The Müller-Fokker Effect (11 page)

Conspicuous in new bib overalls, new work shoes and no shirt, the old man sat with his chair tipped back against the wall. He seemed to be ignoring the entire party, possibly because the rest ignored him.

‘Hello,’ said Glen heartily. ‘Haven’t seen you here before.’ The old Negro did not look up or speak. Glen wondered uneasily if he might not be the Wrong Kind of spade. The Right Kind included jazz musicians, baseball players, poets, astronauts…

‘Friend of Bill Banks, are you?’

No response. Glen resisted the temptation to throw him out—it might look as if he didn’t like the Right Kind—and walked away, hiding his burning face in a drink. Ögivaal the architect caught his eye, but Glen continued on to the farthest part of the apartment. Ögivaal resumed his story:

‘…and it should have been a thirty, instead of a three.’

Throgmorton leaned against the mantel. ‘That’s a shaggy-dog story,’ he told the cryogenics man. ‘I think you fail to make a distinction there.’

‘All right, how about this one, then? Why did the Little Moron take a ladder to the cat-house?’

Ank came in, dropped a cigarette and bent in slow-motion to retrieve it.

‘That’s the so-called art critic who works for the
Sun
,’ said the tall man, jerking his ax-blade nose in Ank’s direction. ‘He thinks a Constable is an English cop.’

The young man in the wicker suit opined that the English police were the best in the world.

‘Is that so?’ said the tall man. He extracted a cigarette from one sleeve of his worn, paint-splattered sweater. ‘Well, a friend of mine got busted by English fuzz for speeding, one night. They just about kicked his nuts off. As it happens, he’s black.’

Six persons in the costumes of Egyptian priests moved together to the bathroom, where they rolled up their black-and-gold sleeves to bare arms no cleaner or healthier than those preserved in museums. One of them produced an anachronistic syringe.

In the kitchen, Hackendorf was saying, ‘You’re right. The Seneca are, as you put it, unequalled in common sense. A magnificent tribe.’

‘Eh?’ Sir Somebody cupped a hand to his ear. ‘Damn that infernal music. Did you say Seneca was
tripe?’

‘Tribe,
tribe
. All of the Seneca put together.’

Sir Somebody looked at him in the way only a man of his class is able to look at someone. ‘Good Lord! Is there more than one great Seneca? Seneca, whose moving death…’

In the next room, just beyond the doorway, Senator Vuje looked around to see who was calling him. No one was, so he turned back to listen to an astrologer, who was giving the horoscope for anyone born on December 25th:

‘He will work and toil, and others may reap the benefit of his labor unless marriage alters the destiny. He is usually well-disciplined and cautious, and tends to overlook his own faults while quick to recognize the faults of others.’

The party rumbled on like a Hay Wain (as someone in the middle of it pointed out), carrying its cargo of fools toward the hour of their release. A lady lawyer spoke long sentences about international law as regards defacing the moon, and to each the cryogenics man nodded and smiled. The girl in the snood claimed that Thomas M. Disch was the author of a novel called
Concentration Camp
. Other girls, in leather bikinis, glass crinolines, wooden mail, foil tartans and plastic pinafores behaved as slightly animated decorations, receiving each conversation item with the same graceful indifference with which chair cushions receive buttocks of all shapes. News, gossip, compliments, pedantry, wit and philosophy, all were rested upon them briefly and then removed, leaving no impression.

One pretty blonde wore a dress of pale creamy silk that seemed to be on upside down. It flared outward and upward from her knees, ending at the neck in a fountain of ruffled lace. Someone remarked that she looked like a peach sundae, and later everyone thought they had originated the idea.

Ank danced with her, danced with them all, doing the jung, the freeb, the buckle-o, the rap. After a short intermission (to puke up a gallon of cheap wine) he returned to dance the rap, the nood and the fox-trot.

‘Seneca’s death,’ remarked the knight, ‘reminds one of the death of Quixote. Or, as you Americans say it, Key-oty.’

‘Kiote?’ Hackendorf frowned. ‘He’s not a Seneca god. I think you mean one of the plains tribes…’

But Sir Somebody wasn’t listening. He had given up trying to understand the peculiar American versions of the classics, and turned instead to scrutinize Bates, the young man in the wicker suit, who spoke now of English cooking.

‘It’s quite underrated,’ he said. ‘You have to get down in the country and try the really authentic English dishes: Curate’s Egg, for instance. And Parson’s Nose.’

‘Good Lord! Is the man serious? Parson’s Nose?
Parson’s Nose
? What the deuce is he on about?’

In the living room someone comforted Miss Columbine, who lay full-length on the sunken sofa, heaving with sobs.

‘What happened, dear?’

‘That dirty young man in the paper suit…’ indicating Ank. ‘He called me a—a
lesbian!’

Ank grinned. ‘All I did was ask her why her arms are so muscular,’ he said. ‘Well it’s true!’

Someone looked down at the 250-pound writhing figure. ‘Like a trapped elephant,’ he murmured. ‘Poor thing.’

The publisher in the hot-dog costume plodded through the den, asking if anyone had seen his wife. The lady with the jeweled face regarded him. ‘How quaint!’ she exclaimed. ‘A kapok coat! How poply quaint!’

She turned to smile on the patrician profile of General Weimarauner. ‘They wore things like that when I was young—practically—I thought they were out of fashion forever. I’ll bet he doesn’t
dare
take it off. He’s afraid someone might see his truss.’

A drink sloshed over her. The face so covered with jewels that it might have been any age looked up. An unsteady man in a wrinkled dinner jacket pulled his forelock in apology. ‘’S all right,’ he mumbled. ‘I’m from Innerpol.’

‘A
jaw
section?’ Ank lurched forward to look at Myra’s face. ‘So that’s why you’re drinking through a straw. How long before the wires come out?’

Before she could answer he began on the details of his own accident, resulting, as he mentioned several times, in concussion.

‘Ye den’t lek tee well, Enk.’

‘Ank looks terrible,’ Glen said to a girl wearing only blue jeans.

Even across the room he could see the edges of Ank’s paper jacket were frayed and greasy, and the seams had started to let go.

‘But he’s a great dancer,’ replied the girl.

Glen made a mental note to take some dance lessons.

Mr Bradd and a crewcut young giant finished their competition, a chinning contest on the bedroom door-frame. Crewcut won. Bradd suggested a little kendo, broom against mop.

‘You’re crazy to go up against him,’ someone whispered to Bradd. ‘He’s a Yale younger poet, for God’s sake.’

Glen asked Hackendorf if he were the Indian expert.

‘Well, I guess you might say that. I’m advising General Weimarauner for his book on the Indian wars.’

‘I wanted to ask you something about this tribe, the Utopis.’

‘The Utopi, yes, a minor Southwestern tribe. Not really important—most of their ritual and so on is copied from others. Gosh, there can’t be many Utopi left.’

‘There must be some,’ Glen said. ‘I just ordered a hat from them, a real Utopi headdress. I thought you might be able to tell me what it would look like.’

The anthropologist looked thoughtful. ‘I’m not certain, really. Didn’t know they
had
any crafts. Utopi hat? That’s a new one on me.

‘Now, if you’ll excuse us, the general and I will duck out early. I have something to discuss with him privately.’

‘Daisy James,’ said a blonde. ‘You know, by Henry Miller?’

‘Isn’t Feinwelt here?’ someone else asked.

The lady lawyer’s shrill voice carried over the other conversations. ‘The question remains, does the moon really constitute…’

A man on crutches came in. Someone persuaded someone else not to rush over and ask him where he got his one-legged outfit. Someone else tried to throw up into the swimming pool, but it was covered. The man from Interpol crawled around on all fours, peering up dresses. He was the only one to make the discovery:

The girl wearing only blue jeans really wasn’t. The blue jeans, pockets, rivets and all, were painted on.

Glen noticed the girl in the peach-sundae dress was alone. He moved over to talk to her, pausing on the way to put his pipe in his mouth.

Jerry shifted a crutch. ‘A jaw section? Myra, that’s
nothing
. I lost a
leg
in that accident—clear up to the knee!’ He held out the stump for her inspection.

‘E see. Thet’s trrble, Jrry. Whet’ll ye de?’

‘Do? Who cares?’ He drank off a cocktail and held the glass in a way that indicated he expected her to fetch him another. ‘Oh, I guess I can keep on working for the Crusade. I’m still a good systems man, and their computer—but I’d like to get my hands on the bastard who did this to me, Myra. Some stupid fuckhead in a slow truck, hogging the intersection.’

She took his glass and went to the bar. Ank wandered past a moment later, waggling an unlit cigarette. No one seemed to have a light.

‘How about you?’ he asked Jerry. The one-legged man made a great show of clapping his crutches together and digging out his lighter. He was (his manner indicated) a cripple being put upon by a man with all limbs intact.

Without even thanking him, Ank shuffled away, trailing a torn strip of paper suit and raining live coals on his own lapels.

‘…and another thing,’ someone asserted. ‘All the penitents aren’t in the penitentiary.’

‘Film critic?’ said the tall man, slipping a cigarette out of his sweater sleeve. ‘You’ve got to be kidding. He still thinks
The AfricanQueen
is a retitled version of
Strange Fruit.’

Sir Somebody entered the living room, promenading with the lady with the jeweled face. ‘Incredible!’ he was saying. ‘The fellow claims we English are fond of eating hen’s arse!’

‘Are you the janitor?’ someone asked the old Negro by the door, who declined to answer. ‘There’s a lot of water coming out from under the bathroom door. Somebody must have passed out in there.’

The old man smiled to himself, took out a sack of tobacco and papers, and deliberately rolled a cigarette.

‘Isn’t that just like a colored?’ shouted the hot-dog man. ‘Look at that! Doped to the teeth, or drunk maybe, or just plain idiotic. Has anybody seen my wife, by the way?’

‘I think,’ said Ank, stumbling into him, ‘I think she left with a mustard pot…’

The two zoot suits were rolling on the floor. The man on top had seized the other’s hand-painted tie and was trying to strangle him with it. ‘1948, you son of a bitch!’

The six persons in the bathroom were taking a shower with their robes on. The water was up to their ankles and leaking out under both doors, the locked door to the hall and the door to the bedroom, where the polite cryogenics man was helping Bradd to his feet. The gloomy producer stood by, still talking shop.

‘I’m tired of doing spade westerns,’ he said. ‘I’m thinking of doing’—with a malicious look at Bradd, who was groping for his glasses—‘a queer western. The fairy lawman who has to keep proving he’s a man. Takes incredible risks, rides in a rodeo and so on. So “straight” he wears low-heeled boots. Only what to call it?
Andy Oakley?

Ank stood in the corner by the fireplace, mumbling to himself. He seemed oblivious of everything, even the great charred hole in the front of his paper jacket. Suddenly he pulled himself up and charged across the living room towards the patio door. He collided with the man in the wrinkled dinner jacket.

‘It’s all right,’ said Ank. ‘You’re from Interpol, remember?’

‘Hey, how did you know? Hey, come back here!’

But Ank lurched on, crookedly but with purpose, across the fiberglass swimming pool cover and on, towards the parapet.

Out in the hall, the Yale younger poet had wedged the elevator doors open by jamming a mop across the opening at knee level. Now he started chinning himself on the mop, letting his body hang down inside the shaft. The two Shriners and a few others looked on.

Grunting, he explained. ‘Have to purify myself…after combat…too much I and thou…need some experience of the Infinite…I and It, see?’

‘That’s not infinite,’ said one watcher, ‘it’s only forty floors, man.’

In the living room, someone asked where that TV exec had got to.

‘A transvestite executive? Wild!’

Ank, unconscious, was carried in from the patio by Myra and Drew, the art dealer.

‘What happened to him?’

‘We found him passed out with one leg over the parapet.’

‘Does the moon,’ said the lady lawyer, ‘in legal terms, belong to
everyone?

General Weimarauner and his anthropologist sat in a lunch counter drinking coffee, or anyway stirring at it.

‘What is it, Hack? It better not be about your damned Indians.’