Just a Couple of Days (28 page)

As bad as it is, many things are worse than standing in an elevator with people you loathe. Among these many things, however, exists a related situation, in particular, being
stuck
in an elevator with people you loathe, and on top of that, witnessing one commit an act of egregious violence upon another, whom you loathed, remember, only not enough to . . . shoot him. Worse than this, even, is finding oneself smiling like a jackass at the whole goddamn mess. In fact, all four of us were a goofy group of simpering simians in a box, a regular barrel of monkeys, and General Kiljoy was chuckling. Perhaps Sophia is correct about them, but certainly not me.

To be precise, we were not in fact stuck in the elevator, at least not in the sense of the elevator being broken. We were, however, stuck between insanity and a cold place, for the compound below would take at least another hour to ventilate and warm up. It could have been worse in some ways. At least the elevator was elegantly decorated. Bearskin rugs, while gruesome, are really quite comfortable.

For now, our immediate concern was the seeming possibility that, despite our efforts, we had somehow been exposed to the Pied Piper virus. This only added to the routine awkwardness of just being in an elevator, and made everyone extremely paranoid. We were all fighting the urge to smile like it was the devil himself. It seemed a ridiculous struggle.

At one point, General Kiljoy attempted to break our icy
smiles with some conversation. I'm not certain if I heard this exactly right, for it made absolutely no sense when he said it and there was no context at all to place it in, but his peculiar turn of phrase was something to the effect of “I don't know which is better—a juicy, ripe cherry or a firm tart.”

Again, I can't be certain that's exactly what he said, but Tynee and Miss Mary seemed to think his assertion rather odd as well. No one commented on it. It just echoed around, and everyone was surely thinking that General Kiljoy was exhibiting signs of being intoxicated by the Pied Piper's music. After all, while the remark may still have seemed somewhat absurd, it would have made more sense if he had said, “I don't know which is better—a juicy, ripe cherry or a firm, tart
cherry
,” but he didn't. He said “a firm tart.” No cherry. Of this I am certain. So, for all we knew, he was beginning to become linguistically incapacitated.

Lest you be kept in suspense, this was not at all the case. After a couple of hours of sitting around waiting, all perception having turned inward, scanning, scanning, looking for any irregularities in our psyches like compulsive bookkeepers, we felt confident that we had not been exposed. As for General Kiljoy's peculiar utterance, none of us ever spoke of it again.

Nor should you.

 

97
Inane. Inane was General Kiljoy's comment. I looked
inane
up this morning in the dictionary that was on one of the bookcases in the observation lounge. It refers to “that which is void or empty,” and is thus a good descriptive in this case. It also
refers to “the infinite void of space,” and can thus be a considerable invective. “Your head, sir, is like the infinite void of space.”

While General Kiljoy's remark was certainly empty, it would be unnecessarily caustic of me to liken it to the infinite void of space. It has occurred to me, however, that the Pied Piper virus was turning people's minds into something resembling the infinite void of space. Is this an insult? Well, that remains to be seen.

 

98
It was a cold day in hell. While the climate in the observation lounge was still a bit chilly, akin to a cool autumn evening with no breeze, it was preferable to staying in the elevator. In more ways than one, actually, for there was still a relatively high helium concentration in the atmosphere. While I was explaining to my cellmates the psychological explanation of the grim-grin phenomenon, my voice began to sound as if I had just sucked down a helium balloon. It seemed appropriate. I've always thought a good deal of psychology is quack medicine anyway.

Our squeaky voices naturally limited conversation. The only words to be spoken were serious, and it didn't do for General Kiljoy to quack his orders. Instead, he pointed his remote control at the observation window, and an enormous talking head from the local news appeared, filling the space previously occupied by the conspicuous absence of Blip, Brother Zebediah, and Manny. The newscaster was telling whoever happened to be on the viewing end of the camera about Roundtown's annual pumpkin festival. It was the 78th Annual Roundtown Pumpkin
Jamboree, when all the urban professionals come down to spend their professional money.

After watching Dick Maalox, the reporter for the road camera crew, shout the rules of the jack-o'-lantern contest into the camera, I excused myself (by politely nodding, not speaking) to go to the bathroom. Normally, this activity warrants no discussion in a story because it is uneventful, as I've already indicated. This, however, was an eventful day for me, and, propriety shmo-priety, there can be no exceptions.

Thanks to the cultural echoes of all those dead Puritans, I can't help but feel some reserve about sharing this segment. However, it is essential to the unfolding, and fear not, scatology is not my intent. But the fact of the matter is that there I was, in the bathroom, on the potty, pants around my ankles and toilet paper in hand, when an event no less startling than some nincompoop barging in on me occurred. It was an event whose occurrence was nothing more than a moment of perception, although it occurs to me that all events are nothing more than a moment of perception. Nevertheless, in this case it was somehow especially so.

What happened is this. My eyes, previously preoccupied with wrestling more than one square of tissue at a time off the recalcitrant roll, were momentarily idle and happened to fall upon a phrase written in soap on the jade green tile wall before me.

It read: “For a good time, call Blip. 555–2012.”

 

99
After finishing my business as quickly as possible, I grappled with the obstinate roll to get an ample amount of toilet paper to wipe the message from the wall before anyone else
could see it. It would have been easier with paper towels, but to my chagrin, there were none, only an old electric hand dryer, one of the original models. While drying my hands, I discovered that it had the nearly ubiquitous electric hand dryer graffiti scratched into its metal surface. For posterity's sake, the directions, which had read:

1. Push button
   
2. Rub hands gently under warm air
   
3. Stops automatically
   

had been changed by someone into:

1. Push butt
   
2. Rub hands gently under arm
   
3. Stops automatically
   
4. Wipe hands on pants.
   

I couldn't help but wonder how on Earth this bathroom, in a top-secret military compound fifty feet underground, had failed to escape this clichéd piece of vandalism. As it happened, Manny Malarkey confessed to the crime by jaggedly scratching M. M. into the white enamel finish near the bottom of the dryer. It was easy to imagine him demonstrating his modified directions, pushing his posterior with his index finger and rubbing his palms gently under his arms like a timid giant.

 

100
Feeling guilty, and thus self-conscious, and thus awkward, I wasn't sure how one is generally expected to act upon returning from the bathroom. But my paranoid anxiety was moot, as no one even looked away from the TV screen. It seemed
the immediate future held nothing more for me than watching more footage of the Roundtown Pumpkin Jamboree. When I returned, a man was being carried away on a stretcher, having dislocated a vertebra competing in the pumpkin toss. This was followed by a short interview with a farmer who had grown a six-hundred-pound hybrid pumpkin. At the end of the interview, he sat his baby granddaughter (whom he called “li'l pumpkin”) next to the stem at the top of the enormous gourd. But she was no Cinderella, and that pumpkin was no magical carriage. She cried like he had set her on top of a firecracker. Grandaddy just patted his big pumpkin and smiled at the camera.

Every few minutes, General Kiljoy would mute the sound and say aloud, tentatively, “Testing, testing.” He sounded like a pubescent emcee about to announce the limbo contest at some party hall wedding. Each time this occurred, he would clear his throat loudly and one of his hands would retreat to his pocket. Then he would hit the sound on the television again, and we'd be back to the Roundtown Pumpkin Jamboree.

Considering that it was the evening news, I was struck curious by the length of this segment. With everything happening topside, the station had been going on about this charming but frivolous tourist event south of the city for fifteen minutes. After watching a jack-o'-clown juggle four mid-sized pumpkins, I could bear my intrigue no longer, and ventured to inquire why this story had garnered the media attention of a presidential assassination. To mine and everyone else's delight, my voice was perfectly normal.

“Media blackout is routine in containment situations,” General Kiljoy boomed, pleased with the return of his baritone. “The situation is completely under control. Every law
enforcement agency and reserve unit in the tristate area has been mobilized by now to handle this situation.”

“So we're safe?” Tynee asked, and Miss Mary gestured to second this concern.

“Affirmative. We'll be here a while, but this compound is equipped to survive a nuclear attack.”

“How long?” Miss Mary demanded. “And where's Tippy?” Her voice still had a shrill helium edge at first, but a phlegmatic pop returned it to its tobacco rasp.

“As long as it takes the boys upstairs to take necessary steps.”

“Necessary steps?” I inquired.

“Where's my Tippy?” Miss Mary demanded once again.

“Whatever steps are necessary to contain this outbreak.” General Kiljoy chose to answer me, and for whatever infantile reason, I felt pleased that he had graced my question over Miss Mary's with a response. Then I remembered Meeko, and realized that I too was concerned about my dog's condition. Before I could voice this perhaps trifling matter, Tynee preempted me, albeit indirectly, by pulling out his mobile phone and attempting to reach the dog-sitting bodyguards.

“I'll see if I can get ahold of Volt and Agent Orange,” Tynee announced, much louder than necessary. The results of Tynee's endeavor apparently interested General Kiljoy immensely. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, awaiting the outcome. His action reminded me of Meeko, when I would sometimes make him sit politely with a stale dog biscuit perched on his nose for a full minute before allowing him to snap it into his mouth. I now wish I hadn't done that.

Presently, it seemed Tynee was playing that same game with General Kiljoy, letting the phone ring a ridiculous number of
times before finally hanging up. To make matters more tortuous, he went through the whole song and dance twice, once trying to reach Volt and once trying to reach Agent Orange. When the resolution came at last, it brought General Kiljoy immense satisfaction, and since he didn't have a tail to wag, he settled for wagging his whippersnapper.

“What about Tippy?” Miss Mary pressed her issue.

General Kiljoy finally acknowledged her question. “Your dog's whereabouts are not a priority.” He was cold and short in his reply.

Taken aback, Miss Mary pulled her own remote control out of her handbag. After punching several buttons with great delicacy and deliberation, she hunkered down and examined a small LCD on the unit. For a moment the lines that had been chiseled in her face by two hundred thousand cigarette drags—erosion ditches that began with her pucker and arced around her jaundiced cheeks to ultimately pull her eyes into an incessant squint—seemed to have vanished, and for just a moment her nauseated face relaxed and a visage of childhood purity fell across her countenance, flooding it with innocent curiosity concerning the gadget in her palm. It was a swift sparkle, briefer than the ephemeral flash of a shooting star. It pushed the lower limits of a moment, stretched the definition of fleeting. It was quicker than the wink of a cheetah running full speed down a moving walkway at an airport, and after it had gone, it left not a breeze to hint at its passing. The decaying fibers in her facial musculature snapped back into shape, and her face was once again musclebound into a sultry and sickly veneer.

“This is strange,” Miss Mary announced.

“What?” Tynee sat down next to her and peered at her LCD.

“I had one of those locator chips surgically implanted under Tippy's skin two years ago, just in case she ever got lost.”

“Let me see that.” Tynee took over her remote control and examined the display. “General, look at this.”

“What is it?” General Kiljoy asked impatiently. “What do you see?”

“According to this, Tippy is on the same horizontal plane as us. Miss Mary's dog is still in this compound.”

“Then Tippy is dead. This entire compound was sterilized. Other than the four of us, there's nothing alive down here.” General Kiljoy snatched Miss Mary's remote control out of Tynee's hands and switched the LCD off. “Now drop it. We have more important issues to resolve, such as where the food stores are located.”

This did not fly well with Miss Mary. She insisted on locating Tippy, alive or dead, before she did anything else. General Kiljoy ignored her and barked orders at Tynee, who yelped protests back. Miss Mary threatened to make a motion to remove General Kiljoy from his position as chairman of the CPC, and on and on it went.

As they bickered about who was going to do what, my attention was drawn toward the TV's muted telecast of the Pumpkin Olympics (try to say that three times fast). Would-be gladiators were attempting to carry basketball-sized pumpkins up the down side of a sliding board and then throw them off the top onto a giant trampoline, to be caught by the next runner in the relay, who would repeat the action. One runner was roaring drunk and missed catching the pumpkin entirely, which collided with his chest and knocked him flat. Before I could see if he was injured, General Kiljoy clicked the screen off like an
angry parent when there are chores to be done, which, as I discovered, there were.