Old Gold wrestled the woman towards her son. Benches scraped the floor and tipped. Brethren scurried, parted.
I stood, shook Trubate's hand off my arm.
"This is fucking crazy!" I shouted. "Stop this now! Take him down!"
"Or what?"
"I'll call the police. They might be interested in your idea of dinner theater."
"Steve," said Heinrich, "darling Steve, that there is the threat of a victim, not a hero. A phone call? You're going to make a phone call? Man, are you neck deep in the big dark darkety dark."
"Take him down now," I said.
I saw heavy movement in my periphery. Heinrich bore down on me with glittery eyes.
"Hey," he said. "It's just a hummer."
Heinrich said, "Start anywhere."
Heinrich said, "Let memory scamper to the glades of the now."
It's hard to believe people buy this brand of tripe. But then you picture the very same man pressing a SIG Sauer barrel to the brow of a sleeping Indian, a trussed nun.
You let it slide.
Heinrich gave me a ballpoint pen, a notebook with a Velcro flap. The Velcro, he said, was so I'd feel safe.
"Like a seat belt?" I said.
It was a good pop, spleen region. Put me on my knees.
"Like a seat belt," he said. "That's humorous."
It's hard to know what's humorous anymore.
I started the first notebook soon after my head wound healed, the one I received the night Estelle Burke publicly pleasured her son. Sorry to say I missed that particular spectacle. It was Parish, I later discovered, who did me my concussive honors, employing what he termed the "old cast-iron hat."
I've been writing, or itemizing, as they call it, ever since.
Heinrich says I'd better get it all down. He believes I'm really dying. Sees it in my eyes, he says. Dimness and some flickering. It's nothing any doctor could detect.
"What if I'm not dying?" I say.
"God forbid," he says.
"Itemize, itemize," he says.
I haven't written anything like this in years. The copy I confected for a living was never more than a line or two, designed to capture the allure of the new, to shimmer with efficient leisure and sumptuous toil, the ongoing orgasm of the information lifestyle: "Software with a Soft Touch," I wrote, or "Reality for Those Who Dream," or, simply, "How Did You Like Tomorrow?"
You've probably seen my work on billboards, on takeout coffee cups, between perfumed pullouts in those surveys of venality otherwise known as slicks. Somebody actually wrote this crap, you said to yourself.
You were absolutely right.
I was a droplet in the steady rain of crap.
I had, I guess, like my father before me, a naif's faith in words. When I was twelve, thirteen, I won the fire safety essay contest for a longish tract, "The Oil-Soaked Rags of Death." Captain Thornfield, he of the silvery sidewhiskers and exquisitely braided dress cap, lauded my genius to an assembly of my peers.
"You boys and girls should take some pointers from this young man," said the captain. "Most especially the part about how the family unit must establish a regrouping area a good distance from any hypothetical conflagration."
I took his praise to be the seeds of fervent tutelage. The next contest nearly a year away, I dashed off another treatise, "Five Alarm Souclass="underline" Studies in Hazard," delivered it to the captain at the borough fire station. Included was an appendix citing each instance of tire tower thuggery I'd suffered at the hands of his hoodlum sons. I wanted the poor man to forsake his blood for the purity of our flame-retardant enterprise, to rid himself of his progeny, take me under his sooty wing.
I never heard back from the captain.
Then it was all those English major essays, user manuals for the spirit's vaporware.
I was kind of a whiz at it, too. My father took pride in my hermeneutic seizuring. He wanted for his son anything but his mode, a poetics in the service of multispeed blenders. I shamed him soon enough, shilling for the silicon sultanates.
"Too Much? Too Fast? Tough Cookies-Deal or Die," I wrote when they wanted something Boom-punchy.
I got a raise, an options package, new digs.
I got a regrouping area in hell.
It'd be nice to know how long I've been here at the Center. Clocks and calendars do not abound. Heinrich says he won't turn tricks for time, that suns and moons and seasons are taunts enough. Sometimes I crave the old exactitude, daydream about the timepieces I threw away back when the Philosopher and the Mechanic first handed down my verdict, my suspended sentence, my frozen state. Now I live life in vague thick drift, my days something crated in Styrofoam, shipment on hold.
I got a phone privilege a while back, called Fiona, begged her to fetch me, her suffering pa. She said she was locked into her own emotional arc at the moment, couldn't afford the shift in trajectory.
She'll be fourteen in June.
"Besides, Daddy," she said. "What are you complaining about? You're alive, aren't you? You're riddled with PREXIS and you're defying all odds. Something must be working."
"I'm not riddled. I hate that. Riddled. Anyway, there's probably no such thing as PREXIS."
"Whatever, dude. I mean, Dad."
Every morning after First Calling I do my bubble dance while Parish preps, a vegetable slaughter. The man raves on between swipes of his Chinese cleaver.
"You're in the weeds now, skipper! You're in the weedy weeds! Look at all those spoons and saucers! They're so dirty!"
"I'm a crawling king snake," I say.
"You're nothing, babyducks. I'm the stewman and you're the stewboy. I'm your daddy in food!"
"Knock it off, Parish."
Which only induces him to start thwapping me with a slotted spoon.
"Baby! Babycakes!"
"Cut the shit, Parish."
"I'll cut your mother's shit. I'll eat it."
"Bet you will."
"Is that an insult?"
"Just let me do my job."
"You don't have a job, you have a chore. Read the fucking Tenets."
"I've read them."
"All you've read is the back of the tater tot box."
Thwap.
"Stop it."
"I'll stop when you admit to me that I'm the stewman and you're the stewboy."
"Okay, Parish, I'm the stewboy. But you're crazy."
"I'm in a healing process, yuppie fuck. I walk the high road."
Thwap.
"Violence will be met with decisive violence," I say.
"Very good. You have read the Tenets. That's a nice one, too. I'll make sure it's engraved on your tombstone, Skippy."
Thwap. Thwap.
Punch bread time, perchance?
Emancipated by the advent of Parish's inevitable dopamine downtick, I'll seek solitude in the trance pasture, or study the Tenets until dinnertime. Some nights Heinrich might have a word or two for the collective ear, a disquisition on the condition of our republic, the United Stooges of Moronica, he calls it, or, rarely, announce an evening of cabin visits. There's a weekly square dance called by Parish which enough of us boycott to render the event more amplified cris de coeur than hoedown. ("Bow to your partner," Parish will command, "now bow to your neighbor who was banging your partner while you were in the hospital with hepatitis.")
Mostly I look for lulls in the evening when I can slip off to the brush with Renee. Yes, Renee. Her initial bluff was hurt entreaty, I guess, because a few mornings after we met she wheeled up to my cabin door and announced she was curious about terminal cock.