Nine Kinds of Naked (14 page)

Naturally, this did not sit well with those at the helms of empire, who preferred to think of themselves as the most powerful presence on the planet. Consequently, they determined that the Great White Spot would have to be dissipated,
dissolved, or in some way dispersed. After all, their punditry argued, any moment the Great White Spot could make landfall anywhere from Cancun to Houston to New Orleans. Lives were at stake. This was true, but not as true as the fact that the Great White Spot had shut down every oil platform in the Gulf, and was a virtual naval blockade to all agricultural exports and petroleum imports through the port of New Orleans. Farms were failing, refineries were collapsing, and economists were clearing their throats and looking away.

Some argued for aiming a nuclear missile directly into its eye. This was idiotic, of course, though not for the obvious reasons. They could have busted a dozen warheads over it, and they probably would have if their scientists had been able to tell them it would work. But the fact of the matter is that trying to tame even an ordinary hurricane with a nuclear explosion is like trying to derail a freight train by tossing cotton candy in front of it. It would be a laughably impotent gesture, and all the more so since the Great White Spot transcended any traditional notion of hurricane. Worse stilly one scenario predicted that the Great White Spot might actually feed off the energy of the explosion, becoming all the more invincible. They would have had more luck just pointing a window fan at it and trying to blow it away.

But humanity has never been a species to accept the limitations of its natural environment. For those who presume to be in charge, the Great White Spot was too great a reminder of their own insignificance. It undermined their illusions of stability, structure, and security in a vast and terrifying way,
subverting their dreary pretensions at control, spoiling the humdrum lullaby of the ordinary, stirring the sleeping masses. They glared and shook their heads. The Great White Spot would have to go.

Rock-a-bye-bye, baby.

 

41
“B
Y WAY OF
deception, thou shalt make war.” Not exactly one of the Ten Commandments, but the traditional motto of the Mossad nonetheless. After his apostatic abandonment of the priesthood, and though he held no affiliation with any Israeli intelligence service, Special Agent J. J. Speed decided to live his life according to this singular thou shalt, devoting his life to the judicious use of the dark arts of deception.

Or so he pretended. The fact was he felt more like a small-time jack roller working for the mob than a special agent working for the CIA. Sure, he used handcuffs instead of brass knuckles, and worked the turquoise beaches of the Caribbean rather than the dank alleyways of Chicago, but he was still just a menacing stranger lurking in the shadows, waiting to empty the wallet of an unsuspecting passerby. It was a small-time gig, working the supply lines of the drug money war and his own offshore account, and he was sick of it. Worse yet, he'd lately begun to suspect that he'd been played as a patsy by the Agency. This shakedown shit had to be busywork, and that might have been okay if he hadn't been apparently forgotten. All the action was in the Middle East. Central America had more or less been subdued to the satisfactions of the local empire.

But fate was about to smile upon him. The same wind that had long ago freed him from the priesthood would soon set
him free from his dead-end assignment. The Great White Spot, just across the puddle from Cancun, hovering off the coast of New Orleans, would be his salvation. Within months of its appearance, Special Agent J. J. Speed was reassigned to the Big Easy.

The situation in New Orleans had not, after all, gone unnoticed. Every week, against the advice of proper authorities, untold thousands were traveling to within spitting distance of the Great White Spot and returning home to talk in spry tones about something no authority could possibly comprehend. People were returning home—if they returned home at all—and doing whatever they wanted to do, quitting their jobs, changing their lives, walking away. The Great White Spot, it appeared, quite apart from decimating their economic structures, was exerting a tangible influence on their
culture
, a culture those in power labored so mightily to direct. Naturally, they could not abide by this circumstance. It was not that civilization was in immediate danger of being abandoned, but still, any such impulse has to be crushed if order is to be sustained. The concept that you actually don't have to do any particular thing has always had a way of spinning out of history's control. At least until they could discover how to dissipate the Great White Spot, this emerging emancipation had to be contained.

Consequently, a network of agents was ordered to New Orleans. Under a broad directive, they were to observe and report on what was happening—ethnographic espionage, they called it, civil surveillance—staying deep undercover, revealing themselves not even to each other, penetrating whatever
underground was spawning this newfound anarchy. Special Agent J. J. Speed grinned broadly when he received the assignment. The CIA isn't legally permitted to engage in domestic espionage, but every spy worth his decoder ring knows that disinformation and disruption are the only things holding the social system together. Deep undercover. Any new assignment would have been welcome, but this sounded like something he'd been waiting for ever since he stopped hearing confessions.

Finally, he would get to spy on
everybody.

 

 

 

 

The First Knot: A Gentle Breeze

 

T
HE CRUSADER'S BODY
evanesced at the amen breath of his death, his armor collapsing into a lifeless heap of chain mail. But there was no time for Clovis to gasp astonished at the crusader's dematerialization, let alone to contemplate his warning not to untie any more knots on the thrice-knotted strip of leather he had given him, for he was immediately startled by an unsyncopated sort of broken applause. From all sides of the clearing, a tribe of Oakmen emerged, clapping abruptly this way and that as if applauding the death of random mosquitoes. Grinning like maniacs, they began tumbling and twirling, hooting and howling, “Hooray for the day! Hooray for the day!” Hilariating thus, they collapsed into wild piles of enthusiasm.

“What nonsense is this?” Clovis demanded loudly, gathering no reply at all. Daunted, he wondered if maybe he should pick up the crusader's sword or climb back into the tree or what. He settled on mounting Attila, making himself that much taller than the drunken gnomes. Then, after a moment's indecision, he crawled back off, grabbed the sword, and remounted.

One of the Oakmen approached, a bluish honey staining his hands as he busied himself licking them clean. Tipping his red toadstool cap, he called out to Clovis. “Ho there, King of the Wood! A fine victory is yours on this day!”

“What is this place?”

“This place is your palace, O King of the Wood. That mistletoe I told you not to touch is your key.”

“Why do you congratulate my disobedience?”

The gnome shrugged. “Curiosity is a form of courage. One man's disobedience is another's derring-do. Your defiance makes you a worthy King of the Wood.” He bowed. “
Rex Nemorensis!
” he loudly pronounced.

“
Rex Nemorensis!
” the other Oakmen yelled in turn, offering salutes and somersaults. “
Rex Nemorensis!
Hooray for the day!”

“I do not wish to be King of the Wood,” Clovis loudly replied.

“
Rex Nemorensis!
Hooray for the day!” On and on they caroused in relentless jubilation.

“See here,” Clovis tried to explain to the first gnome. “I mean no offense, but I truly do not wish to be King of the Wood.”

“You cannot renegotiate your deeds,” the gnome explained. “No do-overs. You have plucked the bough of mistletoe, and this palace is your prize. There is nothing you desire that is not
here in abundance. An eternity of experience is yours to examine, but be thee ware, weary wanderer, for the slayer may become the slain.”

“What does that mean?” Clovis demanded.

“You are guardian of the now. This is forbidden to humans.”

“But I am human.”

“You are King of the Wood.
Rex Nemorensis.
”

“
Rex Nemorensis!
” The others cheered from between their roistering revelry. “Hooray for the day!”

The gnome pulled a mushroom out of a pouch and nibbled pensively at its cap. “The forest requires a witness,” he explained. “You are the witness, the King of the Wood.”

“Why does the forest require a witness?” Clovis asked.

“Why do the stars require eyes?” the gnome replied, then gobbled the remainder of his treat in a single gulp.

“You speak in riddles,” Clovis replied. “What did you mean when you said ‘guardian of the now'?”

“You plucked the mistletoe. It is your portal to the palace of the present. Until you are slain by another, you will see the world for the moment that it is, the big now. But now is not yet for humanity. Until that time arrives, you must guard the mistletoe from all intrusion. It is your inescapable vigil, and if you fail,” the gnome pointed to the empty pile of armor, “you will surely meet your slayer.”

 

42
E
LIZABETH
W
ILDHACK
mindlessly fondled her breasts, contemplating reincarnation. She wondered what she must have done in a previous life to have been cursed with the two whales beached on the shoreline of her torso. Carefully avoiding any eye contact, she glanced over her cantaloupean bosom and down at the customer for whom she was dancing, a customer for whom she danced nearly every day, and wondered if perhaps he was living her previous life. Charlie was his alleged name, and he was her primary sugar daddy. Charlie always looked the same. Scared. Scared stupid. Scared stoopid. And he was different from her other customers. Most guys were just looking for a tit fix, but not Charlie. He'd glance around her body now and again, tracing its curves, even idling on her defining rack for a moment or two, but mainly he looked
at her.
Not at her body, but
at her
, into her eyes, into her soul. It was weird. She would have preferred a sleazy, ham-handed pass to his invasive intimacy, sitting there gazing at her like she was his mother or some damn thing.

Pressing her breasts together, drawing down her cleavage, she began to understand why she disliked the notion of reincarnation. It wasn't that she dreaded the ontology, which is what Diana always told her. According to Diana, we incarnate repeatedly until we learn the lessons we need to learn. Life is a grade school detention, and we're all a bunch of flunkies. Elizabeth wished the answer were so simple.

Let me get this straight, she thought, sliding her hands down the inside of her thighs. Outside of this . . . She paused in her sway, struggling to find a word. I exist somewhere outside of this, outside of life. Where? In the nonlocal electron, says
Diana. So what is this nonlocal electron? Some noplace beyond and before space and time with all these zillions of other entities bobbing around, continually incarnating and reincarnating until they learn their individual lessons and then they don't have to incarnate anymore and they just, what, nirvana? They win? They get to stay bobbing around like some blissed-out ball of mystical light forever? Or graduate to some other level? Fine, maybe, but why? For what? That's just it, end of story, the way the universe works, substituting one improbable reality for another? She shook her head, feeling emphatic but appearing sensuous. It's egoistic, she concluded, just as the song and thus her dance ended. It's a way of clinging to a stable identity.

She hopped down off the table, landing with deft expertise in her high heels and permitting a dramatic bob to her boobs. She learned forward and grinned gushingly, offering “Charlie” a proximate view of her breasts. Men love that, breasts pressed together like pillows of moonlight, but he never really looked. He just kept trying to give her the glad eye.

“See you tomorrow, Charlie.” She slid the ATM-fresh bills off the table with a nearly naked curtsy, then bounced toward the dressing room, eager to resume her reincarnation discourse with Diana.

 

43
“C
HARLIE,” BY THE
way, was ob-gyn striptease fiend Dr. Rip Blossom, and he was concerned. Lately, he'd been noticing a street vendor up the way from Red's Cabaret, hawking seashell pipes. He wasn't there every day, but sometimes he was, and on those sometimes Dr. Blossom was sure to
spy Betty Boobs chatting with him. (“Betty Boobs,” incidentally, was Elizabeth Wildhack's stage name, and the only name by which Dr. Blossom knew her.) It wasn't that Dr. Blossom was jealous or possessive. Rather, Dr. Rip Blossom was paranoid—compulsively, ridiculously paranoid—and perhaps he had good reason. After all, if word ever leaked that he frequented a strip club
daily
, well, no matter how good a doctor he was (and he wasn't even mediocre enough to warm the stirrups), no obstetrician-gynecologist is going to stay in business for long after that. And Dr. Rip Blossom understood very well that it wouldn't just leak out. It would gush like a groupie's trumpetry. It was just too ripe a piece of titillating gossip.