"Right." Gypsy shook off his clothes and skin, steamrolled to the cashier, opened his hingeless snake maw and swallowed the fellow whole.
"It’s all right," Nora cooed, making it all right.
The cashier was a great lump in Gypsy’s throat. Gypsy slithered upright to the walkway door. His human body dragged along the floor like a pair of half-discarded Doctor Dentons. He licked the jambs and the seam between the glass doors, causing them to melt together. Where his tongue touched, smoke shot out. I saw the passage accordion away from the cafe like a portable airplane tunnel. Cars were braking and screeching below. Then the liftoff.
"You worthless fool," Gone Joe said. "Izzy told you not to give them anything, and now they’re boosting your ass to Sanduleak." Gone Joe was catching his breath, double, in Nora’s eyes.
Gypsy undulated back to the table and pulled his skin back on, just like a scuba diver stretching into his wet suit. The cashier was less prominent now; Gypsy’s digestive juices must have been formidable. "Forgive us if we don’t do a ten-nine-eight," he said, once he had his mouth back on. The floor shook. "Goddamn Izzy Molson. One of these days I’m gonna put him right here." He tapped the dwindling lump in his midsection.
Nora clucked and shook her head. "Gypsy!" she moaned.
I looked through Gone Joe at Gypsy. "But Izzy said you were on our side," I said.
"I am," he said. Outside, through the window, Earth was a smoky, blue agate, then a dot, then invisible in the solar blaze, and the sun too was dwindling.
It’s amazing what you can see from a highway rest stop table, especially in a place like Texas, where people tend to let it hang out more. Hitching west, that’s one of the first things you notice: how much more at ease folks seem to feel with themselves out west. They let you catch them scratching their navel or adjusting their hang or spitting or mopping sweat from a cleavage. It’s okay by them. There’s so much more space out there, west of St. Louis, and people are a lot more self-contained. They know they can just get up and go somewhere else if they damn well feel like it. Listen to western music. Listen to Johnny Abilene and the Haymakers, for example. They don’t take shit from anyone, bosses, lovers, fathers, children… "take a bite of this."
Once, over a Swiss Miss, in a Panhandle rest area, I saw a woman and her husband duking it out on the back of a flatbed pickup. That was the best cocoa I ever had. Nobody got seriously injured, though their five kids, pasty, bleak, skulked in looking like war orphans. In New York, you’d see couples swap looks, and you’d notice their kids squirm a little?that’s it, that’s all. If one of them raised their voice slightly, everybody in the restaurant would turn and stare. Somebody would dial 911, sure. In Texas, three people would have to be murdered first.
You see more.
They were talking about me.
Gypsy said, "You see? He’s paralyzed. He can’t do anything. Everything goes in, and nothing comes out. He has no idea what he is. He doesn’t remember anything deeper than the Milky Way."
"Shush," Nora said, "He can hear you. You’ll upset him."
"So what? It doesn’t make any difference. Look at him. He’s not even here."
"Poor baby. Still, that’s it for Shaman. He can’t do this twice. Mel is his feed hole. Shame’ll starve down there. You can take Mel back to Sandy. He’ll be a hero."
"What hero? They’ll build a museum around him. Put him in a glass case. He doesn’t know what he is, Nora. There’s nobody in there."
"That’s because of Shaman. He blew Mel’s mind, is all. It’s like the Sphinx before Tuthmosis: half-buried in the sand."
"What mind?" Gypsy said. "I’ll bet he cut it off himself when he was a baby, like a trapped rabbit gnaws its foot off. Maybe it’s an impediment down on Earth to be what he is. That’s what made it so easy for Shaman to put a hole in."
"Izzy tried to patch it. Look."
They leaned into my face like oral surgeons. Gypsy waved his phony fingers in front of my eyes. I just felt numb. I didn’t want to respond to them yet. I wanted to keep thinking about things I’d seen at rest stops in the west, on Earth I mean.
"It’s a temporary," Gypsy said.
"Yes. Sloppy work."
"Goddamn Izzy Molson!" Gypsy said. "Hey, wait a minute! What’s that?" I felt Gypsy’s finger come straight in through my eye to nudge a spot near the filling.
Nora said, "Gone Joe. Guy in Mel’s mind. Looks like he’s trying to squeeze out."
"Typical. Lot of damage in there, but it’s small stuff, non sequiturs, lacunae, causal gaps, the usual. It’ll heal. Izzy’s bung won’t last more than a few months though. You want to insert anything while we have the chance?"
"For heaven’s sake, no! This is a sovereign person, Gypsy."
"The hell he is! He’s just an extremity, Abu al-Hawl’s blow hole or something. The Mel Bellow personality thing is just static, a TV ghost. Shaman’s feeding through him, Nora. The guy’s nothing but a junkie’s vein."
"You’re beginning to sound like Shaman… Look! He’s coming round. Get your hand out of there!"
I started to "come to." I had been reluctant. You don’t try to land in a volcano. I had plenty of fuel left inside my mind, plenty of things to think about, vivid, fascinating. I didn’t have to join Gypsy and Nora in this impossible reality. But then I heard Nora defend me to him? "a sovereign person"?and things felt much safer.
I made my entrance: "Where are we? What’s going on? Why is it so black out there?" I pretended to be woozy at first, for the sake of continuity. Discontinuity is a terrible enemy of one’s sense of selfhood.
Gypsy looked at his wristwatch, if it was a watch, which hung half through his wrist, if it was a wrist. "Fifteen minutes," he said. "We’re about a hundred million miles out."
Gone Joe said, "Run!"
"I don’t want to be here," I said.
For some reason, this sent Gypsy into a rage. He stormed over to the bus tray station and overturned it, shattering dishes and launching silverware. "Sure. Let’s just turn around. Let’s take you back to Shaman. Maybe we should garnish you with parsley first. I think there’s some in the goddamned kitchen."
"Careful, Gyp, or you’ll jar us off course," Nora said, like a nanny admonishing a fractious toddler. "Have we reached the Magellanic Stream?"
"Not quite." Gypsy stood stock still and glared at me. His fury had distilled itself into a poisonous timbre.
"Let’s do an epoche. We want to make sure Shaman can’t catch up. Go into the kitchen and use the automatic dishwasher."
"But Nora…"
"An epoche, Gypsy. I’ll see if I can get the rabbit’s foot."
"Ah!" Gypsy turned on his heel, on his fake heel, and shouldered through a padded, swinging door into the kitchen.
"You’re safe with us, Mel," Nora said. "You know what Shaman would do to you on Earth. Izzy told you, didn’t he?"
"Izzy’ll be back in a year," I said. "That’s what he told me. On his next vacation. He hasn’t got much seniority."
I felt better with Gypsy gone. I looked around. Except for Gypsy’s mess and the fact that a few tables remained to be bused, everything looked fine. There was a map of U.S. Route 40 on the wall nearby, with colored lights at the rest stops and interchanges; ours glowed red. The condiments station had plenty of ketchups and mustards, though the relish was getting low; maybe a few more of those tiny paper cups would help, in case of a rush. There were kitschy oil paintings of long-horned steer and cacti over the empty tables. The one over ours had a campfire in the foreground with a circle of chiaroscuro bronco busters; one of the cowpokes had a guitar in his lap. Near the stack of salts and peppers at my elbow, there was a display explaining how you could get prints of the Western Landscape Series for your very own. Everything was fine. Everything was okay.