“He’s come up with a plan to reduce the county’s tax burden by half. Everybody says it’s the real quill.”
“I’m surprised he found the time, what with all those congressional junkets.”
“And Judy Trickle, you hear about her?”
“Now you’re scaring me.”
“I know. Ol’ Juggs ’R Us Judy.”
“She should have been your model for Miss Pork, not Mia. What’d she do? Design a newfangled bra?”
“Lifts and separates.”
“You mean that’s it?”
“You nailed it.”
“No way!”
“She’s been wearing a prototype on the show the last few days. There’s a noticeable change.” He did a whispery voiceover voice. “The curves are softer, more natural.”
“Bullshit!”
“I’m serious. Check her out.”
“I got better things to do than watch AM Waterford.”
“I remember the time when you were a devoted fan.”
“That was post-Andrea…and pre-Andrea.” I chuckled. “Remember the show when she demonstrated the rowing machine? Leotards aren’t built to handle that sort of stress.”
“I knew the guy who produced her back then. He said they gave her stuff like that to do, because they were hoping for a Wardrobe Incident. They weren’t prepared for the reaction.”
“Janet Jackson’s no Judy Trickle. It was like a dam bursting. Like…help me out here, man.”
“Like the birth of twin zeppelins.”
“Like the embodiment of the yang, like the Aquarian dawn.”
Rudy jiggled his line. “This is beginning to border on the absurd.”
“You’re the one brought her up.”
“I’m not talking about Judy, I’m talking about the whole thing. The outbreak.”
“Oh, okay. Yeah, we’re way past absurd if Miz Trickle’s involved. We’re heading toward surreal.”
“I’ve heard of five or six more people who’ve had…breakthroughs, I suppose you’d call them.”
“How come I don’t hear about these people except from you? Do you sit in your office all day, collecting odd facts about Black William?”
“I get more traffic than you do, and people are talking about it now.”
“What are they saying?”
“What you’d expect. Isn’t it weird? It must be the water, the pollution. I’ve even heard civic pride expressed. Someone coined the phrase, ‘Black William, Pennsylvania’s Brain Capital.’”
“That’s taking it a bit far.” I had a slug of Iron City. “So nobody’s panicking? Saying head for the hills?”
“Who said that?”
“Andrea. She was a little disturbed. She didn’t exactly say it, but she seemed to think this thing might not be all good.”
He tightened his lips and produced a series of squeaking noises. “I think Andrea’s right. Not about head for the hills. I don’t know about that. But I think whatever this is, it’s affecting people in different ways. Some of them emotionally.”
“Why’s that?”
“I…” He tipped back his head, stared at the clouds. “I don’t want to talk anymore, man. Okay? Let’s just fish.”
It began to snow again, tiny flakes, the kind that presage a big fall, but we kept fishing, jiggling our lines in the dead water, drinking Iron City. Something was troubling Rudy, but I didn’t press him. I thought about Andrea. She planned to get off early and we were going to dinner in Waterford and maybe catch a movie. I was anticipating kissing her, touching her in the dark, while the new James Bond blew stuff up or (this was more likely) Kenneth Branagh destroyed As You Like It, when a tremor ran across the surface of the pond. Both Rudy and I sat up straight and peered. “T-Rex is coming,” I said. An instant later, the pond was lashed into a turbulence that sent waves slopping in all directions, as if a large swimmer had drawn near the surface, then made a sudden turn, propelling itself down toward its customary haunts with a flick of its tail. Yet we saw nothing. Nary a fin nor scale nor section of plated armor. We waited, breathless, for the beast to return.
“Definitely not a current,” said Rudy.
Except for the fact that Rudy didn’t show, the EP release went well. The music was great, the audience responsive, we sold lots of CDs and souvenirs, including Average Joe dogtags and a Joe Stanky’s Army khaki T-shirt, with the pear-shaped (less so after diets and death marches) one’s silhouette in white beneath the arc of the lettering. This despite Stanky’s obvious displeasure with everyone involved. He was angry at me because I had stolen his top hat and refused to push back the time of the performance to 10 o’clock so he could join the crowd in front of the library waiting for the return of Black William (their number had swelled to more than three hundred since the arrival of the science team from Pitt, led by a youngish professor who, with his rugged build and mustache and plaid wool shirts, might have stepped out of an ad for trail mix). He was angry at Geno and Jerry for the usual reasons—they were incompetent clowns, they didn’t understand the music, and they had spurned the opportunity to watch TV with him and Liz. Throughout the hour and a quarter show, he sulked and spoke not a word to the audience, and then grew angry at them when a group of frat boys initiated a chant of “Skanky, Skanky, Skanky…” Yet the vast majority were blown away and my night was made when I spotted an A&R man from Atlantic sneaking around.
I was in my office the next morning, reading the Gazette, which had come late to the party (as usual) and was running a light-hearted feature on “Pennsylvania’s Brain Capital,” heavy on Colvin Mason quotes, when I received a call from Crazy Ed in Wilkes-Barre, saying that he’d emailed me a couple of enhancements of Pin’s photograph. I opened the emails and the attachments, then asked what I was looking at.
“Beats me,” said Ed. “The first is up close on one of those white dealies. You can get an idea of the shape. Sort of like a sea urchin. A globe with spines…except there’s so many spines, you can’t make out the globe. You see it?”
“Yeah. You can’t tell me what it is?”
“I don’t have a clue.” Ed made a buzzing noise, something he did whenever he was stumped. “I assumed the image was fake, that the kid had run two images together, because there’s a shift in perspective between the library and the white dealies. They look like they’re coming from a long way off. But then I realized the perspective was totally fucked up. It’s like part of the photo was taken though a depth of water, or something that’s shifting like water. Different sections appear to be at different distances all through the image. Did you notice a rippling effect…or anything like that?”
“I only saw it for a couple of seconds. I didn’t have time to get much more than a glimpse.”
“Okay.” Ed made the buzzing noise again. “Have you opened the second attachment?”
“Yep.”
“Once I figured out I couldn’t determine distances, I started looking at the black stuff, the field or whatever. I didn’t get anywhere with that. It’s just black. Undifferentiated. Then I took a look at the horizon line. That’s how it appeared to you, right? A black field stretching to a horizon? Well, if that was the case, you’d think you’d see something at the front edge, but the only thing I picked up was those bumps on the horizon.”
I studied the bumps.
“Kinda look like the tops of heads, don’t they?” said Ed.
The bumps could have been heads; they could also have been bushes, animals, or a hundred other things; but his suggestion gave me an uneasy feeling. He said he would fool around with the picture some more and get back to me. I listened to demos. Food of the Gods (King Crimson redux). Corpus Christy (a transsexual front man who couldn’t sing, but the name grew on me). The Land Mines (middling roots rock). Gopher Lad (a heroin band from Minnesota). A band called Topless Coroner intrigued me, but I passed after realizing all their songs were about car parts. Around eleven-thirty I took a call from a secretary at Dreamworks who asked if I would hold for William Wine. I couldn’t place the name, but said that I would hold and leafed through the Roll-o-dex, trying to find him.