From the virago's neck there hung a pendant upon which was strung in miniature a skull, a piano, an arrow, a baby's shoe, and a yellowed tooth.
'What are those?' Marvin asked.
'Symbols,' she said.
'Of what?'
'Come on upstairs, and I'll show you, sweety-ass.'
'And thus,' the saddlebum intoned, 'we perceive the true unmediated confrontation of the aroused feminine nature, 'gainst which our masculine fancies seem mere baby's toys.'
'C'mon!' the harpy cried, wriggling her gross body in a counterfeit of passion all the more frightening because it was real. 'Upstairs to bed!' she shouted, pressing against Marvin with a breast the size and consistency of an empty Mongolian saddlebag. 'I'll really show ya somepin!' she cried, entwining his thews with a heavy white leg, somewhat grimy and heavily varicosed. 'When ya git loved by me,' she howled, 'you'll damned well know you been loved!' And she ground lasciviously against him with her pudenda, which was as heavily armoured as the forehead of a Tyrannosaurus.
'Well, er, thank you so terribly much anyhow,' Marvin said, 'but I don't think just at the moment I-'
'You don't want no lovin'?' the woman asked incredulously.
'Well, actually, I can't really say that I do.'
The woman planted knobkerry fists on tom-tom hips and said, 'That I should live to see this day!' But then she softened, and said, 'Turn not away from Venus' sweet-perfumed home of pleasure! Thou must strive, sir, to overcome this most unseemly gesture of unmanliness. Come, my lord! The bugle sounds; it awaits thee now to mount and fiercely press thy charge!'
'Oh, I rather think not,' Marvin said, laughing hollowly.
She seized him by the throat with a hand the size and shape of a Chilean poncho. 'You'll do it now, you lousy cowardly inward-directed goddamn narcissist bastard, and you'll do it good and proper, or by Ares I'll snap your scrawny windpipe like a Michaelmas chicken!'
A tragedy seemed in the making, for the woman's passion rendered her incapable of a judicious modification of her demands, while Marvin's reputed great vaulting lance had shrunken to the size of a pea. (Thus blind nature, by defending him from one assault, tendered provocation for another.)
Lucidly the saddlebum, following the dictates of his wit if not his predilection, snatched a fan out of his gun belt, leaned forward simpering, and tapped the enraged woman on her rhinocerine upper arm.
'Don't you dare hurt him!' the saddlebum said, his voice a squeaky contralto.
Marvin, quick if not apt, rejoindered, 'Yes, tell her to stop pawing me! I mean to say it is simply too much, one cannot even stroll out of one's house in the evening without encountering some disgraceful incident-'
'Don't cry, for God's sake, don't cry!' the saddlebum said. 'You know I can't stand it when you cry!'
'I am not crying!' Marvin said, snuffling. 'It is just that she has ruined this shirt. Your present!'
'I'll get you another!' the saddlebum said. 'But I cannot abide another scene!'
The woman was staring at them slack-jawed, and Marvin was able to utilize her moment of inattention by taking a pry bar out of his tool kit, setting it under her swollen red fingers, and prying himself free of her grip. Seizing the dwindling moment of opportunity, Marvin and the saddlebum sprinted out the door, leaped around the comer, broadjumped across the street, and polevaulted to freedom.
Chapter 17
Once clear of the immediate danger, Marvin came abruptly to his senses. The scales of metaphoric deformation fell away for the moment, and he experienced a perceptual experiential remission. It was all too painfully apparent now, that the 'saddlebum' was actually a large parasite beetle of the species S Cthulu. There could be no mistake about this, since the Cthulu beetle is characterized by a secondary salivary duct located just below and slightly to the left of the suboesophegal ganglion.
These beetles feed upon borrowed emotions, their own having long ago atrophied. Typically, they lurk in dark and shadowy places, waiting for a careless Celsian to pass within range of their segmented maxilla. That is what happened to Marvin.
Realizing this, Marvin directed at the beetle an emotion of anger so powerful that the Cthulu, victim of its own hyperacute emotional receptors, fell over unconscious in the road. That done, Marvin readjusted his gold-bronze casing, stiffened his antennae, and continued down the road.
He came to a bridge that crossed a great flowing river of sand. Standing on the centre span, he gazed downwards into the black depths that rolled inexorably onwards to the mysterious sand sea. Half-hypnotized he gazed, the nose ring beating its quick tattoo of mortality three times faster than the beat of his hearts. And he thought:
Bridges are receptacles of opposed ideas. Their horizontal distance speaks to us of our transcendence; their vertical declivity reminds us unalterably of the imminence of failure, the sureness of death. We push outwards across obstacles, but the primordial fall is forever beneath our feet. We build, construct, fabricate; but death is the supreme architect, who shapes heights only that there may be depths.
O Celsians, throw your well-wrought bridges across a thousand rivers, and tie together the disparate contours of the planet; your mastery is for naught, for the land is still beneath you, still waiting, still patient. Celsians, you have a road to follow, but it leads assuredly to death. Celsians, despite your cunning, you have one lesson still to learn: the heart is fashioned to receive the spear, and all other effects are extraneous.
These were Marvin's thoughts as he stood on the bridge. And a great longing overcame him, a desire to be finished with desire, to forgo pleasure and pain, to quit the petty modes of achievement and failure, to have done with distractions, and get on with the business of life, which was death.
Slowly he climbed to the rail, and there stood poised over the twisting currents of sand. Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a shadow detach itself from a pillar, move tentatively to the rail, stand erect, poise itself over the abyss and lean precariously outwards-
'Stop! Wait!' Marvin cried. His own desire for destruction had been abruptly terminated. He saw only a fellow creature in peril.
The shadowy figure gasped, and abruptly lunged towards the yawning river below. Marvin moved simultaneously and managed to catch an ankle.
The ensuing wrench almost pulled him over the rail. But recovering quickly, Marvin attached suckers to the porous stone sidewalk, spread his lower limbs for maximum purchase, wrapped two upper limbs around a light pole, and maintained a tenacious grip with his remaining two arms.
There was a moment of charged equilibrium; then Marvin's strength prevailed over the weight of the would-be suicide. Slowly, carefully, Marvin pulled, shifting his grip from tarsus to tibia, hauling without respite until he had brought that person to a point of safety on the roadbed of the bridge.
All recollection of his own self-destructive desires had left him. He strode forward and grasped the suicider by the shoulders, shaking fiercely.
'You damned fool!' Marvin shouted. 'What kind of a coward are you? Only an idiot or a madman takes an out like that. Haven't you any guts at all, you darnned-'
He stopped in mid-expletive. The would-be suicide was facing him, trembling, eyes averted. And now Marvin perceived, for the first time, that he had rescued a woman.
Chapter 18
Later, in a private booth in a bridgeside restaurant, Marvin apologized for his harsh words, which had been torn from him by shock rather than conviction. But the woman, gracefully clicking her claw, refused to accept his apology.