Suddenly—retro-memory, a slug snuck into the galley of Sarvaduhka’s mind! “Duck, listen up,” Izzy had told him just before the crash, so Sarvaduhka recalled, though he had not experienced it at the time (and STET on the tenses, proofreader). “In a couple of graphs I gotta die. It’s the only way to null out the womporf. From that point on, we gotta travel via orthographic propulsion…”
“…which deserves its very own section,” Izzy continued, according to Sarvaduhka’s retro-memory. Sarvaduhka blinked. Sarvaduhka considered Izzy’s corpse, considered the smoking, steaming hulk of his beloved squareback, considered running to Mummy, considered suttee, then remembered that his mummy was in Bengalore and that he wasn’t Izzy’s widow, and then he noticed the parallel lacerations on his left shoulder and arm dripping blood down onto his wrist—just like the scrapes on his right arm, asterisk welts from the leap between sections—and he figured he’d better shut down the old cogitorium and listen up, as Izzy directed. He directed his attention inward, and downward, into the paragraphs following.
“Orthographic propulsion, dear Duck, is how you travel from place to place via the text in which those places are described, see?”
“No.” But he was, in spite of himself, beginning to understand. Sarvaduhka’s world was collapsing to two dimensions. His body felt like forty-weight bond stained with tendrils of black ink, pinched by greasy fingers, skewered by eyes sliding left to right, RETURN, and left to right again. Every couple of seconds, or longer in the case of slow readers, he felt a page number bullet his margins…
“We’ve entered orthographic space, pal. It’s the only way I could settle that womporf and jimmy the past so me and Fay will have met without having been about to be having created (STET) some new womporfs, if you catch my drift.”
“I don’t.” … What if the turning pages should crush Sarvaduhka like a fruit fly, pulverizing bones, reducing him to a pinkish stain, an interlinear blotch, forever without female action, somewhere in Illinois or Wyoming, his spermatozoa useless, flat as planeria in some right hand margin, and unjustified no doubt. What if he were apostrophized or hyphenated at some vital organ or word wrapped beyond the tolerance of his vertebral column?
“See, this way, we can ride on the reader’s attention…”
“The reader??”
“…right into Wendover or Rowley Junction, where Fay dumps that Niagara Falls guy, so I can pick her up on the rebound, like I’m supposed to.”
“Izzy, I need maybe some xanax, some thorazine. Do you have something like this?”
“I can give you an ellipsis.”
“Never mind.”
“So, like I was saying,” Izzy went on, “we just travel to the right line of print and Bingo! Fay meets Izzy. Then back to your Ganeshamobile before the womporf crash, which by that time will not have happened—no piranha, no dead Izzy—with thirteen days left for female action. Whaddaya say?”
“Tell me what to do. I am a blank sheet, Izzy.”
“Not quite. First we need to get in some graphs about Rowley Junction and that. Watch yourself around the asterisks this time, ohkay?”
The bum’s name was Ralph Tout, and it was Fay’s maternal instincts that made her latch onto him. He was the kind of guy who couldn’t get his underwear from the washer to the dryer. “Let me help you,” she’d said. That was that.
Now they were in Rowley Junction, Utah, just an hour and a quarter from Wendover—rainbow’s end. Where Ralph was going to apply his entrepreneurial talent at the Bonneville Speedway, selling popcorn or miniature racing cars or chunks of salt flat or conducting tours, as he’d done at Niagara Falls right up to the time he was laid off. If you knew a few words, those foreign tourists tipped big. Sayonara. Auf wiedersehn. Ne repousses pas de pied mes petits cochons.
They were sitting in a café, by the window in back, letting Ralph’s radiator cool off. They sipped coffee. They munched Sara Lees. Fay’s treat. It was always her treat, Fay was thinking. She was nearly broke after paying for all the gasoline, motels, campsites, et cetera, not to mention his dryer in East Tonawanda, which should have tipped her off. She eyed him over the rim of her coffee cup, backlit by the late-afternoon glint off the Great Salt Lake.
He was smiling. “Coffee’s not bad,” he said.
“Mm hmm.” She didn’t like herself for hating him, as she’d started to do. Was it selfish of her to notice that he wasn’t even that good of a lover? Last night, anyway, she’d passed. He’d stayed up late watching color TV and drinking Thunderbird, while she, behind closed eyes, calculated how much money she had left from the sale of her old Chevy.
“I love this place already,” he said. “You done with that?” She didn’t respond. He took her cake. “I’m gonna make a lot of money here, I can tell.”
Fay tried to see into his soul through the large gap between his front teeth, the one that seemed so sexy at first but reminded her now of chinked mortar. He wiped his mouth with his forearm, flashing once more the faded tattoo: “BORN TO RAISE HELL.” He’d seemed nice.
“Stay put, honey,” she said, getting up. “I need to go for a little walk. I’ll be back before you finish your pound cake.”
“Sure thing, sweet stuff,” he said. “But don’t be too long. Plenty of fish in the sea, ha ha.” The diastema. She peered. But she couldn’t see the soul. She walked out onto the salt flat. She sighed.
“Damn it!” Izzy would have said, had he not been dead.
“What is this?” Sarvaduhka ejaculated. “Orthographic isn’t enough for you, Izzy? Are we now in a counter-factual space, a conditional? I hate inflections, Izzy! I hate moods! Sanskrit is lousy with them.” Since he didn’t know which way to face when he said it—Izzy, after all, was dead—Sarvaduhka addressed his complaint to the broad Illinois sky. It was blue all over, but just above the horizon there was a thin stratus with grey streaks descending, distant rain.
“Damn it!” Izzy would have said again. “We missed our chance. The damned scene break fell too quick. We could have snuck in there, right after Fay’s sigh.
“We? Was I there, Izzy? In Utah?”
“No, but there’s more stability in a plural, for orthographic propulsion, I mean.” Izzy would have mulled things over for a moment, while Sarvaduhka’s mind split neatly in two. The one half was thinking about grammatical forms in Sanskrit and Hindi; the other was amazed that he could be thinking anything at all with his squareback totaled and his friend totaled and his entire third dimension totaled.
Izzy would then have continued: “Look. This is done, isn’t it, to repeat the last phrase of some section at the beginning of a later one? You know, to link them up?”
“Rhetorical transitional space?” Sarvaduhka mewed.
“Something like that,” Izzy said.
“God help us, I think so.”
“Ohkay then. Get ready, Sarvaduhka.”
“How??”
“What the hell have I been talking about? Orthographic propulsion, Doc! Just keep the readers thinking about us. Do something memorable, for crissakes, so we’re both still there, riding on their attention when they cross over into Utah again.”
Sarvaduhka mounted Izzy’s cadaver, his lips on Izzy’s cold and bloodless lips, his thighs on Izzy’s flaccid thighs. He pushed his tongue into Izzy’s mouth and started humping.