Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me

  When their cries could no longer be heard and the earlier silence again commanded the air, Blacknesse shook his head slowly, opened his hands in a gesture of futility. Something seemed to have failed. Gnossos, not daring to move, waited for him to speak.

  “No,” he said finally. “It seems useless.” His eyes returned and he removed the weight from his forehead. An oval indentation remained, fading.

  “What’s going on, man?”

  “Useless,” repeated Blacknesse.

  “Useless?”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Not long. Since just before the bees.”

  “Ah.” He dropped the weight into his shirt pocket.

  “Calvin, man?”

  “Umm?”

  “You’re okay?”

  “What?”

  “Are you all right?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Never mind, it’ll keep.”

  Blacknesse looked momentarily at his hands, paused, then said, “Don’t blame yourself.” He spoke the words as if they were part of some longer, more complex conversation, and not out of context.

  “Hunh?”

  “For Mojo.”

  “What?”

  “It was none of your doing, Gnossos. Evil,” he paused a moment, nearly sighing, “evil needn’t be conjured to be manifest. It often functions on its own. You’ll see.”

  “I’ll see what?”

  Another long, quivering pause.

  But when Gnossos arrived at the house with the Swiss drolleries and entered the apartment, he found Fitzgore with his red head in the commode.

  Scattered all over the floor were pewter pots, brass plates, copper hunting horns, and nineteen empty bottles. The bottles had until recently been filled with aspirin, Bufferin, Anacin, NoDoz, Miltown, milk of magnesia, mineral oil, paregoric, rubbing alcohol, Coricidin, Super Anahist cold pills, Pepto-Bismol, calamine lotion, baby oil, Bromo Quinine, Lavoris, Old Spice toilet water, after-shave lotion, and Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray tonic. Fitzgore was wearing his Navy ROTC uniform and had left a note. It read:

  How I hungered for her touch.

  Her darling hand enclosed in

  mine. There shall be weeping

  and gnashing of tee

  The place stunk of vomit. Fitzgore was still semiconscious.

  A dull moment of panic. “What the hell did you do?!” bellowed Gnossos, jerking the head out of the commode. “Did you swallow all that shit?”

  A limp-necked nod: “Rrrggffd,” came the answer.

  “Holy Christ,” he implored the ceiling. He let the head snap back and rushed to the baby refrigerator, whipping up a horror of egg whites, mustard, and warm water. When Fitzgore saw and understood he was meant to drink it, his eyes swam. He closed his hands over the top of his head in numb protest. His once white ROTC hat was inverted next to him on the tile floor, already full of regurgitated, semi-digested suicide stew.

  “C’mon mother, drink it, drink it up!”

  “Rrrggffd.”

  Gnossos forced the unwilling head back and poured the slimy mixture into its mouth. When he was satisfied with the amount swallowed, he ran to the phone and called for an ambulance, impressing the terrified switchboard operator with the false fact that the victim had turned blue and was hemorrhaging. She failed to doubt him and promised instant action. When he again returned to the bathroom Fitzgore was retching with astonishing violence. Gnossos held him so he wouldn’t choke.

  After a while the spasms subsided and he tried speaking, but the words emerged in a soapy mumble. “I . . . grrfrder . . . unnerstans? I’ve never . . . ”

  “Shut up and vomit. Christ.”

  “. . . Squeeeze . . . rrI wanna squeeeeeezee . . . ”

  His stomach muscles contracted violently and he threw up again, this time returning better than a dozen of the Miltown. Sure thing, thought Gnossos, keep her coming.

  “. . . betrayal . . . all atime awake . . . you jerk.”

  “Quiet, man, just heave.”

  “And me affer . . . her . . . ass . . . anall that . . . rrmonieeeee . . . ”

  “You could’ve killed yourself, you cabbage. Come on, upchuck!”

  “. . . an I hadda innerduce em . . . ” he went on, his face the color of the bathtub, his hair matted, without life. “Me . . . meee. I hadda innerduce em allright . . . allright . . . hehehe.” He began to laugh, then stopped abruptly, went cross-eyed, and threw up again.

  “Easy, baby, there you go, zippo-bang.”

  “. . . married . . . hehehe . . . just like that . . . urp.”

  “Married, man?”

  “Urp.”

  Something devious occurred to Gnossos.

  “Introduce who?” he asked. “You feeling any better?”

  “Hehehehehehehehehehehehehe . . . ”

  “Go slow, man, stay loose. Who do you mean?”

  “. . . rrgfdallatime . . . awake . . . an you thought I was sleeping . . . hehehehehe.”

  For a moment Gnossos stopped trying to help. It’s not possible, came the thought. What I think he’s talking about could not truly be possible.

  “Hehehehe . . . an I heard every . . . fuckin’ word he said, Paps . . . him an that one-eyed creep. Egh.”

  “You mean Mojo, baby?”

  “Hehehehehe . . . ”

  “That morning when he was here?” Gnossos held the pale head up by its ear.

  “Ggrrfd.”

  “When he was in here?”

  “Hehehehe . . . youdumbjerk . . . yousweetdumbgreekgreekjerk . . . hehehe . . . ”

  Gnossos looked at the bare wall, slapped his forehead, and whispered to himself, “The loft party. How else would everyone have known?” Then he considered the vomiting figure, who was as limp as a marionette with the strings cut away. Fitzgore somehow managing to grin and nod, finally blurting:

  “Oh, she’s beautiful, Paps . . . allbeautifultwat an no boobs, I know, but beautiful, wow . . . ”

  Gnossos in his mind’s eye looking again at the small door in the loft, through which had come so many sounds of wet flesh. A delicate phthisic hand reaching across the threshold to guide the drooling Mojo; but this time pegging its owner, zeroing in like a Zoomar lens on those same fingers which had once wrenched the enema bag. Pamela.

  “You scheming little bastard,” he said softly.

  “Hehehehe . . . I wanna die . . . ”

  “You fetid, mangy bastard.”

  “Ggg . . . but I loved her, Paps, see? . . . egh did I love . . . ”

  “You fixed it all!”

  He belched.

  “The whole contaminated scene, man.”

  Fitzgore nodded, gulping for breath, trying to look up, the serge lapels of his ROTC uniform smeared with drool. “Only way . . . I could make her, Paps . . . Paps baby . . . Paps man . . . the only way she wanted . . . little orgy action . . . little lucky Pierre thing . . . me on bottom, man . . . beautiful, oh so beautiful. But how could I have known, sweetheart . . . tell me . . . oh, lemme die, man.”

  “I’ll let you die in a minute, mother. Just tell me what you couldn’t have known.”

  “Couldn’t know, man . . . how could I? . . . ol’ Mojo on top with his bullwhip, man . . . just rollin’ around . . . oh, Paps baby, she went for it. She liked him an’ that bullwhip, man. Oh, she liked it all, man . . . gone now . . . all gone.” Fitzgore began to weep pathetically. “She went away. Gonegonegone . . . all gone. Rrrgffd. Pamela-honeybaby . . . ”

  Gnossos felt revulsion like a moldy bacterial growth in his mouth. “Oh, you corrupt little bedsore,” he said. “Die, why don’t you? I mean, just go rancid and expire.” He let the head clunk down against the inside of the commode, then searched frantically in the medicine cabinet for bottles that could be saved for another try. But everything had been used. He stormed into the living room and called the infirmary.

  “That’s right, lady, cancel the goddamned ambulance.”

  “But it’s on its way, Mr. Pappadoo.”
>
  “I don’t give a shit, right? Intercept it, stop it, he’s okay, believe me. Not a thing wrong with him.”

  “But he had a hemorrhage not twenty minutes ago.”

  “Amazing recovery, all better, all cool. Don’t worry. He’s not here, anyway. Out having a drink to celebrate.”

  But it was useless. The ambulance came while he was still talking, and a team of attendants led by Nurse Fang carried Fitzgore away, weeping, giggling, vomiting on his uniform with brass buttons.

  That very same night, to atone, he abandoned his body without care to the girl in the green knee-socks. The time for Epiphanal Defloration seemed to be upon them and there was no use fighting the metaphysical weather.

  “Really,” she said, disrobing. “Pretending to be asleep.”

  “It brought me down, baby. Do I look down?”

  “And then he just planned the whole thing with Mojo?”

  “I’m sick, dig? I’m sick all over.”

  “Was he really in love with Pamela? It’s a bit difficult to believe.”

  “And I never saw it, not a bit of it. Rub my back a little, will you?”

  “I brought a book along, a special one.”

  “Read to me, baby, put a little something in my head.”

  “God though, when you think of it. Just to be in bed, couldn’t he have asked her? I mean, some other way?”

  “American, baby. The country is diseased. Little lower. To the left more.”

  “‘Wherever I am,”’ she read, “‘it’s always Pooh,

  It’s always Pooh and me.

  Whatever I do, he likes to do,

  “So what are you doing tonight?” says Pooh:

  “Well how very nice, ‘cos I am too . . . ”’

  Yet to his cataclysmic surprise—when he had her ready and waiting, when he cautiously eased her knees apart with his own, when he hand-offered the sacrifice of his periscope’s blind eye, when she leaned nervously away and uttered a moan of exquisite surrender—to his cataclysmic surprise there was no membrane to stop him.

  He was within her as easily as a plug in a socket and nothing had happened, nothing whatever. But they didn’t stop to discuss it and neither did they come together when they came. She was a full minute ahead.

  As they were drinking Dairy Queen root beer floats in Fitzgore’s Impala she explained that it could only have been a Tampax accident. Gnossos said he didn’t understand; he was having trouble with the empty, drawing feeling in his loins. Well once, she told him, sipping, she had mistakenly used a second Tampax without removing the first. There had been this sudden, ugly pain. Probably when she’d applied force, since as she said she’d forgotten about the first one, well, there you were.

  There who was, came the thought, but he tried laughing anyway, and believed her.

  ‘What’s two times ten?’ I said to Pooh.

  (Twice who? said Pooh to Me.)

  ‘I think it ought to be ten times two.’

  ‘Just what I thought to myself,’ said Pooh.

  Now, a month and a day later, with the fume of lilacs in the outside air, he lay naked in David Grün’s blossoming greenhouse, his back on a bed of Irish moss, his hands locked behind his head. Kristin, not exactly naked, crouched with both of her delicate Cashmere Bouquet arms wrapped around his legs. She wore green-tinted nylons, a beige lace garter belt and mauve high heels because she’d learned what he liked. Now and again she pulled up some of the damp, glistening moss and scattered it over his belly. Gnossos, Immune, Exempt, partially transported, knowing next to nothing beyond the sensation of her lips, the patient exhilarating warmth. Around them were heady soporific odors. Fig trees, poinsettia, wild tulips, windflowers, foxgloves, bearberries, pink carnations, sweet sultans, marsh mallows, fuchsias, candy tufts, tiger lilies, rhododendron, sweet williams, the pot of Pot, and a clay vase which once had held St.-John’s-worts. The foliage rustled with the motion of toads and snakes.

  She chased him into the barn. The smell of horses, hay, and grain restored them. They tumbled on the oats, clothes flying, fingers searching. From the meadow beyond, they heard children’s laughter, shouts, yells, distant cries. Kiwi, Towhee, and Sparrow were home from school, prematurely building a maypole. Gnossos and Kristin sat facing each other, thighs straddling, bodies high, hands propped behind for balance. They made sounds belonging to no one language but common to all.

  And again in the saddle of the sidehill, where he’d shattered the head of the galloping rabbit. Now he knew only Kristin. He watched her ecstatic expression, measured her rhythm, and ran out of protein. Drink chocolate milk, eat eggs, raw beef. Oh la.

  “So,” asked David Grün in baggy pants, red-faced, hands covered with green paint. “When is the date? When do you fix the wedding?”

  “June,” said Kristin.

  “Traditional,” said Gnossos. He was whittling a mackerel for a mobile. Three other balsa fish, smaller, lay beside him on the floor, tiny screw eyes for dorsal fins.

  Not so certain, Catbird shrugged. She was mixing small tins of black and electric-blue enamel for the mackerel. Tern and Bobwhite prepared brushes. Robin, the baby, growing stronger by the hour, crawled around the fluffy rug like a kitten, chasing something no one else could see. Kiwi and Towhee combed Kristin’s brown hair with translucent tortoise shell, picked out pieces of hay and oats. They tried braiding but it was too short. They wove a fantasy of colored bows instead, made curls with rubberbands, brushed and combed, then combed again, sculpting, building secret tunnels. “Enough,” said Catbird, in calico, “she’ll have no hair left. Come and help paint Gnossos’ fishes.”

  He pared and whittled with David’s honed tools, chipped rough edges, planed the scaleless flanks, beveled the backs, shaped the obtuse angle of the tail, a graceful V. It was a time of building. Already they had made another music room by knocking through the kitchen into the old storage loft. They had salvaged ancient plans of the house and charted accordingly, locating beams, reinforcing supports, demolishing plaster, changing familiar space. Now Grün had washed his hands with Lava and turpentine and was carrying a tray of coffee and Cordon Bleu, milk and cookies for the girls. “So,” he said. “Some nourishment finally. You enjoyed the day in the woods, Kristin, you saw the greenhouse? The pointsettias still come, it’s amazing. Some brandy in your coffee?”

  Tern and Bobwhite, wary of the grown-up talk, left the room and became actresses, returning in feather boas, sequined gowns, high-button shoes, rouge, velvet hats, patent leather belts. “We have a trunk,” whispered David, to explain. “I’ll remember,” said Kristin, maternally. “Do,” from Gnossos, touching the back of her neck.

  While they drank and watched the actresses dance, they prepared the wooden fish, painting black stripes on blue bodies, looping wire through screw eyes, bending sections of coathangers into suitable curves. When the mackerel balanced, Gnossos pinched the mobile between thumb and forefinger and climbed a stepladder to fix it to the ceiling. The smaller fish dipped and swung around the larger. Kristin only watched with a cigarette, sipping her coffee.

  “Gnossos,” asked Sparrow, “can fishes fly?”

  “Special ones,” he told her. “Some birds even swim.”

  David, standing on a chair, tapped the largest mackerel on the tail. It spun around, paused, and returned. “To change media is not so hard,” he said. “Only dangerous.”

  “Oh, Daddy,” from Sparrow, mock-teacherlike, “fishes don’t drown.”

  “If they leave the water,” with a pregnant pause, “they drown.”

  Not ready for parables Gnossos shook away the reference and hung the new piece of sculpture, using a large thumbtack. Along with the herons, to no one’s great surprise, it swam and flew. The children made sounds of gentle pleasure.

  But in the lull of watching, as the moment was suspended, Catbird turned to Kristin and caught her putting out a cigarette.

  “It’s government you study, isn’t it?”

  Kristin, her arm extended, hand empty
of the butt, off balance, answered, “Yes.”

  “It’s all right for you?”

  Glancing at Gnossos for support. “I guess so. I mean, I like it, is that what you’re asking?”

  “She does very well, man.”

  “Phi Beta Kappa,” David informed them, putting the stepladder in a closet, pronouncing the name with a surprising tincture of cynicism. “A Greek organization.”

  Catbird moved the plate of macaroons and uncovered a dish of strudel, apples in a syrup of nuts and maple sugar. “Your father’s work is Washington, I think you said before?”

  “He’s an advisor,” she said carefully. “To the President.”

  Trying to ease the discomfort, Gnossos added, “Very conservative cat. Free enterprise for the privileged, and like that.” He was testing his brandy with a middle finger.

  Catbird gave an intimate “Oh.”

  “Well, he is,” said Kristin. “Militant, paranoiac, just about everything.”

  “He thinks there’s a Negro-Jewish plot, man, to take over the republic.”

  “He called last week to warn me.”

  The actresses did pirouettes, the beauticians made a French roll. “Some more cognac?” asked David, finally sitting with them.

  Kiwi was doing a headstand to get their attention. One of her button shoes had toppled off and her costume was upside down.

  “He knows Gnossos, of course?” continuing slyly.

  “O God, no. Even the name would give him some kind of attack. He’d probably itch to death.”

  David’s eyebrows raised again, his body motionless for a second, his brow hinting at a frown. He poured a little more brandy into their cups, picking up a spoon to stir, saying nothing.

  “Live near us,” said Tern, sitting cross-legged on the floor beside them, picking up the baby, Robin.

  “Oh yes,” said Kiwi and Towhee, “live here, even.”

  “So,” asked David finally. “What will you do?”

  “Me, man?”

  He nodded seriously.

  “I don’t know. Research. Grants and stipends.”