He sat upright and ran his fingers through his copse of chromium curls. “Me? I don't know. I had a fling with messiahhood once. The Caesars tried to crucify me, but they only got one eye. Ha! Still, I wonder if 'twas worth it. If you look this good to me out o' one eye, darlin', imagine how ye'd look out o' two.” As if releasing a pigeon from a cage, he freed a sigh. The pigeon was so heavy it could barely fly. Priscilla stroked his jaw. Sensing some pity in the gesture, he brushed her hand away.
“At any rate, 'tis too early to help the poor bastards. If I let 'em in here now, they'd only feel ripped off. Just like you, they'd be lookin' around for the laboratories. How could I make 'em understand that I am the laboratory? And not a very good one. I drink too much. And I let me daughter get chubby.
“When I established the Last Laugh Foundation, it was to research the psychological barriers to immortality. Because what I learned from Alobar was that we have to evolve beyond our death consciousness if we expect to claim our divine right to life everlastin'. If we expect to be i-n-g instead of e-d. When I met Professor Morgenstern six months ago and found that he'd become a bloomin' nonstop immortalist, I invited him, at great expense, to take up residency here, not merely because o' the credibility he'd lend to the joint but because I thought he'd be settin' up a lab, and we could run some test-tube experiments out o' here as well. Oh my, and the fairies tricked me on that one! But it all fits together. Do ye know what 'tis called, that jig Morgenstern is always doin'?”
There was no response from Priscilla. Unless “Zznnphh” may be considered a response. She was snoring.
It was a pretty little snore. A rustling of scarabs in the mummy wrappings. Wiggs listened attentively. Most snoring is composed by Beethoven or Wagner, although a few times Wiggs had heard heavy metal rock performed on the somnambulate bassoon. But Priscilla's snore, it had a Stevie Wonder sound. A lyrical scrap left over from “My Cherie Amour.” Wiggs tried to hum along.
For a while, he listened and watched, marveling at the manner in which the dawn light seemed to cling to her lashes, at the tiny shadow cast by her Frito nose.
Then he slid gently off of the couch and gathered his tweeds. Huxley Anne would be waking soon, and he must be there. There were nine bedrooms in the Last Laugh Foundation, but he shared a room with his child. Never did he want her to go looking in the morning for a parent who was really a bookend.
Before he climbed the stairs, however, he tiptoed into the dining room and surveyed the centerpiece. Selecting the largest of the beets, a specimen that weighed as much as the skull of a lemur, he fetched it back to the den and laid it upon the cushion next to Priscilla's snore.
Pris slept for about two hours. The length of a Stevie Wonder concert and a few minutes more. When she was awakened by a thud-a-thump on the ceiling, she knew, even before opening her eyes, exactly where she was.
She caught a whiff of Irish Spring cologne. She sensed the presence of a face beside her own. Smiling, she turned toward the face and kissed it.
Blech!
What she kissed was rough and cold and flavored of topsoil.
Her lids popped open. Any morning light that might have been stuck to her lashes fell away like spilled sugar.
For a long time, she sat there regarding the beet, looking at it with optimism, misgiving, wonderment, bewilderment, and slight disgust, like a beginning medical student confronting her first anatomical drawing of a prostate gland.
At that moment, in Concord, Massachusetts, Alobar was likewise engrossed in anatomical scholarship. He had very nearly reported to sick call that morning, but changed his mind when his ears suddenly cooled. Instead, he decided to consult his library of Penthouse magazines.
As he had pointed out to Dr. Dannyboy, frequent sexual stimulation was essential to a youthful physiometry. And for a heterosexual behind bars, what stimulation was there besides memories and magazines?
On page 83, a young actress was bent over like a map of Florida, affording an unobstructed view of the inland waterway around Cocoa Beach. Sailing in those backwaters would be sunny and brisk. But at the end of the voyage, he'd be searching the horizon for Kudra again.
He was thinking of Kudra, her courage, her character, her crazy wisdom, when a guard rattled his cage. “Barr! From the warden!” The guard shoved an official-looking envelope into the cell. “They're gonna hang ya first thing tomorrow. Tough luck. Ha ha.”
“I regret that I have but one life to give for my country,” said Alobar, mouthing what to him, from the vantage point of having seen hundreds of countries come and go, come and go, was one of the most shortsighted utterances for which a man was ever remembered.
The letter informed him that his hearing before the parole board was being postponed until “after the holidays.”
Which holidays? Did they mean Thanksgiving, which was only three days away, or all the holidays, Christmas and New Year's as well as Thanksgiving? He sat down on his bunk with his head in his hands. If they kept postponing parole, they might as well hang him. A lump formed in his throat. It was as large as a beet. It was imperative that he dissolve it.
He ripped up the letter. “I am immortal,” he said, ignoring the granny's wedding dress smell that streamed from each of his pores.
He returned to Penthouse, opening it to the centerfold. In this photograph, the actress reminded him of Alaska, the centerfold of states: big, beautiful, unrefined, empty — and absolutely irresistible to the type of man who shoots a lot of pool in taverns while dreaming constantly of striking it rich.
“Now, Kudra. .”
The beet reminded Priscilla, rather rudely, that Wiggs had managed to talk until sunup without ever explaining her connection to his obsessions. She rose, dressed (feeling pleasantly sordid as she wriggled into the green party dress), and went searching for her host.
Had she thought clearly about it, she might have realized that it was Monday morning and Wiggs had doubtlessly taken Huxley Anne to school. There remained, however, a yard or two of mummy bandage festooning her brain, so she went about the ground floor of the house calling, none too loudly, “Wiggs.”
Unsuccessful, she ascended the stairs and repeated the procedure. No response there, either. She did, however, hear a thumping and bumping noise emanating from the master suite and assumed that it was Wolfgang Morgenstern.
The door to the suite, thrice her age, was graced by an old-fashioned keyhole. In secretive New Orleans, keyholes were always plugged, but this one was as open and inviting as a prostitute's kimono. She laid a bloodshot peeper to it.
Dr. Morgenstern, fully dressed, was skipping and bounding about the suite in a kind of exaggerated, athletic polka. Every once in a while, he would stop, execute a little backward and forward jitterbug step; then, necktie flapping, an exultant yelp springing from his heaving breast, he would jump straight in the air, up and down, five times.
Well, she'd witnessed some crazy dances during Mardi Gras and all, but this one took the cake, and the coffee, too. Actually, it looked like fun, although on a morning such as this it would surely put her in the morgue. Nervously, she spied a bit longer, then pulled away. There was an imprint upon her upper cheek that resembled an archway in a sultan's palace.
Downstairs, slipping into her raincoat, she noticed that the beet still lay on the sofa, but now, unless her nostrils were playing games with her, there hung a vulgar odor about it, the familiar beet-delivery stink, which she was positive had not been present earlier.