Still Life with Woodpecker (30 page)

He struggled to roll over, to exchange positions, but she’d braced her legs, and he couldn’t turn her.

Pumping adrenaline faster than any Fizel well pumped oil, he reached for every volt and ore of strength left in him and, muscles tearing, sinews stretching, teeth grinding sparks, began willing himself to his feet. He was halfway there, Leigh-Cheri still leeched on tight, when she reached between his legs and grabbed his balls. She squeezed them so ferociously that he nearly lost consciousness. Pain rushed in the front door, and strength slipped out the back. They toppled together. Galaxies and
teddy bears swooshed by as they fell, frogs leaped from star to star, the moon danced a fandango, they saw Max and Dude, Tilli and Kathleen, A’ben and Ralph Nader, blazing blackberries, solid gold onions, and the musical mountain tips of Mu.

They landed on the Camel pack with a single, painful thud. “Yum,” she said, insistently, into his beard.

Then the bomb went off.

THE MOON CAN’T HELP IT.
It’s only an object. The moon doesn’t mean to set things sloshing—in every ocean’s basin, in every female’s uterus, in every poet’s jar of ink, in every madman’s drool.

“It’s only a paper moon/Sailing over a cardboard sea.” The moon can’t help it if the best toys are made of paper. And the best metaphors made of cheese.

They say that lost objects end up on the moon. Is a siren responsible for a sailor’s taste in song?

The moon can’t help it. It’s only a fat dumb object, the pumpkin of the sky. The moon’s a mess, to tell the truth. A burnt-out cinder the color of dishwater; a stale gray cookie covered with scars. Every loose rock in our solar system has taken a punch at it. It’s been stoned, scorched, golf-clubbed, and inflicted with boils. If lovers have chosen this brutalized derelict, this tortured dustball, this pitted and pimpled parcel of wasteland as the repository of their dreams, the moon can’t help it.

Solar enthusiasts are fond of pointing out that the moon merely reflects the light of the sun. Yes, the moon
is
a mirror. It can’t help it. The moon is the original mirror, the first to refuse to distort CHOICE. Objects can’t think. They employ other methods. But we human beings
use objects to think with. And when it comes to the moon, you are free to think as you choose.

If the moon hung over Fort Blackberry like an omen, like a cheap literary device, it couldn’t help it. The moon just hung there. Bernard Mickey Wrangle and Princess Leigh-Cheri drove up in a cab.

BERNARD WAS THE FIRST
to regain consciousness. He woke up in an Arab clinic that featured goatskin bedpans and snot-green walls. It took him an hour to understand why the swarming flies didn’t buzz. He was tipped off when the police began interrogating him via note pad. He was deaf.

Naturally, they believed that he was the kidnapper. They asked him if his motives were political or sexual. He wrote on the pad, “Take a flying fuck at a rolling oil barrel. Take a flying fuck at the Koran.”

The police looked at one another and nodded. “Political
and
sexual,” they said.

He thought only of escape. First he had to find out what they’d done with Leigh-Cheri’s corpse. He intended to take her ashes to Hawaii. He’d build a sand castle in the shape of a pyramid on the beach near Lahaina. He’d sprinkle her ashes on top of the pyramid and watch as the waves came for them and carried them away to Mu.

His mind was as chained to that morbid scheme as his legs were chained to the bed. On the third day, they unlocked his leg irons. His mind remained chained.

“She say you innocent,” the police wrote.

Bernard bolted up. “You mean she’s alive!” he said. He couldn’t hear himself say it.

They nodded. They led him down the hall to her room.

Two-thirds of her hair was singed off. Her right cheek was as torn as the moon’s. But she was awake and smiling.

He pointed to his ears. She pointed to hers. She was deaf, too.

She reached for the note pad.

“Hello, dragon bait,” she wrote.

THE CLINIC WOULDN’T
release them. A’ben Fizel ordered them held. A’ben was rushing home from an American business trip. They both knew what his return would mean.

Gulietta arrived before A’ben. Her prime minister, a bearded giant with a gun belt, accompanied her. And twenty-five rebel commandos, as well. Queen Gulietta advised Ihaj Fizel to turn over the young couple. She threatened an international incident. The old sultan followed her logic. Many times he’d warned his son that redheads were nothing but trouble. “Get them out away from here at once,” he told Gulietta. “I’ll handle my boy. Shalom.”

They recuperated at Gulietta’s palace. Except for their eardrums, healing was swift.

At a desk in their room (Queen G. was no prude), Bernard wrote Leigh-Cheri a letter. Impatient, she read over his shoulder.

He was describing a dream. Or a hallucination. He wrote that when he and Leigh-Cheri fell to the floor right before the blast, he experienced the sensation that they had fallen into the Camel pack.

“All the time that I was unconscious,” he wrote, “I was dreaming—I guess I was dreaming—that we had escaped through the package of Camels. That we went inside of it
and caught the camel and rode it bareback to the oasis—”

She took the pad from him. “We had to ride fast,” she wrote, “because we were naked and the sun was hot. Redheads burn easily.”

Bernard recovered paper and pen. “Yes,” he wrote. “That’s right. Well, we made it to the oasis, where we rested by the water hole in the shade of the palms.”

Leigh-Cheri yanked the pad back. “There was a frog in the pool. And we wondered how a frog got out there in the middle of the desert.”

Bernard grabbed the pad. “How did you know that?”

It was her turn. “We ate fresh dates. You made a droll remark about dates being a laxative. Some Bedouins came through, and they gave us an old camel blanket. One blanket between us. We wrapped in it—”

“It was tan,” wrote Bernard. He was so excited that the pen shook.

“With a few stripes of blue.”

“How do you know this?”

“I had the same dream. It seemed more real than a dream. A hallucination? A—”

“At dusk, we made love.”

“You started it by sucking my toes.”

“Your toes are cute. And then the dates took effect.”

The Princess laughed. “You wondered if there was a men’s room over at the pyramid.”

“We decided to avoid pyramids. Except as pedestals. We slept by the pool. How do you know this? How do
we
know it? Could we both have had the exact same dream?”

“Was it a dream, then?”

They were staring at one another in silent disbelief, trembling a little, when Gulietta entered. There would have been no point in her knocking first.

Gulietta brought a cable from Tilli. It was news about Max. The disappearance and resurrection of his daughter had been too much for the King. His valve had gone bingo. “I bet you zat you’re soon okay,” Tilli had told
him when he slumped. “Two will get you five I am not,” answered Max. He’d won.

For the time being, Bernard and Leigh-Cheri forgot about the Camel pack—and whether at the instant of explosion it had sheltered them from death.

They’d have the last quarter of the twentieth century, and more, perhaps, to bother their noodles with that one.

KING MAX WAS BURIED IN RENO.
Far from blackberries. Bernard and Leigh-Cheri attended the funeral. Later, they put Tilli on a plane for Europe. Gulietta had named her manager of the national opera. “I gun to be a vorking girl,” said Tilli. “Oh-Oh, spaghetti-o.”

Bernard and Leigh-Cheri flew to Seattle. Arriving at the Furstenberg-Barcalona house, they discovered that it had been engulfed by blackberry vines. Chuck, who still lived over the garage, had hacked a tunnel to the front door. Chuck tunneled through the brambles in order to watch game shows on Max’s old Magnavox. The taxi driver offered to take Bernard and Leigh-Cheri to a hotel. They refused. They entered the tunnel by moonlight.

They set up their lives in the house. In the thorns and berries. They seldom went out except to go shopping. They enjoyed supermarkets. Pharmacies. Vegetable stands. Tobacco shops. Val-u-Marts. Meat-o-ramas. Family Shoe Centers. Buddy Squirrel’s Nuts & Candies. Appliance stores.

Wherever they looked, something momentous was happening.

They made love at all hours and in every corner of the house. Sometimes Chuck had to step over them to get to the TV.

But having acquired a taste for solitude, each of them spent days separate and alone, Leigh-Cheri in the attic, Bernard in the pantry. Funny how we think of romance as always involving two, when the romance of solitude can be ever so much more delicious and intense. Alone, the world offers itself freely to us. To be unmasked, it has no choice.

Naturally, it rained a lot. The famous Seattle rain. If love was going to stay, it better be prepared to get its feet wet.

Leigh-Cheri took up easel painting. Still lifes. She wasn’t bad. Bernard carried around wooden matches. “Everybody needs a hobby,” he explained.

Once, to the east, above the mountains, a strange glow science-fictioned across the sky. There were flashing lights of every color but one. When Bernard and Leigh-Cheri were certain that the thing had passed, they told each other that they were proud to be redheads. That they would be ready when the showdown came.

With her share of Max’s winnings, Leigh-Cheri purchased powerful hearing aids. Hers was pink, Bernard’s was black. Each hearing aid was about the size of a Camel pack. They were made from plastic and tended to squeak. They were adorable.

Even with aids, their hearing was only partially restored. Still, they were convinced that they could hear the chipmunk at the center of the earth. They could tell that the chipmunk was running smoothly now. Its wheel spun easy and free.

WELL,
we made it through the night. I have to hand it to the Remington SL3, it hung in there in spite of what must have been, for a typewriter of its class, exceedingly primitive conditions.

I’ll never write another novel on an electric typewriter. I’d rather use a sharp stick and a little pile of dog shit. But the Remington, although too pseudosophisticated for my taste, is an object, after all, and wasn’t the possibility of a breakthrough in relations between animate and inanimate objects one of the subjects of this book?

Yes, this is the book that revealed the purpose of the moon. And while it may not have disclosed
exactly
what happened to the golden ball, it stated plainly why the question needed to be raised.

Objecthood was by no means our only major theme. There was, for example, the matter of the evolution of the individual, how evolving is not accomplished for a person by nature or society but is the central dimension of a personal drama to which nature and society are but spectators. Wasn’t it made clear that civilization is not an end in itself but a theater or gymnasium in which the evolving individual finds facilities for practice? And when it comes
to themes, how about the—but wait a minute. Hold on. I’ve been trapped. This is the very kind of analytical, after-the-fact goose gunk the Remington SL3 cut its teeth on. No wonder it’s still yammering away, despite a lack of fuel, despite the red enamel house paint that’s run down into its guts. Enough already. I’m going to pull its plu

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