The room was rather nice, large and airy, filled with kinetic sculptures and found object constructs that covered the walls and dominated the floor space. There were half a hundred light paintings of bent neon tubing and fluorescent designs. They looked expensive. Roger wondered why his dollar was necessary.
Seven people were seated at the feet of a moon-faced woman perched on a three-legged aluminum stool. The entire left side of her face was blotched with a huge strawberry birthmark. She had a coatimundi on her shoulder; it was nibbling leaves of lettuce she had safety-pinned to her dress like epaulets.
A man who bore a startling resemblance to a plucked carrion bird snagged Roger’s arm as he moved toward the front door. He stammered hideously. “Uh…uh…uh…” he babbled, till something snapped in his right cheek and he launched into a convoluted diatribe that began with a confession of his having been defrocked as a molecular biologist, veered insanely through a recitation of the man’s affection for Bermuda shorts, and reached a far horizon at which he said, with eyes rolling: “Now everybody doesn’t know this,” and he pulled Roger closer, “but the universe, the entire frigging universe is going to collapse around everyone’s ears in just seventy-two billion years. I smoke a lot.”
Roger skinned loose, and turning, thumped against a dwarf who had been surreptitiously trying to look up the skirt of a young woman with a harelip. “Excuse me,” Roger said, assisting the dwarf to his feet. He brushed him off and started to move, but the dwarf had thrown both arms around Roger’s leg. “They remaindered me,” the dwarf said, rather pathetically. “Before, I swear before the damned book had a chance, they remaindered me. Can you perceive the pain, the exquisite pain of being carried into Marboro’s on Third and seeing a stack, a virtual, a veritable, I mean motherGod a phallic Annapuroa mountain of copies of the finest, what I mean the sincerest study of the anopheles mosquito ever written. That book was a work of love, excuse me for using the word but I mean to say ardor; and those butchers at Doubleday, those mau-maus, my God. they’re vivisectionists, for Pete’s sake…if he were alive today, Ferdinand de Lesseps would absolutely whirl in his grave.”
“I have to go to the bathroom,” Roger said, trying to pry his leg loose. The dwarf unwound and sat there looking frayed. Roger smiled self-consciously and moved away. He started back for the door.
Everything dropped into the ultraviolet.
The little finger of his left hand began to resonate with the tinny voice of Times Square Caruso hashing out “I’m Called Little Buttercup” as the neon spiral in his chest gave him a shock and began flickering in gradually bloodier shades of crimson. Caruso segued into Kurt Weill’s “Pirate Jenny,” a tune Roger was certain the papaya juice stand attendant had never heard.
The ultraviolet smelled purple; it sounded like the nine-pound hammers of Chinese laborers striking the rails of the Union Pacific Railroad; it sprang out as auras and halos and nimbuses around everyone in the room; Roger clutched his chest.
His eyes rolled up in his head and the images bummed there like the braziers of Torquemada’s dungeons. He blinked and his eyes rolled down again bringing with them images as bumming bright as the crosses of Ku Klux Klansmen in Selma, Alabama: it was all in his right eye. He feared what lay ahead in the infrared. But that never happened; it was all in the ultraviolet.
The room bummed around the edges, deep purple and a kind of red that he realized—with some embarrassment—matched up only with the red just inside the slit in the head of his penis during his recurring bouts with prostatitis. Every neon sculpture and fluorescent painting in the room was jangling at him. A half a hundred roadsigns from someone who was trying to talk to him. I believe I’m a closet psychotic. he thought, but nothing stopped.
The neon tubes on the walls writhed with the burning edges of the soft-boiled sun as it bubbled down into the black horizon. They re-formed and slopped color words of pink and vermilion across the airy walls.
ROGER, YOU’RE MAKING IT MURDER TO GET THROUGH TO YOU.
He tried running, but all the movement was inside his skin; none of it got to the outside.
I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU PREFER THE COMPANY OF THESE DISGUSTING PERVERTS. LOOK, I LOVE YOU, THAT’S THE LONG, THE SHORT AND THE COLOR OF IT, ROGER. WHAT SA Y?
His metal little finger was singing the bell song from Lakmé and he hated it. His chest spiral was bubbling and he had the immediate fear his shirt would catch fire. All the women in the room were frozen in place, their hair vibrating like cilia, each strand standing up and away individually, emitting purple sparks like St. Elmo’s fire. The men looked like X-rays of rickets cases.
“Who are you?” Roger said in a choked voice.
I THOUGHT YOU’D NEVER ASK. I’M THE RIGHT WOMAN FOR YOU. GOD KNOWS YOU’VE HAD A CRUMMY TIME OF IT, AND I’M SENT TO MAKE IT EASIER FOR YOU. IT’S THE REAL LOVE YOU’VE BEEN WAITING FOR, ROGER.
“Where are you?”
RIGHT HERE. IN THE LIGHTS.
“I’m going to be sick.”
RIGHT HERE, COME ON, ROGER, JUST FIRM UP NOW!
“Haven’t I suffered enough already?”
ROGER, SELF-PITY JUST WON’T GET IT. IT’S TRUE YOU’VE SUFFERED, AND THAT’S WHY YOU WIN THE LOTTERY OF LOVE WITH ME, BUT YOU’VE GOT TO STOP BEING MAUDLIN ABOUT IT.
“Not only am I a put-together thing, a righteous freak, but now I’m going completely insane. “
ROGER, WILL YOU HAVE A LITTLE TRUST, FOR GOD’S SAKE? I’M PART OF THE REPAYMENT FOR WHAT’S HAPPENED TO YOU. ALL IT TAKES IS BELIEF AND A COUPLE OF STEPS.
He felt his right hand groping in the empty air around his right side—while his left hand sang “Pace, Pace, Mio Dio,” from La Forza del Destino—and he came up with an aquamarine Italian marble egg.
“Listen, I think you’re terrific,” Roger said, playing for time.
YOU’RE PLAYING FOR TIME.
She’s on to me, Roger thought desperately. He flung the Italian marble egg at the neon wall sculptures, it struck, geysers of sparks erupted, a curtain caught fire, a woman’s dress went up in a puff of Gucci, people began shrieking, the ultraviolet dissipated in an instant, everything returned to normal, Roger was scared out of his mind…and he ran out of there as fast as he could.
His finger had grown hoarse, and finally shut up.
Roger called in sick and begged off work for a few days. They were understanding, but the big Labor Day weekend was coming up, they’d laid in a large stock of Sicilian switchblades and copies of the steamier works of Akbar del Piombo and Anonymous in the Travelers’ Companion series, and they expected him—neon coil, weird eye and metal finger included—on the ready line when the marks, kadodies and reubens fresh from Michigan’s Ionia State Fair descended on sinful Times Square. Roger mumbled various okays and went for extended walks along the night-hot Hudson River Drive.
The big Spry sign blinking across the Hudson from Jersey caught his eye.
YOU ARE THE DAMNEDEST, MOST OBSTINATE HUMAN BEING I HAVE EVER ENCOUNTERED, said the Spry sign, forming words it was clearly incapable of forming.