Mr. Vertigo (35 page)

The funeral was a bang-up affair. I made sure of that and didn’t stint on the extras. Everything belonged to me now—the house, the cars, the money she’d made for herself, the money I’d made for her—and since there was enough in the cookie jar to keep me going for another seventy-five or hundred years, I decided to throw her a big send-off, the biggest bash Wichita had ever seen. A hundred and fifty cars joined in the motorcade to the cemetery. Traffic was tangled up for miles around, and once the burial was over, mobs tramped through the house until three o’clock in the morning, swilling liquor and stuffing their maws with turkey legs and cakes. I’m not going to say I was a respectable member of the community, but I’d earned some respect for myself over the years, and people around town knew who I was. When I asked them to come for Marion, they turned out in droves.

That was a year and a half ago. For the first couple of months I moped around the house, not quite sure what to do with myself. I’d never been fond of gardening, golf had bored me the two or three times I’d played it, and at seventy-six I didn’t have any hankering to go into business again. Business had been fun because of Marion, but without her around to liven things up, there wouldn’t have been any point. I thought about getting away from Kansas for a few months and seeing the world, but before I could make any definite plans, I was rescued by the idea of writing this book. I can’t really say how it happened. It just hit me one morning as I climbed out of bed, and less than an hour later I
was sitting at a desk in the upstairs parlor with a pen in my hand, scratching away at the first sentence. I had no doubt that I was doing something that had to be done, and the conviction I felt was so strong, I realize now that the book must have come to me in a dream—but one of those dreams you can’t remember, that vanish the instant you wake up and open your eyes on the world.

I’ve worked on it every day since last August, pushing along from word to word in my clumsy old man’s script. I started out with a school composition book from the five-and-ten, one of those hardbound things with a black-and-white marble cover and wide blue lines, and by now I’ve filled nearly thirteen of them, about one a month for every month I’ve been working. I haven’t shown a single word to anyone, and now that I’m at the end, I’m beginning to think it should stay that way—at least while I’m still kicking. Every word in these thirteen books is true, but I’d bet both my elbows there aren’t a hell of a lot of people who’d swallow that. It’s not that I’m afraid of being called a liar, but I’m too old now to waste my time defending myself against idiots. I ran into enough doubting Thomases when Master Yehudi and I were on the road, and I have other fish to fry now, other things to keep me busy after this book is done. First thing tomorrow morning, I’ll go downtown to the bank and put all thirteen volumes in my safe-deposit box. Then I’ll go around the corner and see my lawyer, John Fusco, and have him add a clause to my will stating that the contents of that box should be left to my nephew, Daniel Quinn. Dan will know what to do with the book I’ve written. He’ll correct the spelling mistakes and get someone to type up a clean copy, and once
Mr. Vertigo
is published, I won’t have to be around to watch the mugwumps and morons try to kill me. I’ll already be dead, and you can be sure I’ll be
laughing at them—from above or below, whichever the case may be.

For the past four years a cleaning woman has been coming to the house several times a week. Her name is Yolanda Abraham, and she’s from one of the warm-weather islands—Jamaica or Trinidad, I forget which. I wouldn’t call her a talkative person, but we’ve known each other long enough to be on fairly cozy terms, and she was a great help to me during Marion’s last months. She’s somewhere between thirty and thirty-five, a round black woman with a slow, graceful walk and a beautiful voice. As far as I know, Yolanda doesn’t have a husband, but she does have a child, an eight-year-old boy named Yusef. Every Saturday for the past four years, she’s parked her offspring in the house with me while she does her work, and having watched this kid in action for more than half his life, I can say in all fairness that he’s one monumental pain in the ass, a junior hooligan and wise-talking brat whose sole mission on earth is to spread mayhem and bad will. To top it off, Yusef is one of the ugliest children I’ve ever set eyes on. He has one of those jagged, scrawny, asymmetrical little faces, and the body that comes with it is a pathetic, sticklike bundle of bones—even if pound for pound it happens to be stronger and more supple than the bodies of most fullbacks in the NFL. I hate the kid for what he’s done to my shins, my thumbs, and my toes, but I also see myself in him when I was that age, and since his face resembles Aesop’s to an almost appalling degree—so much so that Marion and I both gasped the first time he walked into the house—I continue to forgive him everything. I can’t help myself. The boy has the devil in him. He’s brash and rude and incorrigible, but he’s lit up with the fire of life, and it does me good to watch him as he flings himself headlong into a maelstrom of trouble. Watching Yusef, I now
know what the master saw in me, and I know what he meant when he told me I had the gift. This boy has the gift, too. If I could ever pluck up my courage to speak to his mother, I’d take him under my wing in a second. In three years, I’d turn him into the next Wonder Boy. He’d start where I left off, and before long he’d go farther than anyone else has ever gone. Christ, that would be something to live for, wouldn’t it? It would make the whole fucking world sing again.

The problem is the thirty-three steps. It’s one thing to tell Yolanda I can teach her son to fly, but once we got past that hurdle, what about the rest? Even I’m sickened by the thought of it. Having gone through all that cruelty and torture myself, how could I bear to inflict it on someone else? They don’t make men like Master Yehudi anymore, and they don’t make boys like me either: stupid, susceptible, stubborn. We lived in a different world back then, and the things the master and I did together wouldn’t be possible today. People wouldn’t stand for it. They’d call in the cops, they’d write their congressman, they’d consult their family physician. We’re not as tough as we used to be, and maybe the world’s a better place because of it, I don’t know. But I do know that you can’t get something for nothing, and the bigger the thing you want, the more you’re going to have to pay for it.

Still, when I think back to my dreadful initiation in Cibola, I can’t help wondering if Master Yehudi’s methods weren’t too harsh. When I finally got off the ground for the first time, it wasn’t because of anything he’d taught me. I did it by myself on the cold kitchen floor, and it came after a long siege of sobbing and despair, when my soul began to rush out of my body and I was no longer conscious of who I was. Maybe the despair was the only thing that really mattered. In that case, the physical ordeals he put me through were no more than a sham, a diversion to trick me into thinking I was getting somewhere—when in fact I
was never anywhere until I found myself lying face-down on that kitchen floor. What if there were no steps in the process? What if it all came down to one moment—one leap—one lightning instant of transformation? Master Yehudi had been trained in the old school, and he was a wizard at getting me to believe in his hocus-pocus and high-flown talk. But what if his way wasn’t the only way? What if there was a simpler, more direct method, an approach that began from the inside and bypassed the body altogether? What then?

Deep down, I don’t believe it takes any special talent for a person to lift himself off the ground and hover in the air. We all have it in us—every man, woman, and child—and with enough hard work and concentration, every human being is capable of duplicating the feats I accomplished as Walt the Wonder Boy. You must learn to stop being yourself. That’s where it begins, and everything else follows from that. You must let yourself evaporate. Let your muscles go limp, breathe until you feel your soul pouring out of you, and then shut your eyes. That’s how it’s done. The emptiness inside your body grows lighter than the air around you. Little by little, you begin to weigh less than nothing. You shut your eyes; you spread your arms; you let yourself evaporate. And then, little by little, you lift yourself off the ground.

Like so.