The Complete Roderick (54 page)

‘Of course my name has not always been Soma. I took it because of its wonderful symmetry: Soma, the Vedic drink of ecstasy, and Amos, the greatest of prophets. Now, Mr Wood, if you’ll find a seat, our meeting can begin.’

Roderick took a seat near the back. Two well-dressed men came in and sat still further back.

‘First,’ said Amos, ‘I have a few important announcements to make. There has been another calumnious attack on us in the church press. As usual, they accuse us of “Mirror worship”, of saying the Lord’s Prayer backwards, and of so-called black magic. Frankly I don’t feel lies like these are worth answering, so I’ll drop that subject. I also have a positive announcement: our Bible translation is ahead of schedule, and we have now finished Sudoxe.’

A man in a parka, sitting a few rows ahead of Roderick, turned
around and said to him in a loud whisper, ‘You aren’t spying on me or anything?’

‘No.’

‘I didn’t think so.’

Amos began his sermon: ‘I want you all to reflect tonight on the cross. Notice how symmetrical the cross is. Right and left reflect, but not top and bottom. Why is that?

‘It is because the cross is shaped like a man. But why, you might ask, is man symmetrical? He could have been made any shape at all. God didn’t need to make you with one eye on the right side of your nose and one on the left. Oh no, God could have made you like one of those modernistic paintings, with an eye on your chin and another on your forehead!’

Amos paused for laughter. There was none. ‘No, God made man symmetrical because He made him in His own image. God Himself is symmetrical. He has a right and a left. Everybody knows that Christ “sitteth on the right hand of the Father”, so the Father must
have
a right hand.’

The man in the parka turned around again. ‘You sure they didn’t send you to watch me?’

‘No.’

‘No, I don’t suppose they’d bother.’

Amos went on, discoursing for some time on left and right – the hemispheres of the brain, magnetic ‘handedness’, whirlpools, political leanings, Lewis Carroll – and why God made mirror symmetry. God meant for us to meet our mirror images face to face (how else?), to talk to them, and to bring them to salvation.

The parka turned around again. ‘You impressed by this bullcrap?’

‘Yes I guess I am.’

‘Me too. Funny, because I think I know what’s wrong with old Amos.’

‘What’s that?’

‘He’s just ambidextrous. He can write with both hands, that means. So the thing is, he doesn’t know if he’s right- or left-handed. He doesn’t know which side of the mirror he’s living on, and it drives him nuts. He wants to convert everybody on both sides, just to play it safe.’

Roderick said, ‘Then you don’t believe.’

‘Oh I don’t know. You have to believe in something. Every week or so I try some new religion or some new political movement. And the thing is, I always believe.’

At the end of the meeting, the man introduced himself as Luke Draeger. ‘I was thinking about going to the bar on the corner, you know it? The Tik Tok Club. Figured I’d sit there and stare at myself in the mirror – till I get double vision. You might as well come along and spy on me.’

‘The name is Roderick Wood, and I’m not a spy. And I don’t drink.’

‘Rickwood, everybody drinks. Especially spies. Come on, you need a drink.’

The two men in the back got up and left.

‘But I really don’t drink. All I really need is a job. Before I become – well, a beggar, like this old guy.’

The old man he meant wore a long black overcoat, almost to the ground, which somewhat resembled a cassock. He had produced a cracked saucer from one pocket and was pretending to take up a collection.

‘Howdy doody, gents,’ he said, approaching. ‘Spare a little contribution for the mm-hmm-mmf …?’

Luke dropped a few coins on his saucer. ‘There, you old fraud. I’ve seen you taking up collections in every storefront church around here.’

‘Bless you, sir, it’s only for the clothes. Against the terrible winter.’

Roderick took off the red stocking-cap and handed it over. ‘You need this more than I do. In fact I don’t need it at all.’

‘Bless you, bless you …’ The old man salaamed away.

Luke was impressed. ‘You’re outa work and you give away your cap. By God I like that. To hell with getting a drink, I’m gonna get you a job. I work at this little factory, see, and they always need extra men.’

He led the way outside against the blustering wind and wet sleet, to an alley between two warehouses. Roderick followed cautiously to a rickety fire escape, then all the way up to the roof. There Luke knocked on an iron door which, to Roderick’s surprise, opened at once. A fat yawning woman let them in. To
Luke she said, ‘Boss wants to see you. Right now.’ She looked at Roderick. ‘Who’s this?’

‘This is my old pal Rickwood. I’m just gonna show him around, he might accept the offer of a job here.’

‘Ha! Better see the Boss first.’

First, however, Luke showed Roderick around. It was a peculiar factory, with hardly a machine in sight. They went down open stairs into the middle of the place, a lot of trestle tables where people sat making things. There seemed to be a lot of different products being turned out here.

One old man with a gallon of wine at his elbow was painting a rustic scene on a diagonal slice of birch log: a lake at sunset, with a moose on the shore and a canoe gliding across, beneath the words
Souvenir of Lake Kerkabon.
The painter completed his work, flipped the wooden plaque over, and stamped on its back MADE IN KOREA.

Next to him a woman with an eyepatch was flattening out aluminium cans and hammering them on a mould to make them into ashtrays shaped like horseshoes. These two were stamped MADE IN KOREA.

Next to her was a man fishing green felt letters very quickly from a bag and sewing them on a grey baseball shirt. His little hand-cranked sewing machine chattered away and in less than a minute he had spelled out SHAMEROCKS. As a final touch, he sewed a label into the neck of the shirt (Made in Korea). Others were assembling and testing digital watches, again with the puzzling label, while still others were painting portraits of the President on decorative meat platters, labelled again.

‘Why is everything “Made in Korea”?’ Roderick asked.

‘It makes people realize they’re getting a bargain, the cheapest item available. It is the cheapest, too. Nobody in Korea can get labour as cheap as it is right here, off Skid Row. Even automation costs more than us. Want a job here?’

‘Sure, why not?’

‘Okay, just let me find the Boss.’ Luke went off to the far end of the room, to a little cubicle made of cardboard cartons. There was a constant sound coming from that cubicle, a high-pitched electric hum.

In a moment Luke came back. ‘You can’t win ’em all,’ he said cheerfully.

‘No job for me?’

‘Not only that; they fired me too. I guess I was expecting it, but – oh hell, Rickwood, let’s go get that drink after all.’

Outside, the cold wind and sleet continued to batter at pedestrians. The gutters were filling up with water, floating cigarette filters and popsicle sticks, pizza boxes and foil from chewing gum, a non-returnable bottle with no message and a used condom floating like a pale jellyfish, bandaids, plastic coathangers, an old
TV Guide.
Roderick thought he saw the floating body of a Golden Retriever puppy, wrapped in sodden toilet paper, but he couldn’t be sure.

At the Tik Tok Club there were police cars and an ambulance, and a large crowd.

‘All right, everybody back,’ said a cop, though in fact no one was pressing forward to look at the figure being rolled out of the bar on a stretcher.

‘… and these two guys just shoot him when he walks in the door,’ said someone. ‘Figure that, an old wino like that, I mean who would waste a bullet? Figure that, these two guys just …’

‘Everybody back.’ The cop bent and picked up the red stocking-cap which had fallen, and put it back on the stretcher.

Luke ordered two scotches. ‘I know why they nailed him. It’s because I gave him 39 cents. They wanted to teach me a lesson.’

‘What lesson?’

‘I didn’t ask permission first. Jesus, Rickwood, don’t you understand? It’s “Captain May I” around here all the time; you gotta ask permission to scratch your ass. I mean
I
gotta
ask permission. So they rubbed him out, just to remind me.’

‘Remind you? Luke, I think this all sounds –’

‘Remind me who’s captain, of course. Who gives the orders them – and who takes the orders – me. I see you aren’t drinking. On duty are you?’

‘No I’m not on duty, but listen, Luke, who are
they?
’

‘As if you didn’t know!’ Luke finished both drinks and ordered two more. ‘Okay, maybe you don’t work for them. I guess maybe I’m a little upset here, losing my job and then seeing that poor old fart lying dead – I mean it hasn’t been all that good a day.’

‘You said you were expecting to be fired,’ Roderick reminded him.

‘Yes. Yes. The Boss said there were too many mistakes in the work. He’s right, he’s right. See, we were working on car seat covers, you know the ones? Imitation leopard skin. There was this big team of us, painting on the spots. And everything was going along okay until I went and changed religions.’

‘You mean to the Church of Christ Symmetrical?’

‘Naw, before that. Like I said, I get a new religion every week or so. No, this time it was the Disciples of the Four Gopsels.’

‘The Four Gospels?’

‘No, the Four
Gopsels.
Deliberate mistake there, see.’ Luke finished two more drinks. ‘The whole basis of this religion is that nobody’s perfect, everybody makes mistakes. Kind of an Islamic idea, I think. To err is human, and not to err is divine. So if you

make something perfect, you’re only mocking God. so in everything you do,
you have to make one deliberate mistake.’

‘I see where this is leading,’ said Roderick. ‘You made mistakes on the seat covers?’

‘That wouldn’t have been so bad. All I’d do was maybe leave off a spot, or do it in the wrong colour, or sometimes do it in a funny shape like the ace of clubs or something. But see painting leopard spots is boring work, so you get to talking with the people you work with, great bunch of guys and gals, I – well, I converted them. They all got born again as Disciples of the Four Gopsels too. So then each of them had to make a deliberate mistake. And by the time twenty-seven people do this, the seat covers start to look kinda funny, you know? That’s why the Boss fired me.’

‘Maybe that was his deliberate mistake,’ said Roderick.

‘Rickwood, you’re a card. I haven’t had a good laugh since I left the Corps.’

‘The Corps?’

Luke laughed again. ‘Maybe you’re
not
spying on me.’ He took a gold pin from his pocket and laid it on the bar. ‘Like, you wouldn’t know what that is, would you?’

Roderick looked at the pin. It showed a circle nested in a crescent, and a star with three lines coming down from it. ‘Some Masonic lodge? Turkish Army?’

‘The Astronaut Corps, pal. I was an astronaut. In fact I was the hundred-and-forty-seventh man on the moon. I was the hundred-and-eighty-first to walk in space, and the two-hundred-and-seventeenth to say “The Earth sure looks beautiful from up here.” Ah, those were the days, those were the days. Except –’

‘Except?’

‘Except they weren’t.’ Luke ordered more scotch. ‘Maybe I should start at the beginning. See, I always wanted to go to the moon. When I was a kid I read space comics and built model rockets and everything. Then I went into the Air Force, dropped a few bombs, had a few laughs, and ended up married and with three yelling kids in North Dakota. Here, I’ll show you pictures of my kids, look at this. No not that one, that’s a bomb pattern, here we are: Ronny and Vonny and little Lonny. Cute, huh? Of course they aren’t yelling in the picture.

‘Anyway they told me I could qualify as an astronaut, only first
I had to get a PhD. They figured they couldn’t have guys walking in space and saying how the Earth sure looks without PhDs. So I went to college, only right away I could see I wasn’t going to make it. So I decided to cheat. I had a lot going for me: I looked bright, I was rich and my father was a Senator. So I bought exam answers and faked experiments, and hired a research assistant to write my doctoral dissertation for me – I couldn’t even pronounce the title. Defending it was no problem, either: I had Dad put a little Federal research grant muscle on the college, and they managed to come up with a friendly committee and a prepared list of questions and answers. I got my PhD and I became an astronaut. You see, dreams can come true.’

Roderick shook his head. ‘What I don’t see is why it mattered so much. What’s so great about space?’

‘Let’s have another drink and I’ll tell you. Barkeep?’

Roderick saw a familiar face at the end of the bar. Or was it familiar? Just some man with oily black hair, tinted glasses, and a tweed overcoat. He was talking to a pretty, doll-like little woman in a black fur coat – they both looked a little overdressed for Skid Row – telling her jokes, evidently. Every now and then she’d let out a little squeak of laughter and say, ‘Oh Felix, you are the limit! The limit!’

Luke was saying, ‘Why did I want to be an astronaut? I used to ask myself that, you know. But then when I’d get home after a hard day faking lab experiments, and the kids would be yelling and the wife would refuse to iron my socks and make a big scene about it – then you know, I realized why I liked space. It’s because you’re alone out there. No one wants a bedtime story. No one wants you to drop off clothes at the cleaners on your way home. Oh don’t get me wrong, I love my wife. I love my kids. I love my dog and my television set and all my neighbours and fellow countrymen and everybody else, but I still like to be alone, once in a while. In space. You know like in that poem, “The world’s a fine and private place”.’

Roderick said, ‘I thought it was the grave that was a fine and private place.’

‘Okay never mind that. The point is, I got into space finally, and instead of being alone, it was just the opposite. Two guys in the damned space shuttle with you, and Mission Control in there
too – I mean right inside your damned suit. You eat a ham sandwich, this voice in your ear says, “Nice going, Luke. Hope you enjoy the ham sandwich, because your blood sugar level can use it.” You take a piss and they know exactly how much, what’s in it, the pH and albumin level, everything. You take a walk on the damned moon, they check your heart rate and tell you you’re lookin’ good, just gotta remind you they’re watching every move.’