The lights revolve and revolve slower and revolve to dimmer upon every revolution — and with them, that sound: this siren roaring the lights dark until the desert’s returned to still, and a pouting lip of hum the only sign left as if the airing of the feminine valley’s imminent swallow, or yawn, just over the unbushed dune and then, the wet ocean itself of sound and of no sound…a mumming filling the deserts above of faith and below of privation and sand without water to parch stuffed the stomach and soul, in a building buzz, a stir in the making: this whirlwind of noise expanding out, enlarging throughout the desert unzoned without echo — unto the houses of 90210, the newly moved into homes amid the Hills that once were called Beverly as if that name were an appropriate descriptor, whether adjective or adverb, an alien form of rich, or freely; Holywood we’re talking, and shaking its own higher Hills, too, trembling them, humbling, filling the western emptiness and the further decks, porches and patios, the stiltpads, Casacrumbles, decrepit mansions missioned with Moorish peaks, Spanish tiles, rattling the glass kept over the idols worshipped as Oscar and Emmy and Grammy and even token Golden Globes how they’re preserved unembarrassed, gildingly imaged godlets not yet hocked out of shame, then shattering them, their faces melting, molten as if a slip of golden sand…a hum that encompasses every July Fourth explosion, almost knocks Him over on His way out across the sand, across sands, a sound He’s seething against, forearm shielding His face from the sky’s frozen pelts and the winded skinnings of dune, the real and sharp hurling of sand in the eyes, in the ears, to mouth away to mud lump, to swallow a golem’s reward — to follow, obey…and then, just as suddenly as it all landed began, it fades, with a sound of poweringdown, as a spring of tongue, almost an aeroplane’s inflatable emergency ramp effusing a refreshing moisture, rolls out the front of the ship, wags itself into wakeless waves, stairs — are they; wroughtiron handrail, which can accurately be dated to an age in which craftsmanship still counted, extends from the sides then fastens into position: two flights up with a landing between is what Ben ascends, how can’t He, pausing on the landing only for breath, then continuing, the stairs givingout sop underneath as if sponges or Hanna’s always in use rag squeezed underfoot by His fisting weight borne down from above, to stand at a wide door that has to be oak to look that good and that sturdy, scratching Himself, spent, stubbly, to ring at the only labeled buzzer—Herr Doktor Professor Froid, DUJ, it says — overtimes and rapidly more than is considered polite by convention.
Haben Sie einen Termin? a voice answers, and it’s maybe a woman’s.
There’s no need to be calling me names.
Moment mal! the same voice nasals, then, in a moment, femininely adds, bitte…the door buzzes shrilly, and Ben shoulders it open in slow trepidation not into a ship as expected, its bridge as imagined in the mind of the culture replete with flagrant blinking, gross boinks, and that whole sound effect, trick lighting life, no — but into the confines of the temporally, terrenely familiar: an office, not quite, more like a lobby or waitingroom for an office, half of one it seems, unfinished, unmade. He stands around still scratching, taking it in. Disappointed, amazed. To explain: this lobby has its totems, its artifacts, the refuse of Sumer, the rubble of Ur, shards, partijugs, hemiamphoræ, amorphous fragments of marble and papyri and whittled rockstone and clay that’s been baked in the sun most ancient and same — an image is becoming complete in His mind, though, assembling unconsciously, the who knew from Other made real, now made whole: these relics, these shards, are — or at least how they appear to be to a mind so entirely worried with itself, its own losses — the missing pieces, the missing halves, quarters and who says so blah blah, of the artifacts whose damage is displayed in the offices of the two Doctors Tweiss; the Tweiss twins have the jug without handle, and this waitingroom — it just has to be a waitingroom — has the handle without the jug; the Tweiss’ office has the leftarm of a fertility goddess in lime, and…nu, you’re so smart, this office has the rest of her, how she’s looking well, too. And so the only question left, or not the only question but the pressingest to Ben whose time it is being wasted, is whose waitingroom is this; rather, He’s waiting here in this room for what and, as His followup, why? To one side, two little green what do you call thems, interstellar merchants of a substance that would preciously translate to diamonds, it seems they’re arguing a sale; to the other, two little greens painting portraits of each other in oils and both on quick glimpse are the same; they’re accompanied by a string quartet played by another alone with eight maybe hectocotylian hands; the music light and quick by a Mendelssohn still unknown as suspected lost or unborn.
Hier entlang, bitte, what has to be a nurse says, a voice identical to that that came through the intercom at door. It leads Ben down a hall whose ceiling’s lined with projections of galactic phenomena, framed images in still then in motion, too, as if screened stuff, skydark and starrily twinkling; their entire effect, though, rather cheap, chintzy, until He realizes they’re portals outside, and this is the launch: a sustained rattling, a shaking then a total uprooting, a snowing of sand, and then a tentative hover. As the nurse it must be, like them alclass="underline" shellfishy, treyf, sucks and spits forward in odd jets and spurts it’s hard to keep up with, scuttling cuttle how it siphons itself propelled down the hall, she leaves behind her if any sex’s hers this black clammy discharge that slowly, though imperceptibly (He’s staring as the ship evens out in its spin), becomes absorbed, or assimilated, into an ether that soon, without gravity, in all weightlessness, will become hung with little droplets of this ink heavy at bottom but floating, as if an interior of negative night — to avoid them, to duck and dodge as the thrusts do what they do. With a massive exertion the ship rises again, this time warpsped to smash through the atmosphere and into the void, and He’s tumbled by the force of the rumble, its lift down the hall to smack against another solid wood door, which opens to fall Him in welcome.
Ich bin Doktor Froid, also sprachs the apparition meeting Ben over the threshold holding open the door by a muscular and hairy hydrostatic tentacle suckling knob; and either this is the language aliens speak, or the good Doktor’s just flown down from atop Mount Sinaius, affecting the sentimental out one nostril, the nostalgic out the other — two tablets to assuage the adenoidal, with an additional heil from tonsils deep in the glottal to this indescribably guttural Europan language, spoken today in no Europa known; a tongue ethnically tentacular itself as it’s reaching, always louder and damning, both velar and palatal but always emphatic, whatever it is, and from where besides the mouth opened wide in His very own head. Und your acquaintance, it says, or he, ist very gut to finally macht…waddles up from the armchair on four of his or its seasidereal, iridescent appendages, to greet Ben with two suctorial kisses, one for each cheek, which Ben’s then compelled to return unfairly, with four kisses, one for each of the cheeks of the Doktor, or for what He perceives as cheeks, which are really four faces, each slickly bearded and with two cheeks each of their own, sopping with respiration’s expectoration or shvitz.