And it is the right door.
So absorbed had Kudra been in the telling, Claude in the listening, that the limousine managed to glide unnoticed to a stop beside them. By the time the driver got out and opened the rear door of the long black Mercedes, Kudra was finished, but the spell held them, like moths pinned to a blowing curtain. At last, the driver cleared his throat, piercing the membrane surrounding them. Claude blinked and wiped moisture from his brow. The driver wondered how his employer could be perspiring on such a night. “Will you join me?” asked Claude. Even as he asked, he was assisting Kudra into the car. What sort of weird carriage she was boarding she had not a clue, but after the events of the past few hours, she was prepared to accept virtually anything. The door closed. They sat in the leather-scented darkness, thighs touching, eyes open but unseeing, like waking dreamers, asleep yet lit by dizzy lamps, prey to some silky fever. And in that condition they were driven to Orly Airport, where Claude was to greet his cousin, Marcel the Bunny, Marcel's new wife, V'lu, and a certain friend of theirs, a man named Alobar.
THE BILL
FOR DARRELL BOB HOUSTON
THE BEET IS THE MOST INTENSE of vegetables. The onion has as many pages as War and Peace, every one of which is poignant enough to make a strong man weep, but the various ivory parchments of the onion and the stinging green bookmark of the onion are quickly charred by belly juices and bowel bacteria. Only the beet departs the body the same color as it went in.
Beets consumed at dinner will, come morning, stock a toilet bowl with crimson fish, their hue attesting to beet's chromatic immunity to the powerful digestive acids and thoroughgoing microbes that can turn the reddest pimento, the orangest carrot, the yellowest squash into a single disgusting shade of brown.
At birth we are red-faced, round, intense, pure. The crimson fire of universal consciousness burns in us. Gradually, however, we are devoured by parents, gulped by schools, chewed up by peers, swallowed by social institutions, wolfed by bad habits, and gnawed by age; and by the time we have been digested, cow style, in those six stomachs, we emerge a single disgusting shade of brown.
The lesson of the beet, then, is this: hold on to your divine blush, your innate rosy magic, or end up brown. Once you're brown, you'll find that you're blue. As blue as indigo. And you know what that means:
Indigo.
Indigoing.
Indigone.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
TOM ROBBINS has been called “a vital natural resource” by The Portland Oregonian, “one of the wildest and most entertaining novelists in the world” by the Financial Times of London, and “the most dangerous writer in the world today” by Fernanda Pivano of Italy's Corriere della Sera. A Southerner by birth, Robbins has lived in and around Seattle since 1962.