A tall pale girl stood near my chair. Her red hair was in pigtails and she wore paint-streaked jeans and a T-shirt with a hole in the middle. I leaned over and touched her arm. Therefore I am. She turned and I put my mouth to her navel. This made her laugh and twist a bit. Softly her thumbs browsed about my ears. Her navel was lint-free, abnormally large, an inner moon of convolutions and repose. There was no reason to wonder who she was or how that level moment was rounded by her hands.
"Name's James," someone said. "Heard and enjoyed your stuff. Third album's a landmark work. Stunning album. Noise and screaming and babble-babble. Heard all your albums and all your singles and liked them all and that comes from someone who's kind of famous in his own right except nobody knows it. Mylon and I. I'm a friend of Mylon's. We live in the same piss-hole building. I gather you're laying back. Understandable. There's nothing to paint and nothing to write and nothing to film and nothing to sing about and nothing to make love to. But your sound comes out of the radio all the time. Stunning sound. Amazing when you think about it how your sound is big even out there in the sticks and boondocks where I come from originally, the absolute sticks, the deep boonies, where it's unlike a big city where people can absorb that kind of sound. Your second LP is killer too but I think number three's the landmark work."
Mylon Ware stood in a corner talking to no one. He was a folk singer from western Canada, a lean bleak man with strange eyes. His second winter in New York he killed and ate his dog to keep from starving. People had offered him food and urged him to go on welfare but he took nothing, listened to no one, said not a word. The dog was a German shepherd, bought for protection, and very hard to kill. Mylon began by using the long bar that was part of his police lock. The first blow wasn't severe or direct enough and the bar proved too long a weapon for the kind of struggle that followed. However it was useful for holding off the dog while Mylon maneuvered with his hunting knife, also bought for protection. It took him fifteen minutes to kill the animal. When it was over, almost nothing in the small apartment stood in the same place or was free of blood. Mylon cut the dog up and over a period of four days cooked and ate whatever seemed edible.
"This is the last party."
"The first act is better in the New York production. The second act is better in the London production."
"Kiss."
"This is my vision. Everybody in the whole world wearing each other's underwear. Whole nations exchanging underwear. China doing Egypt's laundry. Big strong Turks wearing panties from Scarsdale. A people thing. I'm pro-people all the way. It would help us so much. I see it in my mind's eye. Special fourth-class rates for underwear. Cargo ships full of underwear plying the trade routes. This is my vision. Underwear chain letters. World peace through underwear."
"I admit I whimper. I admit I'm fantastically infantile most of the time. I admit I want to sit on the floor and say ma-ma, da-da, na-na."
"For a Filipino she's practically statuesque."
"Winona's little baby is the shittingest little baby you'll ever want to see. That little baby should have its own agent. That baby has a talent no other baby will ever come close to. I told Winona get on the phone to William Morris. That little baby should have an agent."
"This is the last party. Pass it on."
"I'll tell you how I'm shooting this picture. I'm shooting it beautifully. That's how I'm shooting it."
"This is the last party."
"I'm selling comic books on Fourth Avenue. It's a living, right? Kids come in. College boys with the hair, the clothes, the skin. I sell them old comics. I sell them glossies of Bonita Granville and King Kong. They don't call it a living for nothing. It's a living. I live. There's worse could happen. I at least live. It's a living. I make a living."
"This is the last party. Pass it on."
"The Self is inside the Other. Motion is the guiding mind of the solar community."
"Happy Valley's into violence now."
"Kiss."
I thought of all the inner organs in the room, considered apart from the people they belonged to. For that moment of thought we seemed a convocation of martyrs, visible behind our skin. The room was a cell in a mystical painting, full of divine kidneys, lungs aloft in smoke, entrails gleaming, bladders simmering in painless fire. This was a madman's truth, to paint us as sacs and flaming lariats, nearly godly in our light, perishable but never ending. I watched the pale girl touch her voluptuous navel. One by one, repacked in sallow cases, we all resumed our breathing.
11
In sleep I opened an unnumbered door and found the sea. It was wide and still, veneered in delirious silver. Someone I knew was walking along a road that went down a hill toward some houses. The heat was brilliant. Vindictive light burned into the stone of all the small houses chalked near the sea. I heard voices and thought I saw people at the door.
Opel toasted frankfurter buns for breakfast or whatever meal it was. She held the buns on a fork over the burner, toasting the insides of the buns intended for me, the outsides of those intended for her. Each of us thought the other strange for his/her preference. She spread strawberry jam on the buns and brought everything to bed with her.
"I wish we had real strawberries," she said. "Big whole strawberries to look at and eventually eat."
"Live strawberries instead of strawberries on tape."
"I remember traveling literally about six thousand miles in four consecutive flights and then getting to somebody's house I knew and they were eating strawberries and I just sat there and looked at these strawberries sitting in sugar in the middle of the table and it was inconceivable, it was like returning from the land of the dead. They lived, the strawberries lived. I could look right into them. I understood what strawberries really are, not that I could put it in words. They were inconceivably beautiful, so rich and plump and alive, actually glowing from within. Of course I was probably stoned on something."
"Who were you talking to at the door?"
"I thought you were asleep."
"I was asleep but I wasn't fast asleep. Somebody was at the door and the two of you talked about something. It wasn't Fenig because I know Fenig's voice. It wasn't the woman downstairs because it was a man. So I surmise one thing. It was the man you've been waiting for. The courier. Is that who it was?"
"It was the man," she said.
"Good news or bad?"
"Dr. Pepper is not where he's supposed to be. But they expect to reach him in forty-eight hours. I don't know why it's forty-eight hours. Why not forty-seven or fifty-three? Anyway I'm to be ready to leave at a moment's notice as of tomorrow night. I told him I've been ready for days. He expressed the hope we'd function well together."