Nine Kinds of Naked (33 page)

Diablo had listened intently to this summary. “Interesting,” he said, noncommittal.

“So,” Billy Pronto goaded. “Now that you know the context for the first line, try it again.”

“Nah.” Diablo waved him off, offering no excuse as he stuffed the
The Collected Short Stories of Jim Azmeyer
deep into his pocket. “Not with this book.”

“Then do it again with this one.” Billy Pronto suddenly produced an heirloom hardcover edition of the King James Bible.

Diablo stopped in his tracks, pointing at the Bible. “Where the hell did that come from?”

“Open it,” Billy Pronto replied, ignoring his question. “I dare you.”

Aggravated at this hallucinatory harassment, Diablo grabbed the Bible and let it flop open. Glancing down, his eyes fell upon Isaiah, chapter 24, verse 17:

Fear and the pit and the snare are upon thee, O inhabitant of the earth.

“Jesusfuckingchrist,” Diablo muttered, dropping the Bible as if he suddenly realized he was holding a flaming cowshit casserole. The only way Diablo could have been more freaked is if he had also hallucinated the lake of fire flickering behind the words, which upon reflection he was never quite sure he had not.

He stalked off, leaving the Bible behind and shaking his head. “In the law of truly large numbers, any outrageous coincidence becomes likely in large enough samples.”

“Twice in two minutes?” Billy Pronto pressed.

“Ever hear of Little wood's law?” Diablo retorted, turning into an alley. “If a miracle is a one-in-a-million occurrence and if we can accept a second as the smallest unit by which life occurs—”

Billy Pronto interrupted. “A second may be the smallest unit by which life occurs for the immensely distracted, but for those open to love, then as Juliet says to Romeo in the Capulet orchard,
in a minute there are many days.
”

“Well, that's very beautiful, Shakespeare, but never mind
that. Even for the immensely distracted, if a miracle is a one-in-a-million occurrence, and if a second is the smallest unit by which life occurs, then there are thirty-six thousand occurrences in a single ten-hour day, and over one million occurrences within four weeks. Thus, miracles are fairly commonplace, about once a month, as a matter of fact and goddamnit.”

“That debunks nothing,” Billy Pronto replied. “For those who slow down their experience of life—which is what happens when you open your heart to universal love and every blink becomes a blessing and a beatitude—they get a miracle every few minutes. This is the technology of magic and the deepest force in the universe. Don't just seize the day, my friend. The day is long. Seize the second!”

“Seize the cliché, that's what I say,” Diablo chuntered up a set of access stairs off the alley. “The path less traveled by has been trampled into a trodden truism. Please just leave me alone.”

“You are already alone,” Billy countered. “That's the nature of existence, one consciousness dreaming infinite points of view. Life is but a dream, right? You know this.”

“You're wasting your time,” Diablo monotoned, inserting his key into the lock.

“There's no time to waste,” Billy Pronto replied, but when Diablo turned to tell him to shut up, he was startled to find him gone.

 

86
A
TORNADO
is the most intense, most focused force on earth. It is estimated that the average tornado unleashes
enough energy to power all the streetlights in New York City for one night. This is, ultimately, an unimpressive fact, especially if you have ever resided in the vicinity of an unprecedented hypercane (or a runaway tornadic singularity or whatever) so omnipotent that it could probably power most of the United States indefinitely.

Under such skies, you know very well that you cannot escape the realization that life—under any circumstance—is an ongoing near-death experience. The inevitability of this encounter with merciless truth perhaps accounts for the manner in which so many who witnessed and meditated upon Laughing Jim were abandoning every disgruntling aspect of their lives and insisting upon nothing junior to joy. Joy in spite of the collapsing global economy, in spite of resource wars, in spite of global hotting. Joy in spite of starvation, extinction, corruption, disease. In spite of the collapse of everything familiar and secure, joy. As it turns out, the final frontier of freedom is the freedom to choose one's attitude, and in the face of one's own mortality, the only conceivable choice is joy.

This collective meditation upon death also emphasized the otherwise invisible contours of life, the golden threads of synchronicity that sparkle in the eyes of those who see beneath the veil, the meaning, the magic, the awareness that human life is so much less a monkey drama than it is a spiritual unfolding.

Of course, this orientation toward life was also facilitated by the ionized atmosphere generated by the fantastic electrical storms arcing throughout Laughing Jim. Atmospheres charged with negative ions of oxygen, such as the air around waterfalls, turbulent seashores, and lightning storms, have a measurable
influence on the body's hormonal balance, generating feelings of invigoration, enthusiasm, and love. Specifically, ionized air raises dopamine levels in the brain, which ultimately enhances the tendency to see patterns and meanings where allegedly there are none. Hence, apophenia.

This factoid bobbed around the social currents of New Orleans and furnished Special Agent J. J. Speed with a tremendous and self-righteous satisfaction. Along with the deionizer he ran in his hotel room every night, here was his cynical inoculation from the general social sentiment that had come to characterize the tremendous synchronicity zone of New Orleans—namely, the notion that every encounter was meaningful. For fuck's sake, who has time for that? And walk away? Why would I want to do that? Man is wolf to man, and civilization is the only thing keeping us from killing the crap out of each other. Good thing I'm here to get control of things. It was like the whole goddamn city had gone mad, and worse, was infecting everyone who sniffed at the air with its wild-eyed absurdity.
Fools
, he thought as he ambled along gnawing on a toothpick and monitoring the signal from the homing device on Wilhelmina's collar.

Naturally, Special Agent J. J. Speed did not really have to be monitoring the signal from the homing device. He had caught up with Wilhelmina blocks ago and she was only a few feet ahead of him in plain sight. But he had not had occasion to use his supersecret night-vision goggles lately, so he was getting his gizmo kicks with his homing device instead. If he was lucky, he might even get to eavesdrop using the radio microphone built into her collar.

Special Agent J. J. Speed was congratulating himself that stealthy Wilhelmina had not even noticed that she was being followed when all of a sudden the woman in front of him turned around and sang-song some nonsense at him: “If the universe bangs big and no one's around to hear it, does it make a sound?” He scowled at her for this disruption, and more so when he saw the freakish tattoo on her forehead, and still more so when she touched the side of her nose and pointed flirty at him, and unbearably more so when she said, “Walk away.”

But he relaxed considerably when he found the contours of her chest.

 

87
I
N FACT
, Special Agent J. J. Speed had good reason to be anxious. That morning, he had yawned awake in the king-size bed in his hotel room, his tongue coated with the usual bouquet of brackish cotton, the fetid afterglow of his daily tequila bender. Groggily puzzled as to how he had forgotten to close the patio door the previous night (no matter how shitfaced he was, he knew he always closed it at night so that his deionizer could do its work unencumbered by fresh air), he let out a cry of alarm when he suddenly realized that there was someone else in bed with him. It wasn't until after he scrambled out of the bed and took a second look over the barrel of his bedside Luger that he realized that there was in fact no one else in bed with him. Rather, and defying any explanation whatsoever, there was a grandfather clock lying there as if it were taking a grandfatherly nap.

“What the hell is that?” Special Agent J. J. Speed yelled, still
aiming his pistol at the clockworks. His pounding adrenaline inhibited any efficiently rational evaluation of the situation. “What the hell is that?” he repeated, helplessly lost in a paranoid perplexity. Heart still racing, he lowered his weapon as the definition of the object in his bed finally settled over him. There's a goddamn grandfather clock in my bed, he reasoned. Looks to be made from cherry. Probably expensive. Claims the time is 9:00.

The red LED demon eyes of the digital clock on his nightstand corrected the grandfather's chronograph with their glowering display of 7:22, the last digit flicking into a three just as Special Agent J. J. Speed glanced at it. That grandfather clock isn't working, he concluded without satisfaction. The categories were there, definitions and such (grandfather clock, cherry, probably expensive, maybe broken), but Special Agent J. J. Speed could fathom no possible meaning for any of it. Carelessly scratching his head with the barrel of his gun, he turned and slid the patio door mostly shut as Wilhelmina came trotting in from outside to begin begging for her breakfast. He always left the door open a few inches during the day so that she could leave after breakfast, as was her custom and their arrangement, but he never left it wide open at night. It was at least gratifying that she had not run off.

“Hey girl, did you put that there?” he asked Wilhelmina in his pussycat falsetto, pointing to the grandfather clock. “Why would you do that?” Wilhelmina jumped up on the bed and meowed over his chatter. “Did you see anyone?” he asked as he opened the nightstand cabinet and retrieved a scoop of kibble for her.

Sitting down across from Wilhelmina, he idly crunched a few pieces of kibble himself as he considered the situation. Maybe this was some kind of a prank? he thought. Didn't frat boys put donkeys in dean's offices or something? Is this something similar? But why me? And who? And how the fuck did they get a goddamn grandfather clock in here without waking me up?

Unpleasantly troubled as he hefted the grandfather clock off the bed and into a standing position, he found some distraction from the larger puzzle by focusing on the smaller puzzle of how to wind up the pulley system and set the pendulum ticking. Once he achieved this, he set the correct time and stepped back to regard the curiosity, though he still failed to find any meaning in it. Shaking his head in mystification for the duration of his shower, he noted afterward that Wilhelmina had split for the day, out the patio and down the banyan tree as she usually did. Today, however, Special Agent J. J. Speed closed and locked the patio door—something he never did since he wanted Wilhelmina to be able to come and go as she pleased. But since somebody had apparently snuck a grandfather clock into his room last night, it seemed a sensible precaution. Wilhelmina always found him anyway, even when he was out and about.

Then he remembered that he had put a collar with a homing device on Wilhelmina late last night. Not only was there absolutely no risk of losing her, but suddenly he had a mission as well. He was going to track Wilhelmina and see if she opened any new leads, or failing that, discover just where the hell she got to every day. Excited that he got to use his new toy,
Special Agent J. J. Speed sucked a long nip from his tequila flask, checked the batteries in the receiver to the homing device, grabbed a few dozen toothpicks, and headed out for the day, hot on the trail of Wilhelmina.

 

88
E
LSEWHERE AT
that moment, Diana was pleasuring herself to climax after ending a good-morning phone call from her long-distance boyfriend, Tony, who had encouraged her in her desire to quit stripping and become a clown instead. Their morning chat had concluded with some phone foreplay, in which he described his cunnilingual technique in ravishing detail, and she was finishing in her imagination what he had started over the phone.

Unbeknownst to her, a group of neighborhood kids were playing a morning game of kickball in the empty street outside. As Diana reached her climax, her body bucking in orgasm as she imagined Tony's head buried between her thighs, the kickball suddenly boinked harmlessly off her bedroom window, startling her upright and immediately followed by the cheers of a half-dozen children yelling “Go Tony!” to the base runner, who, as it turned out, made it all the way to third base before the kickball was retrieved.

 

89
S
CARCELY HAVING
recovered from awakening with a grandfather clock for a bedmate, Special Agent J. J. Speed was doubly surprised as soon as he stepped into the street. A flash of orange and a bruising
kwa-doink
into his right cheekbone were all that greeted him. Cursing loudly, staggering backward, dropping his fistful of toothpicks, and clutching at his
suddenly smarting face, he saw nothing more than a Day-Glo orange Frisbee spinning into inertia on the sidewalk in front of him. Enraged at this assault, he lunged forward and grabbed the Frisbee and a few nearby toothpicks, scanning wildly around for the perpetrator. But there was nobody but scattered pedestrians regarding him as if he were some deranged lunatic, and rightly so, considering that he was grabbing at his face with one hand and gripping a Day-Glo orange Frisbee in the other and looking like he wanted to tear somebody's head off. Nobody appeared to have seen anything, and they gave him a wide berth.

Eventually turning his attention toward an examination of the disc in his hand, Special Agent J. J. Speed noted that its surface was surprisingly smooth, polished to preternatural perfection, in fact. Flashing on the demented cult of dingbats he had infiltrated, it occurred to him that perhaps this was the Frisbee they thought was a flying saucer. The sea spray could have polished it, like sandblasting. Mildly interested to have found such a rare souvenir, Special Agent J. J. Speed tucked it under his arm and made a mental note to check the satellite feed off the Internet and see if there was still a Frisbee hovering in the center of Laughing Jim. He needn't have bothered. Within hours, news of the abrupt absence of the Day-Glo orange Frisbee from the center of Laughing Jim was interrupting all regularly scheduled programming.