Just a Couple of Days (24 page)

General Kiljoy returned within a minute, still groping about his groin. “Tynee, call Volt and have him meet us at your office. We'll all accompany you upstairs. We won't be returning
here tonight.” He glanced at me. “I think the Doctor has seen enough.”

Tynee pulled his phone out again and called Volt, who, remember, was with Agent Orange, Meeko, and Ratdog. He instructed him to meet us at his office.

“I think Volt needs more training, General,” Tynee said after he disconnected the call. “His accent sounded funny.”

“I adore his Italian accent,” Miss Mary spoke wistfully, and Tynee appeared to make a mental note of this romantic detail.

“Something wrong with his accent?” General Kiljoy asked shortly.

“No,” Tynee said as he gingerly put his cellular phone back in his inside breast pocket, as if there was a mouse in his jacket and he was carefully setting a trap. There was no mouse in his jacket, but there might have been one in General Kiljoy's pants, and from the looks of things, it was cornered and getting pawed and batted about helplessly. “He was doing a southern Hindi, in fact.”

“I don't care for that one,” Miss Mary asserted.

“So what's the matter then?” General Kiljoy inquired tightly.

“Well,” Tynee began, “unless I'm mistaken, he sounded like a drunken Hindi with the hiccups.”

 

81
Among the many irritating inventions humans have devised stands the elevator. Its shafts enable us to scrape the sky (a disturbing concept, I might point out), to design a priapic skyline, to stack ourselves, and to kill ourselves in just one more dramatic way. Moreover, without elevators we might never have had
the opportunity to stand in a box with complete strangers while we mutually wish for one another's absence, self-consciously counting the seconds and the floors until we can get the hell away from one another. They lift our bodies, though not our spirits, and according to Blip, you can feel your spirit being pulled from you as an elevator begins its ascent. Blip always takes the stairs, two at a time, and he's very self-righteous about it.

When in the company of a group of people you already despise, standing in a closet with them is an idea less appealing than fifty flights of stairs. Nevertheless, this was the situation that I realized was imminent when Tynee hit a button on his remote control that caused another portion of the bookcase to open. This revealed an elevator decorated in the same mahogany-walled, bearskin rug fashion as the observation lounge, as if one might want to relax in there and have a nightcap by a crackling fire.

“All aboard,” Tynee quipped maladroitly as we entered single file. The doors slipped shut noiselessly, made all the more obvious by our own conspicuous lack of conversation. The close quarters concentrated Miss Mary's corrosive tobacconist's effluvium, making it all the more emphatic, and a meaty bouquet was rising out of General Kiljoy's duodenum, or perhaps slipping silently out the back door to mingle malevolently in an eloping liaison of fumes with Miss Mary's flagrant fragrances. I instinctively looked for the floor numbers as my soul was tugged through the balls of my feet, but there were none, nor were there any buttons on the wall. I could not help but state this observation.

“Not really necessary,” Tynee answered. I wondered momentarily if the mahogany walls were really necessary. “There
are only two stops in this elevator,” he continued triumphantly. “The observation lounge and my office.”

I nodded. General Kiljoy cleared his throat. Miss Mary fanned the air in front of her face. Tynee's words echoed silently off the hardwood walls, resounding in my head until the sounds had become nothing more than glossolalic gibberish. I began to feel some silly sense of anticipation, though I could not comprehend what for, and checked the time on my watch. It was 5:55, so I made a wish.

What did I wish for? Peace on Earth, of course.

 

82
The elevator hummed an unexciting tune, monotonous and dull, like a chorus of monks meditating upon a hissing teakettle. Their consciousness lifted as far as it was going to get, the monks simultaneously ceased their toning as the doors to the elevator opened to Tynee's office-apartment. Directly across the enormous room before us, five windows stretched from the floor to the ceiling, providing a panorama of the Green. There was, however, no Green to be seen. It looked as if some mad mosaicist had flung thousands of variously colored tessera across a heretofore grassy canvas, sneezed, and inadvertently breathed life into them. The pixels danced, the pixels swayed, the pixels chanted. The unseen teapot continued to shriek like a kamikaze pterodactyl, and the monks sounded as if they'd tired of their somber ruminations, thrown off their robes, and gotten a pickup game of coed naked Red Rover going with the nuns next door. Random yippees and squeals and hollers and wahoos slipped through Tynee's double-thick windows, and outside, a party that would have miffed the morals of Dionysus
was in full swing, leaning back, pulling hard on the chains, pumping its legs till it was playing footsie with the sky (much nicer than scraping the sky), mocking gravity, sassing the centrifuge, tempting inertia, going for it, going all the way around this time.

General Kiljoy roared like one of the grizzly bear rugs in the observation lounge and elevator might have done in their more animate days. “What the devil is happening here?”

“Fuck off!” Tynee hollered back with equal intensity if not greater ferocity as he strode toward his desk. His pulmonary capacity could have blown a brick pighouse down. Astonishingly, this silenced General Kiljoy. Tynee, apparently, took no abuse in his own territory, even though his body weight was less than what General Kiljoy could lift above his head (as he would do later that evening). As if to emphasize his domain further, Tynee pulled out his remote control, and with some nimble finger-work, had both the elevator hidden behind a bookcase and his secretary summoned over the intercom. He also set the Jacuzzi to bubbling, although it never became apparent to what end.

His secretary informed him over the intercom that his assistants were awaiting his arrival in the boardroom. “Have they taken any action yet?” he demanded.

“No sir,” came a practiced and pleasant voice. “They're just waiting.”

“What in God's name are they waiting for?” Tynee barked back. “Can't they wipe their own ass without my say-so?”

The secretary laughed obsequiously. “I guess not, sir.”

“Well, inform them I'm on my way in.” He clicked off the intercom and turned to us. “General, I'd like you to accompany me to the meeting. I'm going to recommend that the National
Guard be brought in.” Before General Kiljoy had time to nod, a full beer can ricocheted off one of the windows. “Back in the seventies, before we paved over the brick roads, that would have been a brick,” he informed General Kiljoy as they exited to an adjoining room.

Tynee was correct about the bricks. Blip and Sophia claimed to have a half brick whose other half was pitched through one of the administration's windows during an antiwar protest in the early '70s. Sophia painted it black and placed it on their mantel. “It's in mourning,” Blip explained soberly. “Its other half went down in a blaze of glory.”

“Yes,” added Sophia, “but it was for a good cause.”

 

83
Somewhere, a teakettle wailed away in creative agony, screaming as the steamy fruit of its womb burst forth. As the sound continued, I began to notice that the noise was cleaner, not as wet, and more constant. It sounded like a crystal wineglass singing or, more precisely, vibrating. Blip was fond of encouraging his wineglasses to sing at academic dinner parties, much to the chagrin of most others present. “Listen to that!” he would shout. “Do you know why the crystal sings? It's because the friction created is vibrating throughout the crystal's structure, creating this frequency of sound. This glass is literally shuddering with music. Come on, join in!” Inevitably, one of the more severe intellectuals would ask him to cease and desist, and he would politely comply, adding that he was “just trying to get us all on the same wavelength.”

This recollection occurred to me as I gazed out a window at the lawless jamboree occurring below. In one section, a group
of people were undulating like hurricane-happy driftwood as they were manhandled across the top of the bronze and amber waves of hands. The hands were connected to bodies costumed in attire ranging from furry cartoon characters to topless belly dancers, and floating through the currents of the crowd were the usual fare of vampires and devils and aliens and robots and gypsies and transvestites, along with tap dancers, jugglers, and a marijuana leaf, to name but a few. On the fringe of the crowd nearest to us, a circle of about twenty drummers, faces and bodies painted like psychedelic aborigines, sat beating out an impossible combination of cadence and chaos while another thirty or so danced around and between them. Bottle rockets shot into the air from time to time, eliciting cheers of approval from the masses. A band had set up stacks of amplifiers in front of the library at one end of the Green and was feeding the frenzy and freedom with a spirited jam of a dozen musicians doing their own thing together.

At one point I leaned forward a little and happened to touch the glass. I abruptly pulled my hand away. I was startled to feel the glass vibrating, buzzing my fingertips like a tuning fork on my front teeth. Evidently, the ruckus outside was causing the windows to vibrate and emit the high-frequency whine. I proceeded to touch all the windows, interrupting the feedback loop that caused them to reverberate. It worked, but only for a few moments, and soon they had tuned in to the frequency of the festivities once again.

I tuned in to the festivities again myself just in time to see, about fifty feet from the edge of the gathering, a void suddenly emerge like a dry spot of pavement from a swiftly evaporating puddle. Into the clearing stepped two Jesuses, one complete
with stigmata on his hands and a crown of thorns around his bloody head, the other wrapped in a bedsheet toga-tunic and wearing a simple halo above his jesuschrist hair. The crowd immediately around them began chanting, “Fight! Fight! Fight!” It was all very good-natured, however, and both Jesuses were grinning like they'd recently turned a bottle of water into a six-pack. They obliged their audience and clasped their hands together, attempting to arm-wrestle while still standing. A brief tussle ensued until one of them was thrown off balance, and lo and behold, it was the halo-wearing Jesus that was left standing.

 

84
Miss Mary is a forgery without an original, which is to say, she is fake, although it is not really clear what she is faking. She is simply the essence of synthetic phoniness, like a woodgrain shower curtain, and yet a counterfeit likely to fool the art world's best auction houses. Miss Mary claims to have highly refined tastes, such as wanting two-fifths cream and three-fifths milk in her Colombian coffee instead of half-and-half—an unlikely gustatory sensitivity given her two-pack-a-day cigarette habit. The garish tobacco heiress, underneath the impressive facsimile created by her clothing, cosmetics, and pretensions, is less real than a middle-aged mannequin, and her head is emptier than puffed rice. She is a sycophant in charge, and she acts as if she draws her behavioral cues from daytime television.

Behind me, I heard her draw in a breath as if to speak, and I cringed at the plastic genialities she was preparing to hurl at me like sugarcoated water balloons. “Enjoying yourself today, Doctor?” she asked, as if I had been sliding down waterslides naked all afternoon.

I paused as long as I could, free of ignoring her question completely, then muttered, rolling my eyes along with my voice, “I guess,” without turning around. I touched the window to stop its high-pitched buzz.

“Doctor, Doctor,” she henpecked. “‘I guess' rhymes with ‘yes' but it sounds like ‘no.'”

“What?” I spat, emphasizing the
t
and allowing a sharp edge to creep into my voice, hoping to puncture her swollen self-confidence. It mattered not if I succeeded in puncturing anything, for as I've said, she was as empty and contrived as a shopping mall after hours. I must have pierced something, however, because a malignant cloud of foul smog spewed out of her mouth like industrial waste and billowed around my head, swirling about in a particulate haze.

“You heard me, dear Doctor. Your well-being is a top priority with us.” As she said this, Tynee and General Kiljoy returned, munching slices of pizza, and I was never so happy to see the other two people I had grown to loathe so completely. If nothing else, they could quibble among themselves. That was my hope, but it was not the case. Like passengers in the back of a Greyhound bound for Chatsville, they were forever intent upon including me in any conversation they were having.

“Hey Fountain,” General Kiljoy called loudly across the room, his mouth full of masticated mozzarella. “Want some pizza? Better hurry before it's all gone.”

I sulked a few moments before realizing that I was famished. I hadn't ingested anything since breakfast except three shots of Wild Turkey. I felt like a child whose parents had just scolded him at a picnic, saying, “Are you going to stand there and pout, or do you want to eat?” Thus humbled, I had to admit
that, yes, I wanted to eat. My physical needs swiftly shoved my moping, melodramatic antics aside, and I found myself trotting to the boardroom to fetch some pizza, salivating in anticipation, damn near wagging my tailbone.

Along the way, my attention was momentarily distracted by Tynee's small bottle of urushiol, the extract of poison ivy, sitting unobstructed on a bookcase. I paused, looked around, and, without premeditation or precedent, swiped it.

 

85
The entire area of the boardroom was filled by an immense ovular table, the surface of which was cut out of a single piece of giant sequoia. The grain was impossibly straight, and the color so rich and deep that the surface seemed threedimensional. It had a width of about ten feet at its widest point, and was nearly twice as long. The room had the same tall, vibrating windows as Tynee's office, and along the walls were pictures of frightfully nondescript white males. They all looked dreadfully serious, and were framed in the same rusty magenta wood as the conference table. Chairs were every which way, coffee cups and empty cans of soda interrupted the crumbs scattered evenly across the table, and four pizza boxes lay open in the middle of the priceless table. There was one piece of pie left, but it was not in any of the boxes. It was in the delicate and slender hands of a young man with blow-dried, blond hair. It was in the hands of Blip's original jailer, Captain Porton Down.