Complete Stories (52 page)

“Hold real still.” He steadied himself and unvalved the cumberquark for a half turn, then tightened it back.

Mrraaaow! Kissycat landed on his feet, right on the circle of cloth that had been part of Rex’s chairset upstairs. Marjorie stared down through the hole in her newspaper at him and cried out his name. Spotting Rex, the cat took off down the hall, heading for the dark recesses of the basement.

Everything was okay for a moment there, but then Zee had to speak back up. “I was thinking, Marjorie, about a wild new way to have sex. I could put the cumberquark’s central sphere in your womb and turn you inside out and—”

With a major effort of will, Rex got himself out the door and on the street before Zee could finish her suggestion. Marjorie watched him leave, too stunned to react.

The three mile drive home seemed to take a very long time. As the hot summer air beat in through the open car window, Rex kept thinking about inside out. What was the very innermost of all—the one/many language of quantum logic? And what, finally, was outermost of all—dead Aristotle’s Empyrean? Zee knew, or maybe she didn’t. Though Zee was not so scalebound as Rex, she was still finite, and her levels reached only so far, both up and down. There’s a sense in which zero is as far away as infinity: you can keep halving your size or keep doubling, but you never get to zero or infinity.

Rex’s thoughts grew less abstract. His perceptions were so loosened by the morning’s play that he kept seeing things inside out. Passing through Killeville, he could hear the bored platypus honking inside the offices, outside the tense exchanges in the Pizza Hut kitchens, inside the slow rustlings in the black people’s small shops, outside the redundant empty Killeville churches, inside the funeral homes with secret stinks, outside the huge “fine homes” with only a widow home, inside a supermarket office with the manager holding a plain teenage girl clerk on his gray-clad knees, outside a plastic gallon of milk. Entering his neighborhood, Rex could see into his neighbor’s hearts, see the wheels of worry and pain; and finally he could understand how little anyone else’s problems connected to his now. No one cared about him, nobody but Candy.

There were four strange cars in front of his house. A rusty pickup, a beetle, an MG, and a Japanese pickup. Rex knew the MG was Roland Brody’s, but who the hell were those other people?

There was a man sitting on Rex’s porch steps, a redneck who worked at the gas station. He smiled thinly and patted the spot on the porch next to him.

“Hydee. Ah’m Jody. And Ah believe yore her old man. Poor son. Hee hee.”

“This isn’t right.”

Another man hollered out the front door, a banker platypus in his white undershirt and flipperlength black socks. “Get some brew, Jodih, and we’ll all go back for seconds! She goin’ strong!”

Laughter drifted down from the second floor. The phone was ringing.

Rex staggered about on the sidewalk there, in the hot sun, reeling under the impact of all this nightmare. What could he do? Candy had flipped, she was doing it with every guy she vaguely even knew! A Plymouth van full of teenage boys pulled into Rex’s drive. He recognized the driver from church, but the boy didn’t recognize Rex.

“Is old lady Redman still up there putting out?” asked the callow, lightly mustached youth.

Rex put his briefcase down on the ground and took out the cumberquark. “You better get out of here, kid. I’m Mr. Redman.”

The van backed up rapidly and drove off. Rex could hear the excited boys whooping and laughing. Jody smiled down at him from the porch. Standing there in the high-noon moment, Rex could hear moans from upstairs. His wife; his wife having an orgasm with another man. This was just so—

“Poor Rex,” said Zee. “That Alf is awful. He’s not even from Earth.”

“Shut up, you bitch,” said Rex, starting up the steps.

“You gonna try and whup me?” Jody’s hands were large and callused. He was ready for a fight. In Jody’s trailerpark circles, fighting went with sex.

Rex spread the cumberquark out to the size of a washing machine and cut off its rotation. There was a lot of noise in his head: thumps and jabber. Jody rose up into a crouch. Rex lunged forward, spreading the cumberquark just a bit wider. For a frozen second there, the outer sphere surrounded Jody, and Rex cut the hyperflow on.

The surface was opaque fractal fuzz. You wouldn’t have known someone was inside if it hadn’t been for the wah-wah-wah sound of Jody’s screams, chopped into pulses by the hyperflow. The cumberquark rested solidly on the hole it had cut into the porch steps.

“You’re next, man,” Rex yelled to the platypus man looking out the front door. “I’m going to kill you, you preppy bastard!” With rapid movements of his bill and flippers, the banker got in his black Toyota truck and left. Rex turned Jody off to see what was what.

Not right. Edge-on to all normal dimensions, Jody was an annular cut-out, a slice of Halloween pumpkin. Rex eased him through another quarter turn and Jody was back on the steps. The cumberquark had stayed good and steady through all this—everything was back where it had started.

“How did it look, Jody?” Rex’s teeth were chattering.

“Unh.” For gasping Jody, Rex was no longer a person but rather a force of nature. Jody moved slowly down the steps talking to himself. “No nothin’ all inside out mah haid up mah butt just for snatch mah god—”

Rex shrank the cumberquark down a bit as Jody drove off. The VW and the MG were still there. How could Roland have done this to him? And who was the fourth guy?

The fourth guy was the real one, the lover a husband never sees. As Rex entered his house, the fourth man ran out the back door, looped around the house, and took off in his bug. Let him go. Rex went upstairs. Roland Brody was sitting on the edge of Rex and Candy’s bed looking chipper.

“Damn, Rex! I didn’t know Candy had it in her. I mean to tell you!” Roland fished his underpants off the floor and pulled them on. He was an old friend, an utterly charming man, tall and twitchy and with a profile like Thomas Jefferson on the nickel. A true Virginia gentleman. He had a deprecating way of tuning everything into a joke. Even now, it was hard to be angry with him. The VW’s popping faded, and Rex sank down into a chair. He was trembling all over. The cumberquark nestled soothingly in his lap.

Candy had the sheet pulled all the way up to her nose. Her big blue eyes peered over the top. “Don’t leave. Roland, I’m scared of what he’ll do. Can you forgive me, Rex? Alf made me do it.”

“Who’s this Alf fellow?” asked Roland, tucking the tail of his button-down shirt into his black pants. “Was he the guy in the VW?”

“You’re a bastard to have done it too, Roland,” said Rex.

“Hell, Rex. Wouldn’t you?”

The room reeked of sex. The jabbering was still in Rex’s head—a sound like a woman talking fast. All of a sudden he didn’t know what he was doing. He stretched the cumberquark out big and stopped and started it, turning big chunks of the room inside out. Part of the chair, circles of the floor, Candy’s dresser-top, a big piece of mattress. Roland tried to grab Rex, and Rex turned Roland’s forearm into pulp that fell to the floor. Candy was screaming bloody murder. Rex advanced on her, chunking the cumberquark on and off like a holepuncher, eating up their defiled bed. The womanvoice in his head was coming through Rex’s mouth.

“Better get out of her, Alf, better get out or your bod is gone, you crooked hiss from outspace, Alf, I’ll chunk you down, man, better split, Alf, better go or—”

“Stop!” yelled Candy. “Rex please stop!” Rex made the cumberquark go matter-transparent, and he slid it up over her legs. Candy’s face got that pixie look and Alf spoke.

“I’m only having fun,” he said. “Leave me alone, jerk. I’m your wife. I’m in here to stay.”

Then Rex knew what to do, he knew it like a math problem. He thought it fast with Zee, and she said yes.

Rex shrank the cumberquark real small and put it in his pocket. Poor Roland had collapsed on the floor. He was bleeding to death. Rex tied off Roland’s armstub with his necktie.

“Sorry, Roland. I’ll drive you to the hospital, man.”

“Damn, Rex, damn. Hurry.”

“That’s right,” said Alf/Candy. “Get out of here and leave me alone.”

The hospital wasn’t far. Rex dropped Roland at the emergency door and went back home. Instead of going in the front door he went in the basement door to sit in his study. There was no use talking to Candy before he got rid of Alf.

He took the cumberquark out of his pocket and set it down on his desk. Small, fast, flowy. He leaned over it and breathed. Hot bright Zee rode his breath out of his body and into the cumberquark. She could live there as well as in Rex. The little sphere lifted off Rex’s desk and buzzed around the study like a housefly. Zee had a way of pulsing its flow off and on to convert some of its 4-D momentum into antigravity. Now she stopped the quark’s flow entirely and inflated it out through Rex so that it held all of him except his feet. Rex hopped into the air, up into the big light bubble. It stuttered on when he was all in.

Rex’s sense inputs became a flicker. His room, his body, his room, his body, his room, his body…In between the two 3-D views were two prospects on hyperspace: ana and kata, black and white, heaven and hell. Room, ana, body, kata, room…The four images were shuffled together seamlessly, but only the room view mattered right now.

Zee shrank the cumberquark down to fly-size again. Rex felt the anti-gravity force as a jet from his spine. Thanks to the way Zee was pulsing the hyperflow, there was plenty of fresh air. They looped the loop, got a fix on things, and space-curved their way upstairs.

Candy/Alf didn’t notice them at first. She was lying still, staring at the ceiling. Rex/Zee hovered over her and then, before the woman could react, they zoomed down at her, shrinking small enough to enter her nose.

Pink cavern with blonde hairs, a dark tunnel at the back rush of wind, onward. No light in here, but Rex/Zee could see by the quark-light of the quantum strangeness. Oh Candy it’s nice in you. Me, kata, you, an, me, kata, you …

There was an evil glow in one of Candy’s lungs: Alf. He looked like a goblin, crouched there with pointed nose and ears. Rex/Zee bored right into him, wrapping his fibers around and around them, knotting him into their complex join.

And zoomed back out Candy’s nose, and got big again, and stopped.

Rex was standing in his bedroom. The ball that was Zee and Alf dipped in salute and sailed out the window.

Candy stood up and hugged Rex. They were still in love.

That winter Rex would get a new job, and they would leave Killeville, taking with them the children, a van of furniture, and the memory of this strange summer day.

============

Written in Summer, 1986.

Synergy #1
, HBJ Books, 1987.

In Lynchburg I rented an office in an empty, crumbling, kudzu-covered house owned by The Design Group, a commercial art office consisting of people who were friends of mine, and I got the notion to set a character into it.

This is the last of my Killeville stories, although the town does appear again in my alternate history novel,
The Hollow Earth
.

Jack and Neal, loose and blasted, sitting on the steps of the ramshackle porch of Bill Burroughs’s Texas shack. Burroughs is out in the yard, catatonic in his orgone box, a copy of the Mayan codices in his lap. He’s already fixed M twice today. Neal is cleaning the seeds out of a shoebox full of maryjane. Time is thick and slow as honey. In the distance the rendering company’s noon whistle blows long, shrill and insistent. The rendering company is a factory where they cut up the cows that’re too diseased to ship to Chicago. Shoot and cut and cook to tallow and canned cancer consommé.

Burroughs rises to his feet like a figure in a well-greased Swiss clock. “There is scrabbling,” goes Bill. “There is scrabbling behind the dimensions. Bastards made a hole somewhere. You ever read Lovecraft’s
Color Out of Space
, Jack?”

“I read it in jail,” says Neal, secretly proud. “Dig, Bill, your mention of that document ties in so exactly with my most recent thought mode that old Jung would hop a hard-on.”

“Mhwee-heee-heee,” says Jack. “The Shadow knows.”

“I’m talking about this bomb foolishness,” harrumphs Burroughs, stalking stifflegged over to stand on the steps. “The paper on the floor in the roadhouse john last night said there’s a giant atom-bomb test taking place tomorrow at White Sands. They’re testing out the fucking ‘trigger bomb’ to use on that godawful new
hydrogen
bomb Edward Teller wants against the Rooshians. Pandora’s Box, boys, and we’re not talking cooze. That bomb’s going off in New Mexico tomorrow and right here and now the shithead meatflayers’ noon whistle is getting us all ready for World War Three, and if we’re all ready for that, then we’re by Gawd ready to be a great civilian army, yes, soldiers for Joe McCarthy and Harry J. Anslinger, poised to stomp out the reds ‘n’ queers ‘n’ dopefiends. Science brings us this. I wipe my queer junkie ass with science, boys. The Mayans had it aaall figured out a loooong time ago. Now take this von Neumann fella …”

“You mean Django Reinhardt?” goes Jack, stoned and rude. “Man, this is your life, their life, my life, a dog’s life, God’s life, the Life of Riley. The Army’s genius von Neumann of the desert, Bill, it was in the Sunday paper. Neal and I were rolling sticks on in Tuscaloosa, I just got an eidetic memory flash of it, you gone wigged cat, it was right before Neal nailed that cute Dairy Queen waitress with the Joan Crawford nose. She rimmed him and I watched.”

Neal goes: “Joan Crawford, Joan Crawfish, Joan Fishook, Joan Rawshanks in the fog. McVoutie!” He’s toking a hydrant roach and his jaywrapping fingers are laying rapid cable. Half the damn box is already twisted up.

Jack warps a brutal moodswing. There’s no wine.
Ti Jack could use a widdly sup pour bon peek, like please, you ill cats, get me off this Earth
…Is he saying this aloud, in front of Neal and Burroughs?

“And fuck the chicken giblets,” chortles Neal obscurely, joyously, in there, and then suggests, by actions as much as by words,
is he really talking, Jack?
“That we get back to what’s really important such as rolling up this here, ahem, um, urp, Mexican seegar, yes!”