Nocturnal Emissions (31 page)

If that didn’t make the outcome clear enough, the next sequence left no room for doubt. Expensive cars and limousines were driving up in front of a funeral parlor. Camera crews and journalists from TV stations and newspapers crowded about for shots of the celebrities who emerged from the cars and moved inside for the ceremony.

The documentary switched to the proceedings inside—and there among the milling VIPs was the singer Walter Egan, dressed in a nice suit and tie, but with an electric guitar slung across his body. Teddy Winsome stood beside him, and was saying, “Please just do this, Walter. I’ll have a nice check for you after it’s all over, believe me.”

The musician sighed, and said, “That’s fine, thanks—not that I’m as mer-cenary as you think, Teddy.”

The camera cut to Rake standing over his partner’s coffin, which more resembled a shoe box. Inside, dressed in his trademark short-sleeved white shirt and green lederhosen, the rosy-cheeked, baby-faced puppet smiled bliss-fully. Rake removed his black cowboy hat and held it over his chest. When he did so, he inadvertently exposed a white scar that entirely encircled the top of his head, set off by his slicked black hair.

“Goodbye, little feller,” he said, “mm-hm.”

Then, a cut to Walter Egan playing his electric guitar, which he’d plugged into an amplifier, accompanying Rake as the latter sang for the assembled mourners:

“Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,

That saved a wretch like me…

I once was lost but now am found,

My pretty little filly.”

After the ceremony, when the attendees were once again forming little groups to talk, Winsome thanked Egan and handed him his check. “Thanks,”

the singer said, folding it away. “So, ah, whose request was it that I play, anyway? Rake?”

“No, no.” Winsome pointed across the room. “It was their request.”

Egan turned to look, as did the eavesdropping documentary camera.

There stood two very different figures. One was a female dressed in a black leotard that included a tight hood around her head, baring only her face, which was made up in white and black mime makeup. Hanging from her mid-section was the upper body of a partly developed conjoined twin, the woman’s leotard having been artfully extended to encompass its body, too. The parasitic twin’s slack, drooling face was also made up in mime makeup, its gnarled hands convulsively thumping at some imaginary window. Beside the woman, a German Shepherd sat patiently. It wore a brass deep sea diving helmet, with the front hatch open to allow its snout to poke out.

Teddy Winsome explained brightly, “They’re my new clients, Walter, and they really love your work!”

#10: Ya Jest Gotta

Hee was nearly inconsolable after learning of the death of Widget. She let me borrow a disc she’d acquired or recorded somehow of Rake and Widget’s work; I don’t know if she heard something different from me, or if the disc had gone defective, but all I heard was static as from a poorly tuned radio and, somewhere behind it, maybe a cat in heat (or was that a baby crying?) and a woman singing opera (or was she sobbing?). To take Hee’s mind off the tragedy, and frankly, in the hopes of tilting our flirtation toward something more fulfilling, I took her out the next evening for dinner at a brand new restaurant I’d learned of called
The Magical Negro
.

I didn’t know quite what it was all about, at first, though I felt the restaurant’s name was a wee bit ill-advised. It was a rather small and humble affair, tastefully decorated with framed photographs of distinguished-looking people of color. Local men and women of note, maybe doctors at the nearby hospital, professors at the local college? It turned out that Hee, with her fanaticism for TV, knew more about the eatery than I did, and she pointed out certain faces to give their names. “That’s Scatman Crothers. He’s an African-American actor famous in the dimension you and me were watching on TV—you know, where Rake and Widget were visiting? Him, too, over there—that’s Sidney Poitier.” She turned in her seat. “Ruby
Dee
, over there, and that’s Morgan Freeman, of course, the most magical one of the bunch.”

“Huh?” I said, staring at the indicated photo, of a handsomely smiling older “African-American” gentleman, as she put it. I confess I was still pretty baffled. Whatever the case, it appeared that the transmissions from the dimension in question, which obviously more people were now receiving on their televisions, had excited not only Hee. Were other factors or anomalies or advances in technology making these signals accessible, or had the afteref-fects of my little mishap extended beyond the limits of the house I lived in?

Our waiter came then, to take our orders. He was himself a distinguished-looking, somewhat elderly “African-American” gentleman, with snowy hair and a mustache, a little stooped but tall and wearing a neat white apron. In a gentle, honeyed drawl he said, “Well, well, young people…pleasure to see you tonight. This your first time comin’ to our fine establishment?”

“Hi,” I said. “Uh, yes, it is.” I swept a hand over the open menu. I had never to my knowledge experienced some of its fare before, such as collards, okra, snap beans, and the cruel-sounding smothered chicken. “Any recom-mendations? I’m not really sure what to order.”

“Well, young sir,” the waiter chuckled softly, “sometimes ya jest gotta listen for the golden cabaret in yo head.”

I gazed up at his warmly smiling face for a few moments, and then said,

“Okay.” I supposed that advice was as good as Detective/Psychiatrist Jabronski’s, “You gotta build a fi-ah,” anyway. I looked back down at the menu.

“Drinks while you folks ponder?” he asked.

We gave our drink orders and he shuffled off for the kitchen. I watched another waiter take the orders of a couple seated across the room. He was a huge, muscular black man with a bald head, who despite his deep rumbling voice spoke haltingly, shyly and simply, like a child. A white dove was perched politely on one shoulder.

While I waited for our own waiter to return I looked back at Hee, both mesmerized and a little unsettled today by her beauty. For our date she had fitted contact lenses onto her eyes—of an unnatural green color—maybe going for an extra touch of exoticism, though I didn’t think they really jelled with her Oriental looks. In fact, the green lenses made her look as though the Ephemeral Eye were peering out of her through them, and I told her as much as a kind of joke—hoping it wouldn’t offend her, given her confession that the Ephemeral Eye had had some unspecified effects on her.

“Yeah, that’s why I bought them,” she admitted easily. “But I never showed you this.” She turned around in her seat, bent forward and thrust her bottom toward me, pulling down the edge of her tight, white hot-pants. There, on the taut brown skin of her lower back (and I was teased with the indented beginning of a dark dividing split) was a tattoo I hadn’t got a glimpse of before, despite her habitually revealing clothing (unless it was newly acquired). It was a perfect representation of the Ephemeral Eye, in weirdly luminous-looking lime green ink. Pivoting on her bottom to face me again, she confirmed, “It glows in the dark.”

“I’d like to see that sometime.” I was proud of myself for having the courage, the daring, to put that out there.

“Sure,” she chirped, giving her winning bright smile. It was a bit lopsided, higher on the right, and her teeth were very white but a little crookedly uneven. Imperfection always enhances beauty, so I found her crooked teeth endearing. By now I found everything about her endearing, and I had a compulsion to record her unique beauty somehow, in a story or a drawing, in a photo or a video, because it needed to be
captured
, to be
possessed
. Possessed by me, of course. The flitting, erratic butterfly pinned in a case to be admired at will, safely and securely and only by me. The more this craving took hold of me, the more I felt an insecurity bordering on panic. My covetousness was such that I could almost have consumed her. Literally, eaten her body, and savored every tender cell. But even then, I thought, without being sated.

This hunger transcended lust. It was an existential kind of lust, I thought.

The unhappiness of desire.

We ate our meal, and throughout I hoped to win a specific date for her tattoo’s phosphorescent properties to be demonstrated, but I couldn’t quite steer her that way as she wove wildly from one enthusiastic topic to another.

We finished with bread pudding (me) and sweet potato pie (Hee) for dessert, after which I sipped my chicory coffee and joked to Hee, “Well, that sure was some good eatin’, huh, little filly?”

Hee looked at me with a frozen smile for a beat or two, before her face crumpled like a tissue and she began shaking with sobs. “Ohh…poor little Widget…I can’t believe it!”

I avoided the eyes of other customers, embarrassed, as I reached across the table to hold her hand. She allowed me to do this, so perhaps it hadn’t been such a terrible
faux pas
, after all. Or so it appeared at the moment.

This was the first blatant indication I had of the radical mood swings Hee suffered, but which she appeared not to consider a serious problem; at least, a problem she was willing to admit to. Her stormier moods were always someone else’s fault. Usually her mother’s, but starting tonight, mine.

“Why did you have to say that, you stupid asshole?” she wept, yanking her hand away again.

“Sorry, shh, sorry,” I whispered, leaning forward in an attempt to catch her hand again, but she wouldn’t let me touch her.

“How was everything?” asked that honeyed drawl again. I looked up and there, as if he had suddenly manifested by my elbow, was our waiter.

“Great, great!” I said too cheerily. “I’m so glad I tried this place.”

“Well, young sir,” the old man said wisely, giving me a wink, “sometimes ya jest gotta jest gotta.”

#11: The Wages of Skin

From having begun our TV ritual with sitting cross-legged on the floor, then graduating to the recliner, the following afternoon Hee—thankfully, recovered from her bout of anger—took things to their natural progression, by suggesting that we lie on my bed together to watch TV. This we did, and thereafter our ritual changed dramatically…as I had prayed with an increasingly desperate fervor that it would.

We started out lying side-by-side in our clothes, and Hee drew a blanket over us and snuggled against me, shivering and claiming to be cold. My left arm was behind her neck as a pillow. I began some channel surfing, until such time as I expected Hee to claim the remote, but she seemed content to cling to me and dreamily watch whatever I briefly alighted on, before, like a restless bee, I drifted on to the next bright flower. I settled at last on a program that looked like it would bore Hee for sure (bore her to sleep, which wasn’t what I wanted), but I was hoping it might further stimulate matters instead, as it was a talk program in which two
people were discussing rela
tionships between men and women—“the male and female dynamic,” as one of them said.

Both host and guest (the guest was apparently an author) were men, and when I tuned in the guest was saying, “Let’s break it down to the obvious, Ted.

For the most part, acquiring children is women’s goal, and sex is incidental—whereas acquiring sex is men’s goal, and children are incidental.”

“But in the end everyone gets what they want, right?” the host joked lamely.

“Really? Are we really all that content? Women—and I don’t mean the fictitious women you see in TV and movies—are not truly sexual beings. Men are sexual beings. Men
superimpose
their sexuality onto women, dress women in their dreams and longing the way women obligingly but unenthusiastically don sexy lingerie. But women are only as sexual as they need to be to acquire the aforementioned children, or to impress or outdo each other, or to boost their self esteem…their self worth, and their worth to their men. I suppose in a way they’re to be pitied. With men, sex is a wholly pure hunger—as innocent, really, as a shark’s bloodlust.”

“But people aren’t just mindless sharks,” the host countered. “We should be more complex than that, shouldn’t we? Doesn’t what you’re saying suggest that in this regard men are
too
simple, but women demonstrate the more complicated thoughts and concerns of beings who are advanced enough to question their condition?”

“Question it to what end? To bring about neurosis, while too often so self-absorbed and lacking in empathy that they leave their counterparts feeling desolate and unfulfilled—when all that’s being asked of them is something as simple as nursing a baby, and as vital?”