Gunderson’s eyes strayed to the Gray’s sign on the building’s facade: WHEN YOU’RE HUNGRY, OR BROKE, OR JUST IN A HURRY. NO GIMMICKS. NO BULL.
There was always a gimmick. The gimmick here was you ate factory-sealed pig chins and the hologram never ceased transmission.
“Everything’s still in play? That’s a good one for your tombstone.”
“Thanks. I’ll leave it to you to make arrangements with the engraver. Meantime, the series division is still meeting, but my guy there, my mole — don’t you love it — says there will be an offer by the end of the day. They no longer have the aforementioned concerns. They believe you believe.”
“Good.”
“More than good.”
“Do you believe I believe, Jack?”
“I believe in solid, serious offers.”
“Fair enough. Because I don’t care about the money.”
“I know, I know. How about you take my cut and I take yours?”
“I would, my friend. The money’s not for me. It’s for Carlos.”
“How is the boy?”
“He’s beautiful. A beautiful child.”
“Seen him lately?”
“Victoria nagging you again? I’m sorry about that. But you can’t listen to all her crap. I see him plenty.”
Now the reeker staggered out of Gray’s Papaya, waved his ragged arms.
“Hold on.” Gunderson dug in his coat for some loose bills. “Hey, buddy…”
“Keep your papes!” screamed the man. Particulate of frankfurter and a fine gin mist sprayed from his mouth. “I want your goddamn soul! Mean to munch it!”
“Pardon?” said Gunderson.
“Your soul wiener! That’s the real-ass jumbo!”
Doubtless on the astral plane, or even just an outer ring of Saturn, this man was delivering galaxy-beating sermons to sentient manifestations of light, but in this dimension, Seventy-Second and Broadway to be exact, Gunderson had to fucking go.
* * *
Maybe he wasn’t such a bright guy. Victoria’s divorce lawyer probably hadn’t thought so when he brought Gunderson to ruin, or rather, to Queens. His studio in Sunnyside was suitable for the composition of prison manifestos, but Gunderson was long past garret-pacing histrionics. He’d already written his book. He’d been on the talk shows, the campus panels. A Rock and Roll Hall of Fame rock star kept inviting him up for a helicopter ride.
The Queens studio worked for hippie tang sessions, but it was not the apartment of a generational touchstone. Yet here he festered within the chipped stucco walls, beneath the hideous chandelier. He was lying on the futon after smoking some of the alpha weed, a gift, or tribute, from one of Nellie’s rich friends, when he felt an odd prodding in his spine. He stood, peeled back the mattress.
“Baltran.”
The machine elf’s head poked through the cheap slats of the frame. Most of him seemed morphed with the hardwood floor.
“What the fuck, Gunderson? It smells like sad, lonely man in here.”
Baltran’s buzzing was fainter than usual. His scallops bore an odd magenta tint.
“I need to catch up on laundry.”
“How about ass wiping?”
Things had, in fact, grown a wee degraded. That’s why he still spent as much time as he could at Victoria’s. Psychologists, probably, would offer negative explanations for Victoria’s failure to change the locks, but Gunderson preferred to see it as evidence of her personal evolution. Guilt for the skill of her lawyer, too.
“Look, buddy,” said Baltran, “we have to talk.”
“The TV thing? I’m close. I think it has a real chance to be a wake-up call for—”
“It’s about the prophecy.”
“What about it?”
“The math needs a little tweaking.”
“Same old same old.”
“But now it’s different.”
“Meaning what? It’s not a few years?”
“Not quite.”
“What do you mean not quite?”
Baltran fell buzzless for a moment. This happened sometimes. Though his image remained, it was as though the essence of the elf were no longer present. He was perhaps being called away for an important matter. He’d be back. Baltran always came back. But Gunderson wanted him back right now.
“What do you mean not quite?” Gunderson said again, lunged. His hand sliced through the hovering projection of his friend.
“Fucking watch it, pal,” the elf said, back again. “You know I can feel that. It hurts.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay. I didn’t mean to make you nervous. You’ve still got a few months.”
“A few months?”
“That’s time enough. Why don’t you patch things up with Ramón?”
“I’ve got no problem with Ramón.”
“Besides the fact that you don’t talk to him.”
“He doesn’t talk to me.”
“It’s your business, I guess. But you’ve got to get out there and effect some goddamn evolution. Do me proud.”
“How do I do that?”
But Baltran was gone again. He’d left Gunderson to worry all alone. How was Gunderson going to complete his mission with these new time constraints? He’d have to throw some money at the problem. You couldn’t fix every problem by throwing money at it, but you couldn’t fix anything without also throwing money at it. But where would he find the papes?
Sure, money came to you as long as you didn’t covet it, but there was still the distinct possibility that the old Gunderson, that greedy moron, coveted on the down low, screwing them both. Maybe it was this vestigial Gunderson who’d cut off Ramón when the shaman started asking questions about the television deal. Probably just wanted a new roof for his hut. Well, unless Gunderson got the message out, Ramón wouldn’t need a roof. Nobody would. There just wasn’t time to waste working out the licensing on a prophecy.
Victoria was in Lisbon for a fado festival and Carlos was with his grandparents in Maine, so Gunderson had full run of the loft he’d traded in for penile liberation. Part of the excitement, the charge, of pending apocalypse, he understood, was knowing Victoria wouldn’t get to enjoy this square footage much longer.
Maybe he wasn’t such a bright guy for other reasons. The treatise one of his acolytes at Oxford had just e-mailed him was dense going, especially in Victoria’s desktop’s antiquated text format. Here were Isaac Luria and Madame Blavatsky, there a text block of dingbats. Gunderson had barely skimmed his philosophy books in college. “I get the idea,” he would announce to his dorm suite after twenty minutes of deep study. “Pour me a drink.”
“Psychonaut” was a silly word (Baltran said only chumps uttered it), and Gunderson had detested most of the heavy trippers in college. He’d taken hallucinogens just a few times, passed those occasions frying flapjacks, staring at their scorched, porous skins. The only acid eater he could ever abide was Red Ned, a scrawny old Vietnam vet who appeared at most major burner parties and who, in return for some My Lai-ish confession and recitations from The Marx-Engels Reader, got free shrooms and beer.
Once, at a barbecue, Ned cornered Gunderson near the keg, stuck a bottle under the younger man’s nose, some filthy hooch he’d likely distilled in one of the bus station toilets.
“It’s absinthe,” said Ned. “The mighty wormwood. You will eat the devil’s pussy and suddenly know French.”
“Maybe later,” said Gunderson.
“Later.” Ned laughed. “Shit, kid, later? Later my platoon will be here. We’ll slit you at the collarbone, pour fire ants in. Then you’ll talk.”
“I’m happy to talk now, Ned.”
“You don’t have anything to tell me yet. You haven’t acquired the blind and pitiless truth. But I have a feeling about you. What do you think?”
“I just want to get laid.”
“I’m good to go,” said Ned, and gave Gunderson what might have been, during teethsome years, a toothsome smile. “You do tunnel rat zombie cock?”