"Tell me, Slick: are you wearing that expression to match your breath, or are you this lowdown for real?"
When I regained myself I told her that this was about as real as it got, and as lowdown.
"Good," she said. "I hate a phony funk. Mind if I join you? I'll even share your troubles…"
She came around without waiting for an answer, tapping her way to a place beside me.
"So. How do you explain this hangdog face?"
"I swallowed more than I can bite off," was all I told her. I didn't think this myopic little freak would understand more, even if I could explain it.
"Just don't spit up on me," she warned. She leaned around to get a closer look at my face. "Y'know, dude, you look kind of familiar. What do they call you besides ugly?" She stuck out a skeletal hand. "I'm called the Vacu-Dame, because I'm out in deep space most of the time."
I took the hand. It was warm and thin, but not a bit skeletal. "You can call me the Véjà Dude."
She made a sound like a call-in beeper with a fresh battery. I guessed it was supposed to be a laugh. "Very good, Slick. That's why you look so familiar, eh? Very clever. So what's with all the pictures stuck on that book in your lap? Photos of your famous flashbacks?"
"In a way. The pictures are from a bus trip I took once with my gang. The book's an ancient Chinese work called The Book of Changes."
"Oh, yeah? Which translation? The Richard Wilhelm? Let me have a look at it, so to speak."
I handed her the book and she held it up to her face. I was beginning to suspect that this freak might understand more than I thought.
"It's the English edition. That's what I used when I first started throwing the Ching. Then I thought I'd try using Wilhelm in his original German. I wanted to see if it helped the poetic parts. I found such a veritable shitload of difference between the two that I thought, 'Shit, if it loses this much from German into English, how much must've been lost from ancient Chinese to German?' So I decide to hell with it all. The last Ching I threw I threw at my degenerate Seeing Eye dog for turning over my wastepaper basket looking for Tampons. The sonofabitch thought I was playing games. He grabbed the book and ran outside with it, and by the time I tracked him down he'd consumed every page. He was a German shepherd. When he found something written in his ancestral tongue he just couldn't put it down. What's all this glass underfoot, incidentally? Did you drop something or did I just miss a Jewish marriage? I don't care for dogs but I love a good wedding. It gives the adults an excuse to get soused and let all the dirty laundry hang out. Is that where you're bringing such a booze breath back from, Ace? A big wedding?"
"I'm bringing it back from Disney World, believe it or not."
"I believe it. On the Red Eye Rocket. Here, you better put your fancy book away before I see a dog."
When I tried to reach around her for my bag I bumped her staff. It tipped and fell before I could grab it.
"Watch it!" she shrilled. "That's my third eye you're knocking in the broken glass!"
She picked it up and turned around to stand it behind the couch, out of danger. Then she leaned close again and gave me a fierce frown. "You're the one broke it too, ain't you? No wonder you got such a guilty look on you, cursed with such a clumsy goddamn nature."
For all her frowning, I couldn't help but grin at her. She didn't seem as fierce as she looked, really. She might not have realized she was frowning all the time. She wasn't as hopelessly homely as she first appeared, either, I decided. Or as titless.
"Speaking of curses," I said, "what was that one of yours the other day? It was formidable."
"Oh, that," she said. The frown vanished instantly. She drew her knees up to her chin and wrapped her arms around her shins. "It isn't mine," she confessed. "It's Gary Snyder's, mostly, a poem of his called 'Spel Against Demons.' You want to know why I happened to memorize it? Because one time I spray-painted the entire thing. On a football field. Remember when Billy Graham held that big rally in Multnomah Stadium a couple of years back?"
"You're the one who did that?"
"From goal line to goal line. It took nineteen rattle cans and most of the night. Some of the words were ten yards big."
"So, you're the famous phantom field-writer? Far damn out. The paper said the writing was completely illegible."
"It was dark! I've got a shaky pen hand!"
"You were plenty legible the other afternoon," I prompted. I wanted to keep her talking. I saw her cheeks color at the compliment, and she started rocking back and forth, hugging her knees.
"I was plenty ripped is what I was," she said. "Besides, I recite better than I handwrite."
She rocked awhile in thought, frowning straight ahead. The sun was almost out of sight in the ridgeline across the river, and the light in the room had softened. The chrome trim was turning the color of butter. All of a sudden she clapped her hands.
"Now I remember!" She aimed a finger at me. "Where I know your melancholy mug from: the dust jacket of your goddamn novel! So far-damn-out to you too!"
She started to rock again. It wouldn't have surprised me to see her put her thumb in her mouth.
"I'm something of a writer myself," she let me know, "when I'm not something else. Right now I'm an astral traveler on layover. Too far over, too, after two days of Miss Seal's Bed and Breakfast."
I told her she didn't look nearly as far laid over as the others I saw up there. This made her blush again.
"I cheek the tranqs," she confided. "I never swallow anything they give me. Watch -"
She felt around between her ragged deck shoes until she found a big shard of glass. She tossed it to the back of her mouth and swallowed. She opened wide to show nothing but teeth and tongue, then a moment later spat the shard tinkling across the new tile. "Want to know the reason they hauled me in here? Because I dropped three big blotter Sunshines and went paradin' around the rotunda at the capitol. Want to know why I got so ripped? I was celebrating the completion of my new novel. Want to know the name of it?"
I told her that as a matter of fact I would like to know the name of her novel. I couldn't help but feel that somebody was getting their leg pulled, but I didn't care. I was fascinated.
"I called it Teenage Girl Genius Takes Over the World! Not too shabby a title, huh?"
I conceded that I'd heard worse, especially for first novels. "First your ass! This is my goddamn third. My first was called Tits & Zits and my second is Somewhere Ovary Rainbows. Shallow shit, those first two, I admit it. Juvenile pulp pap. But I think Girl Genius has got some balls to it. Hey, let me ask you something! My publisher wants to reprint the first two and bring all three out as a package. But I'm not so sure. What's your thinking on that plan, as one novelist to another?"
I didn't know what to think. Was she on the level or lying or crazy or what? She sounded serious, but that could have been like the frown. I couldn't get over that feeling of a pulling sensation on my leg. I avoided her question with one of my own.