The Nirvana Blues (27 page)

“Come on.” She took his hand. “Let's go.”

Inside the house, Sasha had finished toothpasting the living-room window and was now off in a corner, methodically shredding newspapers. Cheepy fluttered onto the earphoned head of his mollified monster-owner (who was grouchily ensconced before the color TV watching “The Beverly Hillbillies”), and started preening. Joe said, “All I want is a bath and sleep.”

He slumped on the toilet while Nancy drew a tub. Then she kneeled beside the tub, elbows resting on the porcelain, looking beautiful and sexy despite his frame of mind. The low décolletage of her silky aqua gown coyly revealed the delicate swell of one breast. Dozens of lascivious impulses were soon caught in an emotional crossfire inside his fatigued body.

“I knew you would come back tonight, Joe. All day I could feel it. It's almost eerie. I'd swear I have a direct line to your energy. I've been so happy. I just know it was meant to be between us. Are you an Aquarius?”

Not long ago, Joe had decided that he would decapitate, with his lethal kung-fu fists, the next person who asked him his sign for the purpose of learning about his personality.

Nevertheless, he merely said, “No.”

“Oh?” Though taken aback, she seemed not at all surprised. In fact, her equanimity under fire amazed him. Nothing fazed this dame. Was she a Valium freak? Or on Lithium? Or Thorazine? “What
is
your sign?” Nancy insisted.

“‘Caution: trucks turning.'”

Her eyes sparkled as her smile spread, emitting an increasingly forceful light that soon flooded the entire bathroom. Reaching behind herself with one hand, Nancy locked the door. On her knees before him, she craned her long neck upward and kissed him with slurry lips. Joe discovered her bare breasts in his hands. She said, “Um…” He answered with a lazy, melancholic grunt. By the time she cooed, “So sweet…” he had nearly slipped into a coma of sexual arousal. While she opened his fly, Joe whimpered like an abandoned puppy just brought in from a killing blizzard and set down on a warm hearth beside a bowl of milk. Nancy gave him the softest head he'd ever known, holding him weightlessly inside her mouth, barely massaging the tip of his penis by faintly constricting her throat. Joe slipped his fingers gently into her hair, and begged for a silky come. Catching him off guard, an “I love you” rose in his gorge; only at the last second did he manage to quash it—and once more his orgasm died aborning.

Hello, Valhalla, Joe Miniver speaking, fresh from yet another day on the hustings. Gimme a valve job, new points and plugs, an oil change—don't forget to clean the filter—and check the radiator too, would you?

*   *   *

Y
EARS PEELED OFF
the cinematic calendar. Joe luxuriated in ethereal aches. All his dreams held winning tickets. In the past, whenever something threatened him, Heidi had always said, “I'll protect you, Joey, I'll wrap you in a pink cocoon of friendly vapor, I'll snuggle you in a pink cloud and nothing will hurt you.” Wrapped in that pink cloud right now, Joe felt infinitely protected, “at one” (his subconscious believed was the expression) with all of life, swaddled in cotton candy and Christmas fiberglass, aswoon in the giddy warmth.

He dreamed of his 1.7-acre farm. Bees swarmed around a dozen hives and among several rows of raspberry bushes planted specially to make their nectar more delicious. In a gingerbread shack the kids were squeezing the combs, extracting pure honey. A modest and yet comfortable solar-heated house stood next to the orchard. Their other energy came from a windmill, and a Tesla coil tapping the earth's magnetic goodies. The garden had cabbages as big as basketballs, strawberries as fat as valentines. Forty chickens in the new coop provided countless eggs each day. Fruit trees groaned under the weight of apples, plums, and pears. Eight sheep, a few cows, and Heather's pinto pony grazed in their small fields. Outside, in the nude, Heidi worked on the final painting for her upcoming one-person show at the Houston Fine Arts Museum. Heather, whom some had pegged as the next prima ballerina in the western hemisphere, was doing some free-form cartwheels on the lawn. In the driveway, Michael showed two Yankee scouts and a handful of metropolitan-newspaper reporters how he had developed the phenomenal pitching control that had garnered him a multimillion-dollar contract at the age of eighteen: he was throwing Spaldeen pimpleballs through a knothole in the garage door at thirty paces, just like his daddy had taught him. And Joe?—well, Joe was in the back field training the new Irish setter he would take grouse-hunting that autumn.…

The gossamer rasping of feathers against night air made a laid-back bid for his attention. Though still asleep, one eye opened. The enlarged shadow of a parakeet, somehow buzzard-shaped, floated chimerically against the ceiling, then disappeared as the bird alighted atop the radio. All the wispy painted guru monkeys whispered susurrantly and unintelligibly to each other, the metaphysical world's equivalent of a Manhattan airwell on laundry mornings, when all the Italian women hung out their wash. Far down in the green netherworld of Joe's romantic reveries, a thought formed. And, like a child playing red rover, the thought began racing around down there, looking for an opening through which to make a madcap dash for the freedom of his conscious brain. Aware of its consequences, Joe urged the troopers patrolling his lethargy to redouble their efforts to keep him ecstatically snoozing. But when the thought finally summoned the guts to make a dash for it, his troopers blew it. And, with one eye on Cheepy, Joe surfaced just enough to recall that he had blown his marriage … and needed to steal that suitcase full of cocaine, fast, before some other criminal beat him to the punch.

Into the valley of anxiety Nancy floated, naked except for a cigarette. By the time she settled onto the bed, Joe had managed to trigger his asthma again. Instant wheeze, folks, and even Houdini couldn't have escaped the chains constricting his chest!

Nancy peered intently. “Are you awake?”

“Yeah. I'm afraid so.”

“The air in here feels tight. What happened?”

“I was just lying here, minding my own business, when I started thinking.”

“You have to make your mind blank.”

“How do I accomplish that? Swallow a beaker of acid? Touch a shotgun to my temple and pull the trigger with my toes?”

“Just close your eyes, take a few deep breaths. Let them out very slowly. Then think of a place where you'd most want to be, and go there.”

“‘Go there'?”

“Picture a stairway, if you have to, and simply walk down it until you arrive at your dream place. Imagine a door, if you want, and open it and walk on through to where you wish to be.”

“I can't.”

“Everybody can if they try. If you're sincere about wanting to be at peace with yourself, you can do it. It's easy. I do it all the time. If you practice enough to get good at it, you can even travel back and forth in time. You can zip all over the world without ‘actually' leaving your living room. Nikita does that regularly. Last week he had a conversation with Aristotle. Once he traveled so far forward that he reached the edge of the world's time. The sun was dying. The earth was covered by ice except for a small patch of the Amazon where he met an Indian from the Minamamo tribe named Kezar, who was among the last survivors on earth.”

“Wait a minute—I can't
breathe
here. I'm worried sick about my children. I just told a wife I truly love to go fuck herself. I've got a suitcase in the bus station that holds the key to my future, but nobody will give it to me. Plus I'm a goddam self-indulgent, pussy-chasing, educationally privileged, selfish-as-all-get-out rich hippie playing at being a garbage man, and you're talking about conversations with Aristotle and an Amazon Indian named Kezar?”

Being fazed was not one of the lady's strong points.

“I can help you cure your asthma if you want me to, Joe. And if you want to cure it yourself.”

“How can I be cured—with a double pulmonary extraction?”

Using the butt of her old cigarette, she lit up a new weed. “You have to concentrate on making it go away. There are exercises. And I'll put you on our healing list.”

“Do me a favor, don't put me on any lists.”

“You don't have to do a thing. We'll simply put you down, and when we have our healing meetings we'll pray for you.”

“Nancy, excuse me. But I don't want a bunch of Maharaji freaks setting their metaphysical meathooks into this kid's dilapidated psyche.”

“It wouldn't hurt to try.”

“All I want is my pills.”

She placed her hands on his chest. The cigarette dangled from her mouth as if from the lips of a Parisian hooker in a Brassai photograph. She squinted slightly against the smoke. Cheepy flew from the radio to a lampshade, twitched his tail, and Joe actually heard the miniature
splat!
of a diminutive birdy caca hitting the dresser. Out in the living room, Sasha was engaged in something muffled and illicit. The dog growled: a thing went
thug!… squish!… drool!…

“Don't move, Joe. I'll help you relax. With a massage.” Her seductive hands elicited goosebumps. Her eerie tranquillity spooked him. Quaaludes? Ritalin? Or just a level dose of Smatterling? Joe envied her apparent equanimity. At the same time he wanted no truck with it. Let the spiritual folks do their broomstick numbers outside his bailiwick—he was a meat-and-potatoes man.

“I really want my pills,” Joe pleaded. “If I take a pill, or squirt a little Alupent into my bronchospasm, I'll feel a hell of a lot better.”

Oblivious to his whimpers, she let her hands coo over his muscles. Out of the frying pan—Joe thought as sheer dismay rolled over him like Notre Dame's charging linemen—and into the fire. In this rapidly degenerating town there was no such thing as a quickie, no such animal as the free lunch. Erica Jong could take her theory of the Zipless Fuck and airmail it to Ripley's Believe It or Not! Joe Miniver, Boy Nincompoop, sole survivor of history's most recent Donner expedition, had turned right, instead of left, at his destiny, and landed once more among the cannibals!

“If I don't get my pills real soon, Nancy, I think I'll die.”

“I can take your asthma from you if only you'll let me.”

Her fingers handled him like feathers with soul. Blood zoomed into his penis like New York novelists applying for Guggenheims and NEA grants. Joe responded by growing as mellow as if he were being electrocuted by a harmless furry current that individually stroked every one of the seventy trillion molecules in his body. He gasped quietly and murmured, “Don't you ever get tired?”

Her voice floated down at him from portentous ethereal heights: “When you come, all the asthma will drool from your body.”

But same as before, he couldn't ejaculate. A vision of Heidi's naked body kept intruding. He was practically strangled by guilt. The find 'em, feel 'em, fuck 'em, forget 'em boogeyman delighted in a neon chanting that beleaguered his brain. Lord knows, though, she tried.

“You know something, Nancy—”

“Hush.” She breathed heavily. The parakeet landed on her shoulder. Where was the Doberman—out hunting deer? In the hallway, the central-heating blower clicked on noisily. Sasha leaped onto the living-room drapes and they clattered, with a muffled rush of heavy folds, onto the couch.

The pills, man: he
still
had asthma!

Her body shifted slightly into a pose that apparently had special meaning.

“What are you doing?”

“Giving you positive energy.”

“Not to be a killjoy, but I really would like to pop one of my own anti-asthma little beauties.…”

“Shhh.”

“Can I borrow your car? It'll only take a minute. I'm a careful driver, I swear.” His lungs were filling up with cotton. His chin itched. The Asthma Hangman, a big black-hooded brute naked to the waist, wearing a necklace of confiscated adrenaline-injection capsules, tightened his hemp around Joe's windpipe. It looked like curtains for sure if he couldn't reach his pusher in time!

“Joe, it's one
A.M.
”

Imitating jovial, good-natured flippancy, he said, “Give me the keys or else I'll bash in your head with the clock-radio and burn Bradley's feet and nipples with cigarette butts until he confesses where they're hidden.”

“They're in the car. But if you insist, I'll drive you there.”

“In the
car?
Aren't you afraid somebody will steal it?”

“If I projected those negative thoughts, sure, somebody might steal it.”

“I'll go alone. You shouldn't leave the kid.”

“He'll be all right.”

“What if a burglar—?”

She chuckled. “In my world there are no burglars.”

*   *   *

S
ASHA WANTED TO COME
. Joe said, “Does he have to?” Eyes twinkling, Nancy replied, “He doesn't
have
to, but he sure enjoys driving around.”

Joe said, “I don't understand why you let him get away with creating such havoc in the house.”

“Because of him, my house is peaceful.”

In the VW, wearing only her robe, Nancy lit a fresh cigarette and started the car. Nearly frenzied beside her, Joe said, “Shouldn't you bring a purse, or at least your license? I mean, given that you're almost naked, suppose a cop stopped us?”

She gazed at him humorously and sympathetically. “A cop won't stop me.”

“How do you know?”

“I never
ask
them to stop me. They used to pull me over all the time—before I understood—because I drive fast. But now it's almost as if I'm invisible.”

They turned left onto Valverde: Nancy braked slightly to avoid flattening Nick Danger. Striding purposefully through the night shadows, clutching his singular valise to his heart, the mysterious little shtarker never glanced up.