Still Life with Woodpecker (18 page)

THE JUG BAND BOMB:

THE FRUIT LOOPS AND BATSHIT BOMB:

WITH A BUCKET OF BLACK PAINT
,, Leigh-Cheri went up to the attic. She blacked out the windows, except for one small pane in the east. Into the overhead fixture, she screwed a forty-watt bulb. She cleared out the royal dressmaking dummy, Christmas tree decorations, and trunks of monogrammed junk. She moved in a chamber pot and a cot. The cot had a foam rubber mattress, the pot would be emptied by Gulietta twice a day. Gulietta, also twice daily, would bring in a plate of food. “Starchy food,” ordered Leigh-Cheri. “I want to eat like he eats.”

In vain, the King and Queen tried to reason with her. “It’s no wonder people lack romance in their lives,” said the Princess. “Love belongs to those who are willing to go to extremes for it. Goodbye.”

Tilli and Max listened to the attic door slam. To Max, the door sounded like the crack of a bat when the opposition has hit a homerun to beat the Mariners in the bottom of the ninth. His heart, which would never win another pennant, cracked a tinny bat of its own. “Oh-Oh spaghetti-o,” said Tilli. She did not elaborate.

Briefly, they discussed seeking professional help for the Princess, but King Max was one of those who believed that psychology was at that point in its development that surgery was at when it was practiced by barbers, so the idea was abandoned. Max put his arm halfway around his wife—halfway was as far as he could reach—and they walked out on the porch and stared at the blackberries. The blackberries, if little else in the last quarter of the twentieth century except killer bees and Arabs, were on the move.

Here, it might be worth mentioning that Bernard
Mickey Wrangle, while in agreement with the King’s opinion of the profession of psychology, had developed a psychological test of his own. It was short, simple and, to the mind of its creator, infallible. To administer the test, merely ask the subject to name his or her favorite Beatle. If you are at all familiar with the distinct separate public images of the four Beatles, then you’ll recognize that the one chosen—John, Paul, George, or Ringo—reveals as much about the subject’s personality as most of us will ever hope to know.

LEIGH-CHERI PACED THE FLOOR.
She sat on the cot. She gave to foam rubber its first imprint in history of a royal behind. She walked to the windows and looked into the black. She tried out the chamber pot, although she really had nothing to contribute. She lay on the cot. Ceiling ceiling ceiling. She turned over. Floor floor floor. She got up and, like a vacuum cleaner with insomnia, roamed the room some more. For three days, she did such things. Perhaps she was coming to terms with the space, although surely she realized that space is merely a device to prevent everything from being in the same spot.

On the fourth day, she decided to think, in an organized manner, about the problem of romance. “When we’re incomplete, we’re always searching for somebody to complete us. When, after a few years or a few months of a relationship, we find that we’re still unfulfilled, we blame our partners and take up with somebody more promising. This can go on and on—series polygamy—until we admit that while a partner can add sweet dimensions to our lives, we, each of us, are responsible for our own fulfillment. Nobody else can provide it for us, and to
believe otherwise is to delude ourselves dangerously and to program for eventual failure every relationship we enter. Hey, that’s pretty good. If I had pencil and paper, I’d write that down.” Alas, she had no pencil, while the roll of paper that sat by the chamber pot was destined for a different end.

Next, she thought, “When two people meet and fall in love, there’s a sudden rush of magic. Magic is just naturally present then. We tend to feed on that gratuitous magic without striving to make any more. One day we wake up and find that the magic is gone. We hustle to get it back, but by then it’s usually too late, we’ve used it up. What we have to do is work like hell at making additional magic right from the start. It’s hard work, especially when it seems superfluous or redundant, but if we can remember to do it, we greatly improve our chances of making love stay.” She was unsure if that idea was profound or trite. She was only sure that it mattered.

Then, she thought, “The mystics say that as soon as you give it up, you can have it. That may be true, but who wants it when you don’t want it.”

Leigh-Cheri tried to think more thoughts about romance. Her mind wandered. Toward dawn of the fifth day, she masturbated.

It was unintentional. She meant only to test herself for signs of numbness, atrophy, shrinkage, aridity. As the damp genital spark flashed from her fingertips, her little hand withdrew in surprise. Cautiously, it returned. It met no resistance. It slithered through the folds of saltmeat and peach. It pressed the seaweed trigger.

Afterward, she was depressed. She felt that she had violated the purity of her hermitage. Try as she might, she could not imagine Bernard masturbating in
his
cell. Bernard didn’t require an ad agency to tell him the difference between the sponsor’s product and Brand X. Bernard wouldn’t accept an ignominious substitute. Those cherubs that circle, in an aurora of blue light, the rocking bed of true lovers, those angels do not fly for
masturbators. In the future, she would try to channel her sexual energy into something more elevating than the do-it-yourself orgasm.

But what?

She tried to name the fifty states and their capitals, but she could never get past South Dakota. She tried to name the nine planets in our solar system and was bewildered to find that she could name
ten
, counting Argon. She tried to remember why George Harrison was her favorite Beatle—surely it was his sincerity, his deep spirituality, his compassion for suffering humanity—only to discover that for some reason she now preferred the rebellious explorer John Lennon. She played a game in which she was given the power to pass one law to which every person in the world must adhere. What law would she lay down? What one law could change the world? You couldn’t force people to love their neighbors as themselves. There already were laws against killing, yet murders continued. Certainly, to make the internal combustion engine illegal would improve things enormously, but how long before industry would put a nuclear-powered car in every radioactive garage? Suppose she made everything illegal. Then everybody would be outlaws. Would Bernard be delighted or horrified? In another game, she could give Academy Awards to the movies of her choice, the films that really deserved them. She quickly ran out of candidates and began fantasizing a movie. She only knew one plot, however, and she could never quite handle the scene in which the frog was dashed against the wall. Besides, whatever happened to the golden ball?

Her fantasies gave way to dreams. Or was it the other way around? In either case, she lay on the cot for days and didn’t open her eyes. Gulietta shook her. “Are you dyink?” the old woman asked. “Zee Queen vants to know,” Gulietta said, parroting Tilli, “eef you are dyink.” “Oh no,” answered Leigh-Cheri dreamily. “Tell mama I am living. Living for love.” She fell immediately back into communion with her private totem, a beast that was both
frog and woodpecker, and, sometimes, too, the chipmunk that runs its little buns off at the center of the earth.

Time passed. It must have been a week. Maybe longer. Then, one evening she awoke, clearheaded and refreshed. She stood up and stretched. She jogged around the attic a few times. She bent down and touched her toes. With a sharp appetite, she devoured the soy burger and mashed potatoes on her dinner tray. She put the chamber pot to its proper use. She sat down on the cot. “Yes, I’m alive,” she said. “Alive for love.” She felt fine, although she had to confess she could still feel on her neck the tepid breath of boredom.

At that moment, something caught her eye. Something snagged the hem of her vision and yanked it like a child. A moon ray had penetrated the one clear pane and was illuminating an object. She walked over and picked the object up. For the first time, she took account of the pack of Camels.

THE TEMPLES,
the minarets, the oasis, the pyramids, the camel itself filtered through her vision without being seen. Her orbs, as if conditioned by years of literacy, settled on the message that federal law required the manufacturer to publish on the left side panel of the package.

… typeface, blue ink, background as white as the eye skin around her blue irises, as white as the library rug used to be.

In her mind, clumps of tumors bloomed; soft pink lungs took on the appearance of charred firewood;
grotesque tubers, oozing blood and spore jelly, spread like mushrooms across an unsuspecting lawn; arteries withered like the tendrils of parched orchids; clots resembling rotten tomatoes or the brains of diseased monkeys choked the organism, each clot emitting faint wisps of smoke from a combustion that would not die until the organism died.

Leigh-Cheri grunted in disgust. “Yuk,” she said aloud, exercising the alternate mantra. “Bernard claims that a cigarette is a friend when you’re locked away. With friends like these, who needs enemies?”

To the Princess, it was an enigma why anyone would smoke, yet the answer seems simple enough when we station ourselves at that profound interface of nature and culture formed when people take something from the natural world and incorporate it into their bodies.

Three of the four elements are shared by all creatures, but fire was a gift to humans alone. Smoking cigarettes is as intimate as we can become with fire without immediate excruciation. Every smoker is an embodiment of Prometheus, stealing fire from the gods and bringing it on back home. We smoke to capture the power of the sun, the pacify Hell, to identify with the primordial spark, to feed on the marrow of the volcano. It’s not the tobacco we’re after but the fire. When we smoke, we are performing a version of the fire dance, a ritual as ancient as lightning.

Does that mean that chain smokers are religious fanatics? You must admit there’s a similarity.

The lung of the smoker is a naked virgin thrown as a sacrifice into the godfire.

HAVING NOTHING ELSE TO READ,
Leigh-Cheri eventually read the rest of the package.
Camel: Turkish & Domestic Blend Cigarettes: Choice: Quality: Manufactured by R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., Winston-Salem, N.C. 27102, U.S.A.; 20 Class A Cigarettes
; and the famous inscription that has graced the rear panel of the package since its creation in 1913 (the year, allegedly, of the last Argonian transmission to redheaded earthlings);
Don’t look for premiums or coupons, as the cost of the tobaccos blended in Camel Cigarettes prohibits the use of them.

She tried to count the
e
’s in that sentence, running into the same difficulty that has plagued many another package reader: almost nobody counts them accurately the first time. Staring at the camel, she detected a woman and a lion hidden in its body. On tiptoes, she held the pack before the one clear windowpane and saw in its reflection that the word
CHOICE
reads the same in its mirror image as it does on the pack, it is not turned around by the mirror. That might have tipped her off that the Camel package crosses dimensional boundaries, the line between matter and antimatter, but she failed to grasp its significance right away. It was just another parlor game. As when she searched for additional camels on the package. (There are two behind the pyramid.)

Leigh-Cheri wondered if Bernard read his Camel pack also. She decided that he must, and she felt all the closer to him, just as daily Bible readings maintained a bond between knights and ladies separated during the Crusades.

Upon rising in the morning and before retiring at night, the Princess read the Camel pack. Sometimes she read it during the day. The words were soothing to her. They
were simple and straightforward. They did not set her mind to whizzing, as could the literature on certain other packages. Cheerios, for example.