of being shot for singing: ‘Is that what you get for bringing a little beauty into the world?’ he protested. ‘It’s not fair!’ ‘What do you mean, you were lucky!’ the ticket-taker replied. ‘There’s no big deal in a long life – what counts is the quality of the departure. Yours was beautiful! You died quickly, more or less painlessly, and at the moment of your greatest happiness!’ ‘No, you don’t understand,’ the cat objected, ‘the singing was only the preparations.’ ‘Exactly!’ smiled the ticket-taker. Indeed, now that I thought about it, I’d said something very much like this to someone earlier tonight, only …
‘Ah, listen!’ Vic barked.
‘What—?!’
‘I said, listen, damn it! I’m talking … about what’s happening … here tonight …’
‘Ah …’ My heart was pounding. Bob, I realized, was holding his gun out to me, butt first. Jim took the empty glass. ‘But … do you really think—?’
‘You know … what kind … what kind of a world … we live in … !’
‘You can see for yourself,’ said Jim. ‘The size of the wound, the blood lost, kidney and bowel dysfunction, numbness in the extremities—’
‘So why … are they letting you … ?’
‘And that rattle means his lungs are filling up: he’s slowly choking to death, Gerry. Then, as he loses oxygen, the brain – well, just listen to him …’
‘… Letting you even … have parties like this?’
‘The poor guy,’ said Gudrun. Howard snorted scornfully. ‘Yeah? Whuzzamatter?’ asked Charley blearily.
‘I – I’ve never …’
‘Here,’ said Bob, showing me the safety catch. ‘It’s easy.’ There was a soft whirring noise behind me and the lights brightened: the guy with the video camera again. ‘Angle’s bad,’ he said. ‘Hang on, I’ll get a chair.’
‘Damn it, Gerry! I … asked you—!’ Vic burbled.
‘What? I don’t know, Vic. Maybe they don’t know any better.’ The weight of the thing surprised me: I nearly dropped it. It seemed nose-heavy or something. ‘Oh, I love the cowboy boots!’ Patrick was gushing behind me in his swollen lisp. ‘They’re so well tooled!’ My sudden shadow, which had been clouding Vic’s chest, now fell off him below my knees. Certainly he was a mess, I couldn’t deny that. ‘Grip it a little higher up the handle,’ the cop said, and Gudrun asked: ‘How are the skin tones?’
‘Don’t … underestimate them … !’
‘Not bad – could use a touch at the back maybe,’ said a voice high above me. ‘Under the hairline.’
‘Whoa! Whoozat tall sumbitch?’ Charley asked.
‘He’s not tall, Charley, he’s on a—’
‘No? Jesus, then maybe’s me! Maybe I’m shrinkin’!’
My shoulder ached with this sudden awkward weight. Vic looked ghastly in the hot glare: it hurt to see him like this. ‘I’ve got a lot of things to do. I don’t think I like this …’
‘You’re okay, just hold it steady.’
‘Grrr-rrr-rr-rr!’ said Patrick, drawing a nervous laugh or two.
‘That’s it. Now all you have to do is squeeze.’
‘I just want to eat them!’
‘You get any goddamn spit on my boots, you old tart, and you’ll get one of ’em down your fucking throat – now get that mike outa the way!’
Gottfried ducked down beside me, squatting into my shadow. ‘Oh, what a brute!’ exclaimed Patrick giddily. ‘Isn’t he simply fe-ro-cious!’
‘Don’t pull on it or jerk it, just close your fist, easy-like,’ said Bob.
‘In some way or other,’ Vic gasped, his shaggy head lolling under the bright lights (‘Hey, where you off to – is it getting too much for you?’ somebody asked), ‘you’re … useful to them …’
‘No, I wanta catch it live on the tube.’ Someone was stroking the back of my neck (‘It’s live here …’), taking the pain away. ‘I-I don’t think they know I exist, Vic,’ I sighed (‘Yeah, but I miss the zooms!’), and Bob said: ‘Listen, maybe you oughta use both hands.’
‘And pivot about thirty degrees, so I can see your cannon!’ the guy on the chair called down. ‘Wow! Funkybuns! C’mere! Lemme see ya!’ ‘Whaddaya mean … ?’ Vic growled, just as little Bunky Baird, stark naked and painted a gleaming scarlet from head to toe (stark, that is, because even her hair was shaved away, her skull a gleaming red dome, her pubis sleek as a creased plum), pranced into the light between us. ‘Hey—!’ ‘Isn’t it just smashing?’ she exclaimed breathlessly, one hand on hip, the other behind her ear (‘They’re here, Gerry,’ came the gravelly voice between her legs, ‘it’s a matter of record … !’), switching through a sequence of fluid poses to make the paint sparkle. ‘Gudrun here did it! It’s a masterpiece!’ I stepped back out of her way, gave my arm a rest. She was bound loosely with a fine metallic thread that made her flesh bulge in peculiar places, and decorated with little silver ribbons, randomly attached to the thread. She looked like someone who’d got tangled up in the tail of a kite. ‘It’s for Zack’s terrific new show! It’s called Party Time, and I’ve got this great part – it’s so exciting!’ She glanced up at the lights as though discovering them for the first time, flashed a bright innocent smile (‘Watch out you don’t shoot your foot,’ Bob muttered irritably in my ear): ‘Oh, hello! Am I interrupting something?’
‘Yeah, stop catching flies, sweetie, and move your fat act! We got something heavy going down here!’
‘What—?’ She turned to gaze down at Vic, gasped audibly, her hands before her face. She held this pose rigidly a moment, then let her fingertips slide slowly down her seamed body (‘Even pleasure …,’ he was muttering on the other side, ‘has its fucking consequences …’), coming to rest just at the crease between thighs and shiny buttocks, her shoulders bowed but back straight, bare feet straddling his body. When she turned around, two tears glistened in the corners of her uplifted eyes.
‘Oh yeah!’ applauded he
r younger friend (‘Gesture, stylized gesture,’ I’d remarked that night at the theater – perhaps it was her uplifted eyes that had reminded me of this, or else the heavy weapon in my hand – ‘is really a disguise for uncertainty: which is why we’re so attracted to it’ – but perhaps I’d been wrong about this), and the older one said: ‘Ha ha, come over here, baby, and see what your old man’s got for you!’
Because it might just as well be said (I wish I’d thought of this at the time) that what fascinates us is not the ritualized gestures themselves – for, in a sense, no gesture is original, or can be – but rather that strange secondary phenomenon which repetition, the overt stylization of gesture, creates: namely, those mysterious spaces in between. ‘What … what are you going … to do, Gerry … ?’
‘Pardon?’ His eyes were open. One of them anyway: it was fixed on the revolver in my hand. ‘Ah. I’m sorry, Vic,’ I said, waggling it about ambiguously (‘God, it’s gorgeous!’ Bunky was raving behind me, and Howard, staring grimly at my hand, said: ‘Would you watch where you’re pointing that thing, Gerald?’), ‘I’m only, you know …’ I lowered it. His open eye (‘Is it a sapphire?’) rolled up to meet mine briefly, then closed. ‘Ah well, it … it beats … senility, I guess,’ he wheezed, and effected a jerky little movement with one shoulder that was perhaps meant as a shrug. ‘Yeah, a little something to celebrate your new success, baby – slip it on your pinkie, there!’ ‘Anyway, it’s – it’s almost over, Vic, and I thought—’
‘No, goddamn it, it’s not!’ he blustered, spewing blood. ‘The sooner you get it over with, the better it’s gonna be for everyone,’ Bob growled in my ear. ‘It’s so big!’ ‘More’s … more’s gonna happen, but I won’t … be here … to see it … and that … that scares me …’ I shared his dread: that door closed forever. Not being. Eternal absence. ‘Well, you’re a big star, sweetheart!’ It made me shudder just to think about it. This consciousness was what I had and, like him, I didn’t want it to – ‘I don’t … want it … to end!’