“Too bad,” Johnny said, not having the slightest idea what the cop was talking about.
“Lips which lie are best kept silent,” the cop said, tossing the hat that wasn’t his over into the passenger seat. It landed on a tangle of meshy stuff that appeared studded with spikes.
The seat, bowed into a tired curve by the cop’s weight, settled against Johnny’s left knee, squeezing it.
“Sit up!” Johnny yelled. “You’re crushing my leg! Sit up and let me pull it out! Jesus, you’re killing me!”
The cop made no reply and the pressure on Johnny’s already outraged left leg increased.
He seized it in both hands and tore ii free of the sagging seat-back with an indrawn hiss of effort that pulled blood down his throat and started him dry-heaving for real.
“Bastard!” Johnny yelled, the word popping out in a red-misted coughing spasm before he could pull it back. The cop seemed not to notice that, either. He sat with his head lowered and his fingers tapping lightly on the wheel. His breath was wheezing in his throat, and for a moment Johnny wondered if the man was mocking him. He didn’t think so. I hope it’s asthma, he thought. And I hope you choke on it.
“Listen,” he said, allowing none of that sentiment to enter his voice, “I need something for my dose… nose. It’s killing me. Even an aspirin. Do you have an aspirin.”
The cop said nothing. Went on tapping the wheel with his head down, that was all.
Johnny opened his mouth to say something else, then closed it again. He was in terrible pain, all right, the worst he could remember, even worse than the gallstone he had passed in ‘89, but he still didn’t want to die. And some-thing in the cop’s posture, as if he were very far away in his own head, deciding something important, suggested that death might be close.
So he kept silent and waited.
Time spun out. The shadows of the mountains grew a bit thicker and moved a bit closer, but the coyotes had fallen silent. The cop sat with his head lowered and his fingers tapping the sides of the wheel, seeming to meditate, not looking up when another semi went by headed east and a car passed them going west, swinging out to give the parked police-cruiser with the ticking roof—flashers a wide berth.
Then he picked up something which had been lying beside him on the front seat: an old—fashioned shotgun with a double-trigger setup. The cop looked at it fixedly. “I guess that woman wasn’t really a folk-singer,” he said, “but she tried her best to kill me, no doubt about that. With this.”
Johnny said nothing, only waited. His heart was beating slowly but very hard in his chest.
“You have never written a truly spiritual novel,” the cop told him. He spoke slowly, enunciating each word—with care. “It is your great unrecognized failing, and it is at the center of your petulant, self-indulgent behavior. You have no interest in your spiritual nature. You mock the God who created you, and by doing so you mortify your own pneuma and glorify the mud which is your sarx Do you understand me.”
Johnny opened his mouth, then closed it again. To speak or not to speak, that was the question.
The cop solved the dilemma for him. Without looking up from the wheel, without so much as a glance into the rearview mirror, he placed the double barrels of the shot gun on his right shoulder and pointed them back through the wire mesh. Johnny moved instinctively, sliding to the left, trying to get away from those huge dark holes.
And although the cop still did not look up, the muzzles of the gun tracked him as precisely as a radar-controlled servomotor.
He might have a mirror in his lap, Johnny thought, and then: But what good would that do. He wouldn’t see any—thing but the roof of the fucking car. What in the hell is going on here.
“Answer me,” the cop said. His voice was dark and brooding. His head was still bent.
The hand not holding the shotgun continued to tap at the wheel, and another gust of wind hammered the cruiser, driving sand and alkali dust against the window in a fine spray.
“Answer me now. I won’t wait. I don’t have to wait. There s always another one coming along. So… do you under stand what I just told you.”
“Yes,” Johnny said in a trembling voice. “Pneuma is the old Gnostic word for spirit. Sarx is the body. You said, correct me if I’m wrong—” Just not with the shotgun, please don’t correct me with the shotgun “—that I’ve ignored my spirit in favor of my body. And you could be right. You could very well be.”
He moved to the right again. The shotgun muzzles tracked his movements precisely, although he could swear that the springs of the back seat made no sound beneath him and the cop could not see him unless he was using a television monitor or something.
“Don’t toady to me,” the cop said wearily. “That will only make your fate worse.”
“1…” He licked his lips. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”
“Sarx is not the body; soma is the body. Sarx is the flesh of the body. The body is made of flesh—as the word was reputedly made flesh by the birth of Jesus Christ—but the body is more than the flesh that makes it. The sum is greater than the parts. Is that so hard for an intellectual such as yourself to understand.”
The shotgun barrel, moving and moving. Tracking like an autogyro.
“I… I never…
“Thought of it that way. Oh please. Even a spiritual na—like you must understand that a chicken dinner is not a chicken. Pneuma… soma… and s-s-s.-”
His voice had thickened and now he was hitching in breath, trying to talk as a person does only when trying to finish his thought before the sneeze arrives. He abruptly dropped the shotgun onto the seat again, gasped in a deep breath (the abused seat creaked backward, almost pinning Johnny’s left knee again), and let fly. What came out of his mouth and nose was not mucus but blood and red filmy stuff that looked like nylon mesh.
This stuff—raw tissue from the big cop’s throat and sinuses—hit the windshield, the steering wheel, the dashboard. The smell was awful, the smell of rotted meat.
Johnny clapped his hands to his face and screamed. There was no way not to scream. He could feel his eye-balls pulsing in their sockets, could feel adrenaline roar into his system as the shock-reaction set in.
“Gosh, there’s nothing worse than a summer cold, is there.” the cop asked in his dark, musing voice. He cleared his throat and spat a clot the size of a crabapple onto the face of the dashboard. It hung where it was for a moment, then oozed down the front of the police-radio like an unspeakable snail, leaving a trail of blood behind.
It hung briefly from the bottom of the radio, then dropped 2 to the floormat with a plop.
Johnny closed his eyes behind his hands and moaned.
“That was sarx, the cop said, and started the engine. “You might want to keep it in mind.
I’d say ‘for your next book,’ but don’t think there’s going to be a next book, do you, Mr.
Marinville.”
Johnny didn’t answer, only kept his hands over his face and his eyes closed. It occurred to him that quite possibly none of this was happening, that he was in a nuthouse some—place, having the world’s ugliest hal]ucination. But his better, deeper mind knew that wasn’t true. The stench of what the man had sneezed out—He’s dying, he’s got to he dying, that’s infection and internal bleeding, he’s sick, his mental illness is only one symptom of something else, some radiation thing, or maybe rabies, or… or…
The cop hauled the Caprice cruiser around in a U, pointing it east. Johnny kept his hands over his face a little longer, trying to get himself under control, then low-ered them and opened his eyes. What he saw out the right—hand window made his jaw drop.
Coyotes sat along the roadside at fifty-foot intervals like an honor guard—silent, yellow—eyed, tongues lolling. They appeared to be grinning.
He turned and looked out the other window, and here were more of them, sitting in the dust, in the blazing sun of late afternoon, watching the police-cruiser go by. Is that a symptom, too. he asked himself. What you’re see-ing out there, is that a symptom, too.