Count Geiger's Blues (20 page)

40
Through the Gerbil Tube

Bari returned in triumph
from showing her UC couture collection in Paris. Her models, as Xavier had seen in a video sent to him by Marilyn Olvera, had strutted the catwalk at the Espace Cardin in a gaudy pageant of acetate, dyed leather, and mirrorlike foil. The inspiration for every outfit was the comic-book costume of a female stalwart: Ladysilk, Saint Torque, Warwoman, or Gator Maid.

The models made catwalk sorties to a synthesized techno-rock beat, or wove about one another to drum-dominated Smite Them Hip & Thigh arabesques. Sometimes they moved so vigorously that they looked like cagers fast-breaking. Even the video showed Xavier the pop-eyed awe of the world fashion press and the hip covetousness of the Shiny Set women primed to buy.

Xavier was reminded of an old joke: “
‘I hate women, and I want the entire world to know it.’ ‘All right, then. You must become a fashion designer.’
” But Bari didn’t hate women, and these clothes, despite their origin in the pages of Uncommon Comics, were not sartorial digs at the women who wore them. The fashions in Bari’s collection were well made, with flattering drapings and accessories. No woman would flaunt them at a backyard barbecue, but not one outfit would have seemed gauche at a ball or a theater opening: daring, even avant-garde, but hardly vulgar or silly.

Still, it was hard not to think that by coopting certain points from the gear of pulpy superheroines, Bari had sold a piece of her soul for UC’s financial sponsorship and the market security of a pop-culture logo. Like teenage fanboys stateside, the French intelligentsia worshiped all things UC-connected. And Shiny Set women of a dozen nationalities (the wives and daughters of Arab oil sheiks and Arab import-export merchants being the major exceptions) leapt at these immodestly déclassé clothes, to lay claim to their auras of hipness and heroism. Both Bari’s of Salonika and Uncommon Comics had made a killing overseas. The money would pile up faster once Bari’s ready-to-wear variations on her couture collection premiered in New York and began filtering into boutiques and department stores from Maine to California.

*

One evening soon after her return, Bari was discussing these and various other matters with Xavier and Mikhail in the Oaxacan Zapotec Restaurant in the revolving sapphire disk atop the Bridgeboro Tower near the Salonika Hemisphere.

“Hey, Bari, I get off on your UC Look,” The Mick said. “But it irks me that the dude who invented it, even if you and Howie Whoever modified it and all, has been canned by Finesse. T. B.’s sitting in jail for trying to kill my uncle.”

“Of course that bothers you,” Bari said.

The waiters in the Zapotec—
waitpersons
, rather—wore vinyl loincloths, white war paint, Aztec headdresses, and ocher bodysuits. Despite the tacky overliteralness of these “uniforms,” Xavier sympathized with the men. Their pre-Columbian costumes had to be as plaguesome as his own Count Geiger BVDs, with the humiliating disadvantage that their outfits were visible.

“What in fuck’s ‘
pollo de Cortés en una manta frita de maiz
’?” The Mick held up a menu the size of a round card at a prizefight.

“A fried chicken burrito,” Xavier said. “I think.”

“‘
Quince dolares
,’ ” The Mick read. “Sheesh. We could’ve all gone to Ricardo’s for the price of one fancy cluck-roll here.”

“Consider the view,” Xavier said. Tonight, the Zapotec’s disk was not revolving, but their perimeter table offered a view of the Hemisphere, the glinting surface of the Chattahoochee River, and a picturesque enclave of Satan’s Cellar, now a-ripple with lights and carved into irregular geometries by a salmon-tinted sky sinking toward full darkness. Their waiter—waitperson—took their orders and padded away in his ersatz-deerskin moccasins.

“We thought you’d be home sooner,” Xavier said, using the first-person plural to cover his nag. (In some ways, it was a drag having Mikhail along; in others, a godsend. Despite his conviction that Finesse had rudely buggered Tim Bowman, The Mick
loved
Bari.) “I mean, it’s the end of
March
.”

“We had dozens of orders. Buyers had to have individual fittings. One customer had seventeen. Couture fanatics, unlike ready-to-wear customers, regard it as their right to
customize
each ensemble. They also think the designer whose brand they’re buying should handle all the alterations. It’s a hassle, but I do it to keep the ladies happy. Also, frankly, to make my couture work in the real world. I would’ve betrayed my customers and my vision if I’d left early.”

“How does one make the make-believe ‘work in the real world’?”

“That’s the basic imperative of any art, isn’t it? Anyway, I’m one of those who believe that
all
clothes are costumes.”

“Amen.” The Mick wore a silk-screened Smite Them Hip & Thigh T-shirt with a Persian Gulf camouflage jacket and a string tie with a bucking-bronc clasp. The jacket and the tie had put The Mick in technical compliance with the place’s dress code, even if his galley-slave anklets and black fingernails were wake-up calls to throw him out.

“It’s just that some costumes are more low-key, conventional, or unimaginative than others,” Bari said.

“Like mine?” Xavier self-consciously pinched a lapel.

“No. Uh, yes. Your suit would be wholly in place, and totally nondescript, almost anywhere.”

“Dull?”

“Soporific.”

Bari meant this, Xavier could tell, not simply humorously, but judgmentally. It was a put-down and a dare, from a recess of her personality that she had barricaded from him ever since their chance meeting at the Upshaw. She had loved him once, Xavier decided, in spite of his stodginess in dress, because he had forcefully attacked orthodoxy and mediocrity on other fronts, but, with the advent of the craven Howie Littleton, via the UC connection, her opinion of him had declined toward tolerant affection. That was the emotion she broadcast now, amped up a degree or two by the good vibes attendant upon their reunion.

“Boring. BOF City.” The Mick crunched a corn chip to punctuate this verdict.

“All right. Presto, change-o.” Xavier stood up. He took off his jacket, unknotted his tie, removed his shirt, heeled off his polished but outdated oxfords, undid his belt, and stepped out of his pants. While he was aligning their creases and folding the pants over his chair back, their waitperson hurried up to remind him of the Zapotec’s dress code. He noted that Xavier was tempting arrest for “forgive me, sir, public indecency.”

“I’m wearing more than you are,” Xavier said.

“Grunge-all, Uncle Xave!” The Mick cried. “You’re giving away your fucking secret identity!”

“Doesn’t the Zapotec have a language code?” Xavier asked the waitperson.

“That would violate the free-expression provisions of the Bill of Rights, sir.”

Xavier had peeled to his tinfoil long johns. Bari looked on in wonder. The vibes from her were positive. Xavier smiled. He found his protective Count Geiger slippers in an inside coat pocket and pulled them on over his navy-blue dress socks.

“These clothes,” he told the waitperson, rummaging in his pocket for the quilted indigo hood that completed the costume, “are one of the means by which
I
exercise my First Amendment rights.” He yanked the hood—an eerie aluminum-mesh burn mask—down over his skull and fiddled with it to get the mouth- and eyeholes lined up. Most of the Zapotec’s other patrons were openly gawking.

“You can’t wear that mask in here, sir.”

“It’s really just a hood. It goes with my costume.”

“A hood’s worse. Oconee’s Supreme Court ruled last May that no one may wear a hood, or any garment inspiring fear and/or concealing one’s identity, in public.”

“That was for Ku Klux Klansmen, wasn’t it? And I’m not concealing my identity. You already know who I am.”

“Mr. Thaxton, this isn’t Halloween.”

Xavier lifted his hooded eyebrows. “I’m aware, but it may be that you and your fellow waitpersons aren’t.”

“And, uh, you’re not wearing a tie,” the waitperson noted.

From his chair back, Xavier retrieved his tie, an old one with the ever-popular floating-amoeba design. As if fitting a noose, he pulled it on over his head. “There,” he said, adjusting the knot. “Please bring our food before I tell Management you’re wearing neither tie nor cumberbund nor cuff links.”

The waitperson retreated to the kitchen to fetch their burrito plates.

“Better?” Xavier asked. He knew that his eyes in their cutouts were a pair of gleaming marbles, while his mouth in its oval window was a wet, pink scar. He must look pretty grotesque.

“Better,” Bari said. She still might not love him as he loved her, but he’d won a measure of her respect.

*

After eating, a somewhat awkward task in his indigo cowl, Xavier folded his trousers and jacket into the old military backpack Mikhail had worn to the restaurant and paid the cashier with a credit card that The Mick also stowed in it. Then the three left the Zapotec, rode an elevator to the Bridgeboro Tower’s fourth floor, and strolled through a skybridge to the nearest EleRail station. The plan was for The Mick to ride on home alone while Xavier took Bari to her riverside atelier on another train. He hoped that this arrangement would prompt Bari to invite him in for a nightcap.

It was late. The skybridge was empty. The streets under it were not so pretty at this height. Bundled drunks slumped in doorways. Discarded paper helicoptered through alleys. Pokeweed junkies huddled on the landings of an ancient parking garage.

“Know what the Cellarites call these things?” The Mick said.

“What things?” Bari said.

The Mick stamped his foot. “These bridges over Salonika’s fucked-up waters.”

Xavier and Bari said they had no idea.

“Gerbil tubes,” The Mick said. “Yuppie tunnels.”

“Ah,” Xavier said. The have-nots’ sick revenge on the haves striding above them in hermetically sealed cages. So maybe the tubes
were
blatant architectural raspberries to the streets beneath. Those who could not use the bridges were nothing. Those who could were
Übermensch
, literally. Or gerbils.
Über
gerbils. The trio’s footsteps echoed in the skybridge, even the whispery schussing of Xavier’s slippers. Fifty or so yards from the EleRail court onto which their gerbil tube debouched, they heard a woman’s scream, a cry of complex terror with high-pitched versicles or parts. In the womb of the skybridge, Xavier perceived each part as a probing needle thrust.

“My God,” Bari said. “What’s going on?”

“Save her,” The Mick said. “Go on, Uncle Xave, help her!”

Help who? But Xavier instinctively responded. He broke into a trot. Then he was running. Then he was shooting toward the EleRail court as if drawn by a magnet. To Bari and The Mick, he was a hammered silver blur retreating from them at unguessable speed. They could still hear the unseen woman’s screams, but what they principally heard was the vacuuming
whoooooosh!
of Xavier’s takeoff and the extended
thwuuuuup!
of his lightninglike passage through the tube.

*

Xavier propelled himself into an open space of stucco terraces and fountains fronting the EleRail platform. Stopping, he felt the ghostly afterimages of his own swift progress through the skybridge telescope into his back. He had a dreamy double consciousness, one belonging to the self in action, the other to the spectator self looking on in astonished approval. The feeling—if examined, a luxury discouraged by the crisis at hand—was the reverse of that prompted by adventure movies, superhero comics, pulp novels. With those you vicariously assumed the identity of the hero. Here, though, gripped by a demand nearly the opposite of make-believe, Xavier cast back to the safety of a spectator self wholly fictional. Who was he now? Where was he?

Another series of screams scattered his thoughts. He was here, not elsewhere. Just beyond the station’s ticketstiles, a woman in blue jeans and a trench coat held four black toughs at bay with an aerosol can. Chemical Mace, most likely. One man already lay writhing on the platform’s stippled concrete. Another, his arm up to shield his face, was yanking at the woman’s coat sleeve. Even as she screamed, she nimbly let the sleeve be pulled in stages from her arm. A third man, cursing, tap-danced behind the coat grabber. The fourth man on the platform caught sight of Xavier.

“What the fuh!” He pointed a finger. “C’mon, you dumb shih, c’mon ’n’ rumber.”

The third man stopped tap-dancing and turned aggressively toward Xavier.

Xavier subconsciously reviewed his options. The man who had just invited him to “rumber” radiated only bluster and uncertainty. If challenged, he’d run. The other man facing Xavier was for real. He’d fight, fully expecting to take out the Reynolds-Wrapped avenger, probably with a head slap and a knife swipe. Xavier dashed forward, hurdled the ticketstiles, simultaneously tripped and shoved in the back the man who wanted to “rumber,” and disarmed the self-confident tap-dancer. He used a wrist twist that swept upward into the tough’s Adam’s apple and knocked him backward into a support column. The man collapsed. After that, he easily dispensed with the only attacker still on his feet and the downed man whom the woman had Mace’d.

With her muggers down, the woman stopped screaming, collapsed on a bench, and began to sob. “Where the devil’s the station cop?” Xavier asked her. The woman couldn’t answer. Xavier turned back to the four men lying about the platform as if concussed by an IED blast. There was a utility closet, its door half-open, near the woman’s bench, and Xavier dragged an aluminum stepladder out of it. This EleRail platform featured several large, vandalism-proof chandeliers, each with four hooklike globe supports. Using the stepladder, Xavier hung each gang member five or six feet off the floor from a separate hook of the same fixture. The stainless-steel and polystyrene chandelier rocked back and forth under the men’s weight, creaking and coruscating. So disposed, the men looked a lot like gutted deer carcasses. The woman on the bench continued to sob, inconsolably. Xavier had no idea how to calm or reassure her. In a moment, though, Bari and The Mick arrived (along with the missing station cop, who, with truly bad timing, had been helping a traveler with a broken foot to a taxi stand), and Xavier retreated into the shadows to let the newcomers take care of things. It wouldn’t do, he realized, to come forward in his Count Geiger persona. . . .