"Then stop."
"I'm trying – really."
"Go ahead, laugh. Bastard. Laugh at nothing. It helps pass the time."
"I'm trying to stop," I said.
"No, laugh. I want you to."
"Should I laugh or not? I'm trying to stop. But now you're telling me laugh. I can't talk. Wait a minute. It hurts. Should I laugh or shut up? It really hurts."
"Laugh, idiot."
"Okay, it's over now. It's all over. Wait a minute. It's not over. It's starting again. It's coming up from my appendix. It's beginning to hurt some more."
"You were laughing at what I said. Bastard. All I said was the whole thing was over."
"And you were right to go," I said. "It was better than staying."
"All through now? All finished with your private riot?"
"I think so."
"When are you going back to them?" she said.
"Back to them-who?"
"Here it comes. Another five minutes. Choke, choke, sputter. Somebody give him a bedpan to gurgle into."
"No, I'm stopping. It was a flurry left over from the other one. When am I going back to them? I know exactly who you mean. The people. The crowd. The audience. The fans. The followers."
"The public," she said.
"When I have something to go back with. Something or nothing. Nothing takes more time."
She was sitting up now. I reached over the side of the chair and lifted several tissues out of the box on the floor. I rolled them up and decided to toss them over to Opel because I knew she would clap her hands softly as soon as she realized my intention and I wanted to witness that small gesture of hers, simple prefix to a game of catch, the mildest of handclaps transformed to a radiant act of grace by the beauty of the child reconstructed in the gesture. After the toss and catch we rested a while, allowing our brief symmetry to decompose.
"I don't guess you care to hear about my piano teacher's biblical sky. This is down-home regional material you can't get just anywheres."
"Hardly hear your voice."
"I'm under the covers again."
"Is that you?" I said. "I thought it was me. I've been sitting here thinking that mound was me. Or that mound had me under it."
"How could you think that? You're there and I'm here. You're the chair. I'm the bed."
"I knew you were there but then I forgot. I knew earlier. Opel Hampson, I thought. It's her and she's there. But then I somehow forgot."
"Maybe you'd better get back over here. Or maybe if I uncovered myself."
"I used to be such a normal boy."
"That was before my time. That was long before I ever set eyes on your celebrated body."
"Were you ever a normal girl?"
"When I was an itty-bitty Baptist my daddy took me to a revival meeting and I made a decision for what's-his-name. That's about as normal a thing as I ever did."
"Were you saved?"
"I was drowned."
"You mean the well-known immersion ritual." "Immersion's a nice word," she said. "They grabbed me by the neck and threw me in. But that's not when I made the decision. I was real young when I made the decision." "How old were you when you got immersed?" "I was five or six," she said. "They stood me up alongside the galvanized tank under the choir loft. My piano teacher had painted the River Jordan and a biblical-looking sky on a giant piece of canvas that was set on a makeshift frame behind the galvanized tank. Right nice. Real pretty sight. Then they picked me up by the neck and dunked me. When they got me on my feet again I noticed my dress had floated up around my neck, more or less exposing my entire maidenish bratty six-year-old body to every Southern Baptist thrill-seeker in the vicinity. That moment marked the true beginning of my womanhood."
"Those were the true, real and honest days." "On Saturday night all the boys used to go up on the railroad bridge and pee down on the passing trains."
"Listen to Fenig," I said. "He's devised a new pattern." "What's he doing up there?" she said. "It doesn't even sound like pacing. It sounds like he's running around in little circles. I don't think I like having him up there. A man who spends his evenings running in little circles. But I'll tell you what I really don't like. I don't like not liking him. I never used to be this way. I used to have shadings. Now I'm all one thing."
Opel had spent a year at Missouri State Women's College in Delaware, Texas. This fact was all I knew about that year. She'd led a scattered life and saw no reason to elaborate on content. It was enough in her view to present titles, headings and selected prefaces. Her past was such that these did the necessary work. When I met her, in Mexico, she'd just completed two years in New York. All I ever learned about those years was what happened on the very first day. This was a selected preface. The very first day in New York she walked through Bryant Park to get to her hotel. It was December and a man dressed as Santa Claus sat on a bench eating a sandwich. A derelict walked across the park singing, in full voice, "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen." He seemed headed right for the Santa Claus. The Santa Claus watched him for a moment, then got up and began to run away, biting at his sandwich as he fled. Once across Forty-second Street he looked back to see how much distance he'd put between himself and the derelict. Then he ran through traffic on Sixth Avenue and disappeared. Opel gave the derelict a dime and he obligingly exposed himself.
10
She wrote post cards to ten people and I went out to mail them. The cards had been bought in various timeless lands. Palms, mosques and jungle. I walked down the Bowery trying to find a mailbox. I put my hands in my pockets and moved sideways into the wind, trying to slice through, to minimize.
(A corporation word but perfect for our time.) Maybe that was the answer I needed, the one route back. So simple. To decide to love the age. To stencil myself in its meager design, A mailbox was visible through snow flurries. It was pleasant to drop the little cards in, adding ten names to the great circulatory process of delay. Simple. I might yield to the seductions of void, taking a generation with me into blank climates, far beyond any place we'd been before, chancing endless pain to our children, misbirth and aphasia, all asleep in drool. I had no idea how I might begin. It was important, I knew, never to fear the end of any line I might venture to trace. Important never to alter levels of purpose.
Never to satirize or pursue small ironies or curtsy to the one-handed clapping of the tasteful and humane. I'd have to hand myself over to the structures that defined the time. Float on its clotted oil. Become obese with power and self-loathing. How else to remake myself, to pass the point I'd found, the proportion needed and feared, nothing to nothing. Opel waited in bed, tangled among the sheets, her body labyrinthine in shrouds and pockets of sloppy linen. It was an evil thing to consider, allying myself with the barest parts of mass awareness, land policed by the king's linguists, by technicians in death-system control, corporate disease consultants, profiteers of the fetus industry. I wondered whether I'd need a new following or whether the old would simply rearrange itself to accommodate my second coming. This was possibly the most interesting aspect of the problem. But either way I'd be the epoch's barren hero, a man who knew the surest way to minimize.
"I hated to get rid of those cards," Opel said. "They were so beautifully ugly."
"What did they say?"
"They said it's your birthday in four days and would so-and-so come over for a little ether and muscatel."
"Thanks for letting me know."
"I thought you'd read them."
"I looked at the pictures."
"You see, I thought you'd read them and that your failure to comment was an indication of tacit approval. That's what I frankly and sincerely thought as a matter of fact. Anyway they'll be here in four days. It'll be the last party. Assuming everybody's still at the addresses the cards were mailed to."