Everything changed. Jesus was now in jail baptized in a network of epileptic violence awaiting trial for possession. (He'd moved uptown into a foxy apartment on West Eighty-Second and had started dealing heavy shit. So the possession charge was good luck.) Mason thought about Jesus: fed up with the witty and giddy and pleas and fleas. Blessed are the poor, blessed are the pure; blessed are the persecuted. Lying on his big bed, Mason, Mason. Busted a week ago, Jesus wouldn't get more than, say, a year, maybe two, if he got a rotten judge. Maybe he'd be lucky enough to get a liberal. Edith, Edith: where could she've hidden herself — with all her loose ends still here in the city. She'd sold her lease and split. And Brad. Well, Mason knew his story: dude living it up big, high on the hog, in the fast lane, jamming, strutting, buying drinks for his dizzy bunch of new friends, trying to fingerbop-pop with the jaded and slick crowds at the Brass Rail, Eddie Condon's, Basin Street and Max's Kansas City, and all the padded bars from Waverly Place all the way up to East Fifty-Seventh. (The hit had yielded close to four hundred-thousand split four ways: and the last time Mason saw Edith she was driving a Mercedes…) Mason looked at his new typewriter, a Selectric, on the table over by the window. A sheet was on the spooclass="underline" the beginning of the vita he was typing for Moreparke at Cowie Speakers' Bureau. Miss Mufinsnat'd thought his first effort needed editing down. He'd reduce it from twenty-five pages to six: something she could send around… Moving on with the change. Would Painted Turtle return? You're full of catfish. You flap like a bee bee-shot bluejay. Click, click. A little hemp wouldn't be bad right now. Help? He got up, went to the typewriter, sat, but only gazed out the window: sky full of goldfish. No, look again: that's the building across the street. No, I tell you it's a red sunset.
He felt it too soon to crack the ice at the invisible empire, the Magnan-Rockford Foundation. Maybe just scared? What was this nonsense about needing a solid base first? Which base? More confidence? Step first into “his” old shoes, autograph a few books, speak to audiences from behind podiums? He'd been at Fifty-Two Gramercy Park North ten days before he broke down and bought himself a drink at the bar downstairs. It was in celebration of Moreparke's apparent trust and belief. Cool, but stay on your toes: bob like a buoy: because there's always the chance The Impostor might turn up, a-and, and what if Brad fucks up, Jesus squeals… The word is deep cooclass="underline" swing low, sweetly. You got shoes, I got shoes. The Impostor could try a hoax. Mason sipped the White Horse hearing the rich click of ice against glass. He smoked a Camel. Hadn't it happened to Barthelme? Somebody published stories under his name. The real Barthelme got wind of it; asked the guy to stop; wrote a letter to
The New York Times Book Review, denying authorship. And what about that guy who claimed to have collaborated with Howard Hughes on that autobiography? April fool! Simple Simon! Watch out for the trap-door! Pay attention: in a day or two, John Moreparke'd said, he might have a tentative tour outlined. They could discuss it. Moreparke felt the MRF grant'd given the writer enough recent publicity to make a domestic tour possible: people were interested in winners, in money. (“Are you with us Mister Mason?”) Two protein-fed guys who were participants at the annual convention of organic chemists working in the polymer field were talking shop two iron stools down. Mason'd seen the banner out in the lobby. A bespangled husband and wife with a purse the size of a canoe, farther along, were drinking gin in blue silence. All realistic. All over fifty. Mason finished his drink. Back upstairs in his large room, with sitting room and French shutters, he sat himself down again at the cold, infernal machine. This he called moving on. Time. From day one till this circlet of anxiety he'd felt the uncharitable end — which, though, he could now reason, was only a transition, was still an end. The jammed-up feeling of having to move on, to flail against the quickly located details… Everything continued to change: Moreparke's itinerary for Mason: unpromising programs at: University of Maryland; Howard University; Brooklyn College; Sarah Lawrence; University of Washington at Seattle; University of Colorado at Boulder. Miss Mufinsnat, a scarecrow with bug eyes, had neatly typed out the schedule, complete with names and numbers of hosts on twenty-five percent rag. Mason in jeans and sports jacket picked it up from John (it was John now “please”) who was, bless his gut, a water buffalo in a suit. In defiance of “man” Mason pushed his way through the crowd at Kennedy. He was doing the “Big Foot Jump.” With his new leather carry-on, he found twenty-eight C, Smoking. The gray-haired man next to him was reading In Defense of Man. The taxi out was smooth. That picture of the horsefaced woman on John's desk? Cowie Junior's daughter. And Miss Mufinsnat a cousin of the Cowie's. One of the top three of its kind, old grandpa Cowie, who started the business in 1895 had died in 1931 when Junior was twenty-five. Mason stroked his lapel at his curious good luck. Yet there were worries: what was left of the hundred thousand — most of it — was not in a safe place: (locked in the trunk of the VW bug he'd bought after the hit) but taking the chance was part of his so-called defiance. The beetle was itself in a garage two blocks north of the Gramercy, parked in a dark corner three stories below the sidewalk. They were ascending now. Now they were up. All was well. Now they landed at National. February cold: damp, freezing. The taxi to flat, bleak College Park was being driven by a brown-skinned man with weepy eyes and freckles. He kept watching Mason in the rear-viewer. What puzzlement. Looking out, Mason imagined he was in Africa, in a big industrial city: the faces along the sidewalks and at intersections waiting to cross were saffron nutmeg black ivory with an occasionally pink or ivory white. And government buildings with massive columns, clusters of shopping areas. Traffic was sluggish. A membrane lampglow over everything. Early evening drizzle. Miserable shit weather. The last time he'd been here was during Martin Luther King's famous March on Washington. He'd gotten sick from the spoiled mayonnaise on his salami sandwich. Now Mason (free of his guns) felt as “clean” and “respectable” as he had in those days: as credible. He certainly looked like a person of respect and position. In a way, this pigtail-jerker was flying “home.” Like Lionel Hampton, like Ellison's character in the short story. Home, surely was that profound and elusive. How could it be otherwise? It was not the heart of darkness: not completely: not color: not completely. Not place. He looked out again at his dark people along the sidewalk. My people? No confetti floated over the city as he arrived. As the cab inched its way, in bumper to bumper traffic, on the Belt, he looked over through the trees and saw what he imagined to be the lights of Georgetown. O spirit of Toomer, stay, give me comfort, direction, in this chaos! (That night Mason rigged up a branding “iron”—made of a metal E on a key-chain and an M on a tie-clasp. He branded himself with this emblem: M/E. Almost passed out. Later, in the mirror he thought the view of his chest impressive.)