The Children of Hamelin (25 page)

Walking up the block towards the Foundation, Robin’s dark hair thunderheads in the wind, she looked under by black hood at the shiny black surfaces of my impenetrable shades, said: “Man, you’ve almost got
me
going. You sure know how to look sinister.”

“Baby, I was doing sinister junkie numbers when you were but an innocent tyke sniffing airplane glue in junior high school.” True, how true! Maybe my days as a junkie were not a total loss after all; they had given me Hidden Resources of Sinister. Mmmm, how long had it been since I had wrapped myself in cloak of darkness and prowled the night...?

Shit, if I didn’t watch out, I’d start playing the game with myself!

“Man, are you a trip!” Robin said. Was there the slightest tightness around her eyes, a tiny tremble in her lip? Could I play the game with
her?

“Do you believe?” I asked. “Do you believe in the Sinister Forces that prowl the midnight of the soul?”

“Oh Wow! Happy Halloween, baby!” She giggled evilly. I needed that—the giggle to bring me down and the evil in it to put me just far up enough again. Trick was not to take it
too
seriously, just seriously enough to project black vibes—a fine line to walk, with Robin my kaleidoscope-gyroscope.

I pressed the door buzzer at the street entrance to the Foundation. A hesitation; then the doorlock buzzed and I pushed the door open.

“They got a magic word, too?” Robin asked as we started up the long flight of stairs.

“You’re a scary chick,” I said.

“Bet your ass—the magic word is ‘money’.”

I could hear the sounds of party echoing along the entrance hallway and down the stairs: it was nearly ten and things should be going full blast; I had timed it for the Grand Entrance.

At the landing outside the doorway, I unbuttoned my coat but left my hood up—billowing cloak effect—took Robin’s hand and burst into the dimly lit (and dimmer through my shades) hallway flapping cloth like Bela Lugosi. Ida and some fat hausfrau type I hadn’t seen before were taking off their frumpy coats in the hall, looking the other way. They turned at the sound, and I was pleasured by a tiny flicker of shock as Ida turned into the vision of darkness. Just a flicker, but it must’ve cut deep because she instantly froze into a sneer of defensive contempt, and said: “What’s the costume for, Tom? And who’s that with you?”

“Costume?” I said pleasantly. “I wear no costume. And this is Robin, a simple Child of the Night.”

“Arlene is supposed to show up tonight,” Ida said primly.

“So?” A challenge which Ida nervously brushed aside.

“Is... ah... Robin interested in joining the Foundation?” she said.

“Maybe...” Robin said in a teeny little girl voice. “I understand you try to expose your consciousness here.”

“Well, yes....”

Robin’s voice dropped two octaves; somehow she made her eyes look totally crazed. “Yummy...” she said, licking her lips with a lazy jungle-cat tongue. “Raw consciousness on the half-shell. My favorite dish. Slurp! Slurp!”

Ida looked like she had bitten into a turd. The woman with her shot a why-did-you-drag-me-into-this-den-of-iniquity look. They hurried up the hall away from us. Black vibes followed them.

“Evil chick!” I said approvingly.

Panther-eyes and a Cheshire-cat smile leered back.

In the little room next to the john, there was a table piled with coats, a couple of people I didn’t know, and Ted and Doris. Ted gave me a what-have-we-here look as I took off my black coat revealing my black clothes underneath; Doris looked at Robin, then at me, then shook her head and rolled her eyes.

“Robin, Ted and Doris Clayton, old friends of mine.” I helped her take the peacoat off and threw it down on the table over mine.

Ted gave Robin a leer that a couple of years ago would’ve set me to grinding my teeth and Doris to chain-smoking and anticipating a nightmare evening. But neither of us were uptight now, not even when Robin gave him a super-fey smile. Evil chick that she was, Robin seemed disappointed at not getting a rise out of Doris. Poor fucking Ted!

“Hey man,” Ted said, “gotta talk to you for a minute. Doris, why don’t you take Robin on in to the party—”

I nodded okay to Robin; she nodded back and I dug how Ted was impressed by the number as Doris led Robin out of the room. Ted pulled me into a corner away from the table as people came into the room, undressed, and left in a continuous stream.

“Why the shades, as if I didn’t know,” Ted said.

“You got it,” I told him.

“Harvey isn’t gonna like you’re coming here stoned.”

“Fuck Harvey. I paid my fifty bucks. Besides man, I can maintain.”

Ted grimaced.
“Sure
you can,” he said. “But what about Arlene? She’s gonna go through the roof when she sees you here with that Robin chick....”

“You were never one to let something like
that
bother you, Ted.”

Ted smiled a poor little ghost-smile of pussy-past. “Got to admit that’s a mighty fine looking piece of ass you got there. Looks like she fucks like an angel.”

I licked my lips. “Like a devil,” I said.

Ted grinned. “That’s what I mean.”

For auld lang syne, I faked a nervous smile, said: “That’s my turf, Ted.”

“If I weren’t a happily married man—”

My guts cried out in pain for him. Knowing I was on safe ground and sad for it, I said: “You can have her man, courtesy of the house in memory of the chicks you steered to me.”

Ted blanched and I hated The Man in Black for his sly cruelty.

“If you’re ready to fight me for her with pistols at ten paces, that is,” I drawled, letting him off the hook. Friendship can sure go through some funny changes. I had the awful feeling Ted had picked up on every nuance, but of course he couldn’t and wouldn’t and shouldn’t make a sign. I just couldn’t take that.

“Looks more like it’ll be Robin and Arlene with pistols,” Ted said. “You sure you know what you’re doing?”

“Don’t you dig having chicks fight over you?”

Ted sighed. Laughed. Frowned. “I don’t know about Robin, but you sure could blow your thing with Arlene this way.”

“If it blows her mind, that’s only fair,” I told him. “She’s sure fucked around enough with
my
head.”

“This is gonna be one interesting party,” Ted said.

“Well let’s not keep the animals waiting,” I told him.

Through the black glass of my shades the decadence of the big crowded room took on the ominous funky tones of a Berlin-in-the-twenties movie. Sitting on the lip of the dais in his baggy pants and decaying shirt, Harvey was the prototypical streetcorner Hitler rapping with Linda Kahn, Ida, O’Brien, Weeping Willy Nelson, Jeannie Goodman, and a few other gray losers, all dreaming of the day when the sewers of the universe would boil their muck out into the dim light of what passed for reality. Rich Rossi and a weird-looking science fiction fan (with him, it was a whole career) named Chester White were squatting on the floor trying to make a couple of fat female pimples. Charley Dees and a couple of other lushes were swilling beer decked out on the table in the back of the room. A few scattered noncouples were twitching in the gloom like terminal paretics to the low-fi Muzak-rock coming from the phonograph. The rest of the room was pretty well filled with clots of pudding-faced clots discussing whatever pudding-faced clots discuss. All very dim and shadowy through the shades like a worn-out film-clip from an ancient Polack remake of
La Dolce Vita.

Over
in a corner, Doris and Robin were rapping on each other. Couldn’t hear them, but I could tell from their faces that it was a noncontest of one-upmanship: Robin trying to out-freak Doris (no contest) and Doris out-mothering this poor deluded chile (also no contest).

Robin smiled at me as Ted and I reached them. “Welcome to the cartoon,” she said.

My head did a flip-flop. The unreality of the whole scene washed over me in india ink. Tuning in to the sounds in the room, it seemed like a million ducks were quacking. Over at the table, was an assembly line of beer-drinking mechanisms: constructs consisting of arms to grab beer cans, mouths connected to tubes to convey the beer to bladders, legs to walk the bladders to the john, spigots to piss the beer into hidden tubing that led under the bowels of the Earth back to the beer factory. Machines running in a closed circuit. Dancing robots slightly out of sync. Plastic music like a crumbling player piano. People milling back and forth on hidden tracks in the floor, rearing, gesturing and making mouth-noises at preprogrammed points like the mechanical bears in Coney Island penny arcade shooting galleries. Old Uncle Harvey’s Bavarian cuckoo clock, with dozens of near lifelike metal figures moved by creaky clockwork through a complete cycle every hour on the hour.

“You ever been to San Francisco?” Ted was saying to Robin. I could see the clockwork moving his mouth as the piano roll Harvey had put into his head sent him through his paces.

“What’s with this San Francisco thing?” said The Man in Black, trying to toss a handful of sand into the mechanism.

“I’ve really been thinking about San Francisco,” the Ted-machine said. “The Foundation would be—”

“Much better off in San Francisco than New York,” I said, causing the gears of his speech-box to slip a few teeth.

“Yeah! You know, we really
could
move the whole Foundation to San Francisco. I mean, a cross-country trek together, just like old pioneers....”

“You talked to Harvey about this?” I asked.

“I’ve tried to,” the Ted-thing said. “But he acts kinda funny about it... sort of puts me off...”

“Or puts you on.”

“What do you mean, puts me on!” Ted said. “He’s just not ready to consider it yet... but I get the feeling that if enough of us really commit ourselves to making the move, Harvey would go along for the good of everyone.”

“‘Please, please, don’t throw me in dat ol’ briar patch,’ said Brer Rabbit.”

“What’s the matter with you tonight, Tom?” Doris’ Earthmother tape subsystem caused her vocal mechanism to say.

“I guess I just got the Old Piano Roll Blues,” said The Man in Black.

“Can we go look at the monkey cage now, Daddy?” Robin said, pulling me toward the crowded center of the room.

“Evil chick,” I explained over my shoulder to Ted and Doris.

“Evil chick,”
I whispered to Robin, grabbing the cleft of her ass and holding it hard for a long moment as she dragged me by her ass and my free hand toward the gaggle of listening-machines surrounding Harvey.

“I’m an evil chick with a tasty ass!” she said loudly, causing heads to turn.

“That’s the best kind,” I said, giving her a slow, exaggerated, ultra-conspicuous feel before I let go.

I could feel a wall of eyes behind us as we threaded our way through the clockwork machinery toward Harvey and his mechanical worshippers; clockwork eyes watching The Man in Black and his Evil Chile as we moved in a train of darkness across the room. Maybe the gears were grinding a little (The Man in Black not programmed on the Old Piano Roll Blues) like seeing characters drawn in
Crypt of Terror
style popping into their Feiffer cartoon. Uptight, they were: “Get back in your own cartoon!” Because digging The Man in Black & Co. drawn in contrasting style meant the realization that other cartoon-realities existed meaning that maybe their own Harvey Brustein cuckoo-clock mechanism was not Total Reality after all, in which case—“Help! I’m trapped into a Bavarian cuckoo-clock factory!”

Into the current inner circle: Ida and her fat hausfrau friend; O’Brien, Myra Golden, a fat blond chick in a circus-tent mumu (moo-moo); Weeping Willy Nelson; a couple of mindless college twerps; Donald Warren, the Foundation’s sanitized token Negro; an aesthetic faggot; and Linda-uptight-Kahn, all standing at the bottom of the little dais with Harvey standing on the platform itself about six inches above them and
outside the mechanism.

Outside the mechanism!
By God, old Harv was outside his mechanism! I had wondered about that: it was theoretically possible for the cuckoo-clock maker to end up incorporated in his own mechanism (a la Adolf Hitler-Mickey Spillane-The Doors & Co. at one time or another) in which case Harvey would be running off his own set of piano rolls meaning that he couldn’t change anyone else’s piano rolls meaning that predestination would be a self-programmed invariant. But no, Free Will was alive in Argentina—no clockwork behind Harvey’s eyes.

“No, Mike, the job situation is about the same in San Francisco as it is here,” Harvey was saying.

“It’s just as... cosmopolitan as New York,” said the aesthetic faggot (meaning the San Fran vice squad languished not for lack of pederastic clientele), “but more...
in time
...”

“Yes, San Francisco is as much a city as New York,” Harvey conceded, “but the Bay Area as a whole is as spread out and varied as Los Angeles...”

By God, I had caught Harvey red-handed in the act of changing piano rolls! Cleverly inserting a groove-behind San-Francisco piano roll into each individual subsystem. Had to admire, in a technical sense, the subtlety of the programming, considering the crudity of the clockwork he was working with. Instead of changing the Master Piano Roll of the whole Foundation cuckoo clock (which would have jarred the individual member-mechanisms, possibly introducing selfawareness glitches into the program), he was changing the individual piano rolls one by one so that they would all demand a change in the Master Piano Roll themselves while still believing in Free Will. Put that in your hash-pipes and smoke it, Free Thinkers: illusion of Free Will can be programmed into a predestined piano roll complex!

But The Man in Black danced to no Piano Roll Blues. “You’re changing the piano rolls!” he said.

Linda-uptight-Kahn turned into an eyeball-to-shades confrontation with The Man in Black. She goggled. “What the hell is that get-up?” her vocal mechanism said.

“You’ve heard of the
traje de luces,”
I said, “the suit of lights?”

“Well, the man is wearing a suit of Darkness,” said Robin. The chick was clearly telepathic on the blacker wavelengths.