“Those babies are homeless punks, too!” somebody shouted. “Nate speaks for all of us!”
“Damn straight!”
“Nate’s got arc!”
Now I felt them, the great arms bunching me up, the wisps of soft hair grazing my cheek. Next thing, I’m out on the sidewalk, staring up at that face, the one I’d never shaken from my dreams. He flashed an enormous steak knife.
“Why?” I said.
“Nate’s pain is now,” said the man in coveralls.
“But I have more I need to say.”
“That couldn’t possibly be true.”
“Who are you to decide?”
“I’m the guy.”
“What guy?”
“That guy. The guy out there. The guy with the pulse. When you put your finger on the pulse, it’s my pulse. It’s my heart. I’m the guy with the heart.”
“What are those stains?” I said, pointed at his coveralls.
“That’s the blood of my heart. And other hearts. Various hearts. Also, I had some berries for lunch.”
“You should tell your story. Write a memoir. If you let me live, I’d be happy to help.”
“I respect the genre too much,” said the man, and took some practice swipes with his knife.
the REAL-ASS JUMBO
This world would end. The brink beckoned. A bright guy might as well pick a date. Gunderson had. A revolution in consciousness, the peaceful dismantling of mankind’s cruel machinery was, according to Gunderson’s interpretation of an interpretation of a pre-Columbian codex, a half decade away. But that was merely one unfolding. Alternate finales included fire, flooding, pox, nukes. Homo sapiens had a few years to choose. Was that time enough? For Gunderson it was time enough for another book, some lecture tours, a cable deal. Time enough to sample all the yearning young hippie tang in questing creation.
Maybe too much time. A guy could unravel.
Gunderson hadn’t picked the date out of his favorite Alpacan hat. His zero hour was the culmination of a Mixtec prophecy. These bejeweled dudes had played their proto-basketball to the death, strolled the zocalo in the skins of foes. Probably they’d known something. Gunderson didn’t know much about them, really, but who cared? That their glyphs foretold an imminent global shift was sufficient for Ramón, the shaman mentor Gunderson had been visiting these last several winters. That’s all the convincing Gunderson needed. They’d suffered some false ends already, but you could always cite a misreading, push back the date.
Besides, nobody claimed the earth would crack open, just that something huge was on tap, and if we didn’t evolve our asses quick, it would be bad huge. A reasonable message, if vague. Surprising how many preferred not to hear it. These were maybe the same folk who figured crop circles for teen pranks, the fools who called him fool. Look around, he said, to gatherings in the many hundreds, to patchouli kids and home chemists and mind hikers, to, in short, all the non-fools, the excellent few willing to be deranged by their knowing.
“Look around,” he’d say, perched in loose lotus in a patron’s sunken living room, and his followers would, as though exemplars of encroaching gnarlitude did ghoulish waltzes in the very room. “Look at the world, what’s going on in the world. Oppression, repression, depression, the Middle This, the Western That, everything melting, burning, sick. It’s no coincidence. It’s prophecy, and prophecy is no joke, no matter what some cool shill for the corporations might tell you. Trust me, I used to be one of those shills. Until I got my head handed to me on a plate. Or, to be honest, in a bowl. A bowl full of the foulest soup you ever tasted. Vision gumbo. Best gift I ever got. Just a few years, people. We’ve got just a few years to find the better path. Or we are guaranteed one of the utmost, outmost shittiness.”
Once, one of the girls who invariably stalked him home from these gigs, a Gospel of Thomas fan named Nellie, now his current sintern, while getting positively gnostic on his fun parts with ballerina slippers she’d happened to have in her bag, asked Gunderson if he ever looked out on the crowd, thought, “Suckers.”
“Never,” said Gunderson.
“Never?” Nellie asked, her silk insteps rubbing him toward some murked glimpse of the Demiurge.
“You don’t get it,” said Gunderson, apant. “This is no con.”
It wasn’t. It was real, and he had to share it with the world. He had to hit eyeballs. A heads-up for species-wide calamity deserved eyeballs. So, yes, he was a little on edge, on brink. He stood at the counter of Gray’s Papaya waiting for a call from his manager, who was waiting for a call from his agent, who was waiting for a call from the TV people. He’d pitched them like some puma-headed god of pitching a few days before, laid waste to that conference room, but now there were concerns. They wanted to be certain Gunderson truly believed in his vision, that it wasn’t a gag. Otherwise the Untitled Gunderson Prophecy Project might make for lousy television. But how could a rad Siddhartha who roved the earth quaffing potions in its most sacred places and boning its most radiant creatures, not to mention rallying humanity for one last stand against its own worst urges, make for lousy television?
Bastards had insulted him, and Gunderson could feel that hunched, bile-sopped troll he’d been, that devolved little prick he’d purged with iboga root and Jung, burble up. The old Gunderson, he knew, would never really go away. He’d just have to be endured, like some incorrigible junkie brother everybody in the family hopes will finally get clean, or just die already.
Even now the old Gunderson hovered close, craved, for instance, those glistening turd tubes on the Gray’s grill rollers. Meanwhile the street stinker at the counter beside him — grease-stiff duster, foam-and-twine sandals — wolfed down a jumbo, gave Gunderson one of those poignantly exasperated looks certain nutjobs mastered, the one that asked, “Will the hologram ever cease transmission?” Bun crumbs tumbled from the man’s mouth. Orphaned schizo cast out by the corporate state? Avatar of an ancient sage? Both? You never knew, but plenty of avatars burned out anyway.
Some got as lost as the old Gunderson.
Now the new, improved Gunderson sipped his papaya smoothie. Fairly toxic, this stuff, too, but he gave himself a pass. During a recent DMT excursion in his ex-wife’s duplex, while Nellie wept and shivered in the linen closet, the machine elves, or this one other-dimensional ambassador in particular, a squat, faintly buzzing fellow with scalloped metallic skin and emerald eyes, a gnome in gold lamé who’d become something of a guardian to Gunderson, ordered him to ease up.
“Relax,” Baltran had said, slithering up from his usual sofa cushion crevasse. “You’re doing great. You’re on the verge of serious revelations. Highest clearance imaginable.”
“Really? That’s amazing. Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. It’s all your hard work. But really, relax. You’re wound too tight. Get a massage or something. Rolfing’s fun. Stay loose for the coming astonishments. Don’t be a fuckrod.”
He would not be a fuckrod. He would stay loose, stay on his toes, whatever Baltran and his glimmering ilk required. They looked like cartoons, sure, lacked sustained corporeality, and even had slightly squeaky voices, but they had chosen him. The message was too important to be left to anybody else, no matter how much he lectured at symposia about dialogue and communal deliverance. Also, no fuckrods could lurk in his vicinity. Maybe he should shitcan his manager. No sooner had he thought the phrase “shitcan my manager” than Jack’s name blinked in his hand. Coincidence was a concept for sheep.
“What have you got?” said Gunderson, stepped out to the sidewalk.
“Everything’s still in play,” said Jack.