Exceptions to Reality (9 page)

First thing the following morning, he brazenly ignored an unexpected drop in the cedi market to buy
schmerkels
like crazy. It was a reckless buying spree, consummated far more on instinct than knowledge. That it worked out to his advantage was as much a matter of luck as good timing. When something like a leprous weasel appeared in a small insert on his third screen to congratulate him, he took it in stride. The rest of the day spent dealing in bland dollars and euros was boring by comparison.

When he returned to his apartment late that night, there was a box waiting for him outside his door. It bore a peculiar and unfamiliar return address sticker but was clearly intended for him. Picking it up and carrying it inside, he removed his coat and tie, laid them neatly aside, shook the box experimentally, and then carefully opened it.

It contained the most beautiful suit he had ever seen: a lustrous, almost metallic black, fashioned of material so soft and light, it felt like woven air. A smaller box nestled within the larger contained cuff links and a tie pin sporting gemstones unlike any in his experience, including those featured in the display window at Tiffanys. They were deep violet shot through with dancing gold sparks. He wondered what they could possibly be. An accompanying card declared, “Compliments of the Öurt-Hafnook Pension Fund.” As he tried on the suit, which fit him like a cool breeze on a hot Manhattan afternoon, he wondered what an Öurt-Hafnook might be besides generous.

As his work with currencies belonging to the realm of the outré progressed over the next several weeks, he found himself the recipient of half a dozen additional wondrous and inexplicable gifts. There was the toaster that materialized butter inside the bread without any visible application mechanism; the add-on stereo for his car that, while ungainly and not quite fitting the intended slot in the dash, brought in stations no one else could hear; and the special toilet seat that, while one was appropriately enthroned, quickly cured any intestinal upset, distress, or hangover while performing its other, more plebeian function. Yes, business was very good indeed.

Until the
bafferfoom
market collapsed.

Now, Parker-Piggott no more knew the nature of
bafferfooms
than he did
zwebagls
. All he knew was that it cost him nearly ten millions
quiviqaps
before he could get out. That, in turn, ruined his leverage with Kovodo
doyks
. Before he knew it he was out another million
mopulopes
. Even his beloved
schmerkel
forwards were suddenly in jeopardy.

Wait a minute, he told himself. What was he worried about? It was all done through the computer, through whatever bizarre cross-dimensional upload had infected his private system. It was all sham, the suit and toaster and other gifts notwithstanding. Prank or something more, it was time to put an end to it and get back to dealing exclusively in sound, familiar currencies, from Mexican pesos to Egyptian pounds.

Accordingly he ordered up, at his own expense, an entirely new operating system. The handling software he installed himself, layering on his own personal work-ware after carefully scanning each individual component for viruses, spyware, or other intrusions. Only when he was certain all was virgin did he re-power-up his office. It was with the satisfaction of the very thorough that he subsequently observed on his triple screens only figures and names that made sense. He went back to work with a vengeance. Only occasionally did he cast a quick, nervous glance in the direction of the complaisant third screen.

The only news it brought him, however, was real news. Comprehensible news, delivered by interchangeably attractive men and women. No bilious chimeras thrust their quivering proboscises in his face, announcing this or that impossible disaster or ascendancy. No scholarly worms spewing elegant elocution announced the fall of unknown deities or celebrated the arrival of some inscrutable new conjuration. He was back on solid ground, monetarily speaking.

Next week he was due to take off for ten days in the Bahamas. Sun, sand, casino glitz, good food, fine drink, and relaxation—in the company of the enchanting Jennifer Lowen, if he could persuade her to accept his invitation. He was full of happy reggae thoughts, mon, as he entered his apartment that evening and locked the door behind him.

It struck him right away, and with considerable force, that he was not alone.

One visitor was wearing a neat brown suit that might have come right off the rack at Lord & Taylor except for the four arms. The flattened oval head that barely protruded from the starched collar was neckless, hairless, and devoid of visible ears. Each hand had three fingers, and each finger ended in a long claw. These were painted cerise, which Parker-Piggott thought went decidedly poorly with the creature’s coloring.

Its companion had no feet at all, sported a kind of loose-fitting dark blue turban around its middle, and was one-third oversized skull. Half a dozen bulbous eyes framed the vertical, fanged mouth, which more than anything else resembled an oozing Venus flytrap. The creature’s breathing was loud, slow, and exceedingly fetid, in keeping with its air of general putridity and poor posture.

Barely visible over the collar of the brown suit, a small babyish mouth addressed him. “Time’s up, Parker-Piggott. You did brilliantly there for a while. Really well,
ha-ssst
. But you stepped over the line with the Youbithian
ikkim
. What were you thinking? Don’t you watch the Youbith commodities markets? Any fool should have caught that rise in Bing-wa prices!”

“Bad weather,” rumbled the flytrap with the eyes. “Any fool.”

“Look, I know I’ve had a rough couple of weeks here lately. But my basic moves have been good. Everything will come back, and more, by the end of next month. There’ll be a full recovery, you’ll see.” Slipping out of his jacket, he loosened his tie. Another gift from gratified investors, it was impregnated with some kind of permanent perfume whose scent varied from day to day. “My instincts are still as sound as ever.”

Flytrap stepped forward, advancing as if he had twice the usual number of joints.

An alarmed Parker-Piggott retreated in the general direction of the mirrored mini-bar. “Here now, my good creature! Let’s control ourselves like civilized beings, shall we? This is global finance we’re dealing with here. This is not a game for the nervous or faint of heart.”

“Haven’t got one of those,” Four-arms responded, “so I wouldn’t know. Your margin has been called in, Parker-Piggott. Time to forfeit.” The bald half a head twisted slowly from side to side, as if mounted on a spindle. “Too bad. I made a couple of thousand
wivwuks
taking your advice on the side.” Eyes that could barely see over the white collar glanced significantly kitchen-ward. “Drouk…”

“No, wait!” Parker-Piggott squeaked as Flytrap closed in on him. He quickly saw that it would be impossible to give the slip to something with six eyes. “I can fix it! I can make it all back! Just give me another couple of weeks. No, no, a week, just one week!”

Four-arms sighed and lit a cheroot. It stank alarmingly of burning flesh. “Sorry, Parker-Piggott. If it was up to me…But I ain’t the one whose millions of
botobs
you were throwing around as if they were so much minced
spiyork.
They’ve run out of patience with you, Parker-Piggott. You should’ve been more careful with other folks’ money.”

“But,” Parker-Piggott screeched as Flytrap worked him into a corner from which there was no escape, “it wasn’t even
money
! It wasn’t real! It couldn’t have been real!”

“Easy for you to say.” The surreal speaker let out a porcine grunt as the shrieking Parker-Piggott was enveloped by Flytrap. Ominously Four-arms thoughtfully switched on the big-screen TV and turned up the volume to a suitably ear-numbing level. “You’re not the one who lost twenty million
schmerkels
last week.” With a barely visible nod from his barely visible head, he gestured tersely for his partner to proceed.

“Call in his margin, Drouk.”

They did not kill Parker-Piggott. After all, only the business of the
schmerkels
constituted a truly objectionable matter. The punishment was designed to fit the crime. In consequence, he forfeited a particularly sensitive and precious 10.5 percent of himself, which could not be recalled by speculation on the relevant open market or by any other means.

As a bit of a consolation, the enchanting Jennifer Lowen agreed to accompany him to the Bahamas—until that first evening in the suite they shared. When she saw how his person had been discounted, she ran shrieking from the room and caught the first flight back to London. With a resigned sigh, he knew he really couldn’t blame her.

No matter how successful in the business, a man whose gibbl has been oblately norked loses something in attractiveness…

Wait-a-While

In the winter of 1989 my wife and I found ourselves in a bar in a sprawling Sheraton resort in Port Douglas, Australia. Port Douglas is a tiny laid-back tourist town located on the southern fringes of the World Heritage Daintree Rainforest in northwest Queensland. In most ways the Daintree is a typical tropical rain forest: a place of enervating humidity, riotously diverse flora and fauna, oppressively sauna-like heat, and mysterious dark nooks and crannies unvisited by humankind. Atypically for a rain forest, its plant life is more threatening to human visitors than are the local animals. The exception is a giant flightless bird called the cassowary, which looks more like a dinosaur than any other avian with the possible exception of South America’s hoatzin.

When my wife departed for elsewhere, I lingered awhile. I found myself listening (where do writers get their ideas?) to a conversation between a couple of local gents who had popped in out of the heat for a quick one. They rambled on about sports scores, the weather, road conditions, box jellyfish, and enough local lore to apprise me of the fact that they not only lived in the area but knew it well.

Eventually one of them started talking about two women, a mother and her grown daughter, who were known to conceal themselves in the depths of the forest, not wear clothes, and generally live off the land. In the course of the tale-teller’s talk I expected to hear derision, if not outright laughter. Instead there was more than a modicum of respect in the voices of both men. Respect for anyone, much less a couple of ladies, who would dare try to eke out an existence in a wild and inhospitable, albeit beautiful, place like the Daintree—with or without suitable attire.

The Daintree, you see, is and always has been a special place…

Michael Covey had
come to Queensland looking for inspiration and had found only beer. Beer and overwhelming heat, suffocating humidity, subtle bigotry, and an all-pervasive tropical dulling of the senses inconducive to cogent thought, much less the novel he hoped to write.

The bar in the hotel was solid Daintree hardwood, cut from the center of a single tree. From where he sat near the far end it looked expansive enough to handle the landing of a small plane. Dark brown veined with black, it resembled a slab of meat hacked from some dinosaurian flank. Sparkling empty glasses dangled like crystalline grapes from crazed brass piping. Spotted throughout the vast Byzantine reaches of the restaurant, potted plants squatted forlornly, as if marooned in amber. Tinted windows kept the unyielding equatorial sun at bay.

Covey sat alone at the bar. It was midday, a time when the rest of the hotel’s guests were out swimming, diving, sightseeing, and shopping, their relentless desperation to enjoy themselves as remorseless as the sun. Through a vast picture window he watched a quartet of Japanese golfers putting their way through the tenth green, little mechanical windup figures in perfectly pressed slacks and shirts that somehow defied the pitiless humidity.

Lucky bastards. They don’t have to think for a living. The only thing that torments them is fear of failing to please a boss-san. He sipped cold lager.

The bartender was pale, blond, athletic, Aussie; fertile ground for skin cancer. Covey was lean, tired, nondescript; a surefire candidate for artistic anonymity. No matter where he went, no matter how often he traveled, the one thing he could not escape was the incontestable mediocrity of his talent.

“Hot,” Covey muttered.

“Too right.” A damp cloth shusshed over the counter, slick as skis on fresh powder. Ceiling fans whirred softly overhead, agitating the cold air-conditioned atmosphere that tried to hug the tiled marble floor.

Covey shifted his butt, straightening slightly on his stool, abruptly overwhelmed with the urge to confess. “I’m a writer. I make a very nice living because I have written twenty-four novels.”

“Good on ya, mate.”

“No, it isn’t. It isn’t good on me at all. It sucks. You want to know why?” Of course the bartender wanted to know why. It was his job. “Because all twenty-four are exactly alike. The titles differ, so do some of the details, but basically I’ve been writing the same goddamn book over and over again for the past twenty years. Each year they sell a few more copies, and each year I get a little more in royalties and a little more disgusted with myself. Because I know I can write something else, something better.” The sanctity of the confessional was interrupted by the arrival of a trio of middle-aged white men. They entered the bar cackling with midwestern twang. Covey tried to ignore them.

“That’s why I came here. To find inspiration. To expose myself to new surroundings, new ideas.” He held up the empty lager bottle. “So far I have found only this, and it is not worth even a novelette.”

“I tell ya, they were buck naked, the both of ’em!”

“Gawann, Fred.” The doubter wore plaid shorts and a white tennis shirt stretched taut over the anchored blimp of his belly.

“He’s tellin’ the truth, Jimmy. They weren’t bad lookers, either.” A dirty snigger punctuated the observation propounded by the third man. “Shoulda seen the wife’s reaction to ’em. Edith like to have peed in her pants.” The trio chortled as one, a Topeka chorus distinctly unmelodic. The sound grated on the smooth stone of the floor.

“We tried to get the driver to stop,” said the first speaker. “Dumb Aussie ignored us. Said we were seeing things. That there wasn’t nobody living in that part of the rain forest, naked or otherwise. But I seen ’em.” He leaned forward, squinching the belly. “Bill did, too.”

“That’s right.” The second man nodded solemnly. “Buck naked, they was.”

An irritated Covey watched as the three traversed the length of the bar like oysters escaping a buffet. “What do you suppose that was all about?” He looked back to the bartender. “You have naked women living in your jungle?”

“Rain forest.” The bartender corrected him without looking up from his work. “Maybe.”

Covey chuckled, reached for his glass, hesitated. Something in the younger man’s tone…

“It’s a joke, right? You’re goofing on me.”

“No joke, mate. It’s a woman and her daughter, fair dinkum. Eleven years they been out there. Live off the land, they do. So people say.”

Covey pushed his glass aside. “Why? Why would anyone want to do that? Much less a mother and daughter.”

The bartender turned away, hunkering down with the air of a man who had already said too much. “Their business. Why ask me? You’re the writer.”

“I’m a novelist, not a reporter.” There’s something here, he found himself thinking. Something in what’s not being said. Was it worth checking out? On the face of it, the story belonged near the top of the bullshit probability index. Doubtless the bartender had overheard the three clowns from Kansas as clearly as his customer and had improvised a good gag on the spot.

But the way Covey was feeling, anything was better than flying home to face the accusatory sameness of book twenty-five and the screeching inadequacy of his meager, overpaid talent.

“I don’t believe you, of course, but certain of my fellow travelers whom I’ve been unable to avoid keep insisting I ought to see some of the jung…the rain forest…before I go home. Assuming I decide to give it a try, how might I locate these antipodean naiads?”

“You don’t. They’re supposed to live way up in the backside of the Daintree.” As bartenders do, the young Aussie busied himself polishing a glass. “You don’t ‘find’ anybody in the Daintree. It’s a garden God planted and then forgot about and now it’s all overgrown. Nobody’ll take you into the back of in there.”

Digging into a pocket, Covey extracted a thick wad of traveler’s checks. Very slowly and deliberately he signed the one on top. “Nobody?”

Purple print caused the young bartender to waver in his better judgment.

“Maybe one larrikin. But he’s mad.” The traveler’s check vanished. “If you’re so flamin’ sure it’s a joke, why’re you suddenly so keen on checkin’ it out?”

Covey stared across at him out of eyes that could not see quite far enough. “Since my writing and I are something of a joke, I don’t see the contradiction in following up on another.”

Boris Schneemann didn’t act crazy, but he sure as hell looked the part. Covey found himself mentally recording the man’s vitals for future literary abstraction. Six-two, 210, crowned by a mat of scraggly black hair that glistened with some kind of internal ooze, Schneemann regarded the world unblinkingly while perspiring like an asphalt-layer working Phoenix streets in mid-July. Originally from a corner of Germany he declined to identify more than vaguely, he had migrated to northeast Australia fourteen years ago. Now he grew bananas and dogs when not running tourists into the Daintree.

A succession of short scars ran across his Roman bridge of a nose, fossilized evidence of some ancient battle in which an opponent had tried to remove the protuberance via amateur rhinoplasty. This and other aspects of personality and self suggested that in dear old Deutschland, Schneemann had been something other than a farmer of edible fruits and lover of dogs. Covey chose not to probe too deeply too soon into his guide’s hazy history.

The battered gray Toyota Land Cruiser was to cars what a professional wrestler was to a surgeon. It did not so much drive over the road as intimidate it.

“Ninety thousand new she cost me.” Schneemann railed against faceless bureaucrats as the Land Cruiser slammed contemptuously through a bottomless pothole, sending Covey’s brains ricocheting off the top of his skull.
“Auschloch
import duties! Can buy nothing reasonable in this country unless it’s made here.” He pointed to his right.

“See that tree? Tulga. Forty thousand dollars it’s worth, just standing there. Most places people poach animals. Here they try to steal trees.”

“Tell me about the women.” Covey’s fingers were white and numb from clinging to the handgrip bolted to the Land Cruiser’s frame above the passenger-side window. The so-called road they were careening down like a runaway Baja racer, the Inner Bloomfield Track, continued snaking its way through towering green walls. The roadbed was yellow-brown, the narrow strip of sky overhead shockingly blue, and the rest of the universe alternating shades of green hothouse gloom.

“Not much to tell, Mike Covey. They been back in here long time.”

“So you believe in them, too?”

Schneemann was silent for a while, concentrating on the road. “Ya.” He spoke softly for a change, scratching the back of his head. “Ya, I believe in them.”

“Any idea how old they are?” Covey was making mental notes.

“Mother and daughter. The girl, she would be about seventeen, I’d say.”

“And the local school authorities don’t mind that she’s not in school?”

The front end of the Land Cruiser went temporarily airborne, and the impact when it touched down stunned Covey’s sacrum.

“Oh sure, they mind. Every once in a while somebody go looking for them to bring in the daughter. School nannies, state social services. They never find them.”

“I was told that you could.”

The burly German laughed like a demented Santa Claus. “What fool bloke guy told you that? I can track them…sometimes. Naked footprints in the mud, two sets. You follow them.” There was a curious edge in his voice. “Over ridges, through trees, across streams. Until they disappear. Always,” he muttered more to himself than to his passenger, “they disappear.”

Covey began to worry that the bartender’s appraisal of the guide’s sanity was nearer the mark than he’d been willing to countenance when he had hired the man. He gazed out the window. One thing was already apparent. Any inspiration to be found out here would be heavily tinged with green.

“Yeah, sure. They ‘disappear.’”

Schneemann shrugged massively. “Maybe they go up in the trees, ya? Maybe they fly away.”

“How can they survive in this? I mean, what do they eat?”

“Mango, pawpaw, lychee, possum, snake—plenty
für essen
in the rain forest.” He gripped the wheel with both hands. “You hang on, Mike Covey. All the good road, she is behind us now.”

Covey swallowed hard and wondered what the hell he was trying to prove.

They spent the night on hard beds in a tiny youth hostel situated in the absolute middle of emerald nowhere. The ramshackle clapboard-and-metal structure squatted by the side of the track like a corrugated boil engulfed in broccoli soup. It was designed to serve backpackers, which excused Covey. The only backpacking he had ever done in his life was from shopping cart to car trunk. His idea of a nature walk was crossing Central Park from the Met to the American Museum of Natural History.

Eventually they abandoned the track entirely as Schneemann turned up a shallow stream, the Land Cruiser grinding and sloshing its way over a pavement composed of water-polished pebbles and punky driftwood. Eels and crayfish scattered from beneath the crunching tires.

As the guide explained, the unpaved Inner Bloomfield Track more or less paralleled the coast. No roads led straight inland, into the heart of the mountainous rain forest. There was nowhere for any to go, and no way for them to get there.