Talking Heads (33 page)

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Authors: John Domini

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BOOK: Talking Heads
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He was hit as soon as his arm started to fall. Whacked on the nose and then clawed across his gun hand. For a moment he thought he'd lost a finger.

“
Stronzo,
” Leo said.

Crumpling, his face cradled into his aching, now empty hand, Kit was astonished at the old man. He'd worried about Garrison, about Louie-Louie, never about Zia's father. Pain rippled out across his face, across last week's wounds, and Kit had a raw flash of Leo's hardhat friends rushing down on him in a mob. He turtled away on his knees, directionless.

There was the lip of the lower site's dam. The corrugated steel. Swaying against it, Kit came to himself, hunched as if in prayer over the edge of the dig. He saw the archaeologists' grid. A checkerboard of string or twine, a loose net across half the murky floor. A net, but too weak to catch him. One moment the drop looked like six feet, the next closer to sixty.

“Cunt,” Leo was saying, above him. “
Rincolo.
”

And the hardhats were coming. Their boot steps, coming fast, shuddered the earth under Kit's knees. He tried to squeeze an idea from his bleeding index finger, his former trigger finger, gashed and stained with oil. He blinked against the fresh ooze from his stitches.

“Talk,” Leo said. “You, your business, it's nothing but
talk
. You think you could beat a man who really does something? Really makes something?”

Hey believer, what was that click? That click and then that clunk, just behind your head?

“Didn't even have a round in the chamber,” Leo said. “Safety was off and you didn't have nothing in the chamber. What, you going to shoot me with talk?”

Kit didn't see a ladder, below him. He didn't hear anything good from the onrushing workers.
Leo! Fuckin' A
!

“Whatever happens now, cunt, I call it self defense.” And believer, what's that against the back of your neck?

“Self defense,” Leo repeated. “How's that for talk?”

Kit wasn't about to make any sudden moves. It was all he could do just to master the new bloodrush of his fear, a fresh chill, stinging. Against his neck, Louie-Louie's .38 was the worm on his back turned to worse. But he found himself starting to talk. “Leo …” Starting to talk: the old man had been right about that. It was what Kit did, talk: his business, his fallback, his last straw. And it had its advantages. It meant, for one, that Kit knew the old man. He wasn't going to blow up, the old man, and leave a thousand loose ends hanging in the air. He wasn't that kind of gunslinger, any more than Kit himself. There at the edge of the lower site, as he weathered his blood rush, Kit discovered again this root clarity. Starting to talk. He began even to overcome his soggy remorse over how stupid he'd been, and he may have realized his mistake—realized why all this had happened.

But then the gun came away from Kit's neck and he took a belt across the back of his head. Once more he was nothing but nerves, shock, body.

Chapter 11

NOTES

[
Remember—DON'T READ YOUR NOTES. Talk. Spontaneous.
]

Thank you. [
wait, applause
] Thank you.

Of course I'm happy to accept this award, so weighty with esteem—and so generous with the checkbook! [
wait, laughter
]

I'm happy to have the Emmy, yes.

[
smile, thoughtful
] It's pretty, isn't it? Very pretty, very clean. [
sincere
] I always believed in my brave little newspaper; I always believed it might be good enough to get on TV.

[
no smile, thoughtful
] And now I stand here honored and rich, while the men I exposed as crooks lie ruined and wretched. They've been sent to Monsod—Monsod, my God!

LAST SEEN

Dig this: unearthing the future
.

How do you tell a tourist?
Zia see—if you jump to conclusions, it's not the fall that kills you. Jump, and what does the damage is all the other dead souls out there.

This one's a spooky one, my basementals. Spooky scary Kult Klassic. I've been in some undergrounds in my time; I've seen my share of more dead than alive. A punk's night out is nothing if not
Nosferatu
in 3-D. The lips all too real and the skin hardly there. But today my Show & Tell is just the opposite. Today, it's not the deathy revelry of the sick and abandoned, my usual hang (o, these fragments I have shored against my ruin). Instead, I've got the desiccated fossil of a person who should still be alive.

Justice! [
wave award
] Justice! [
wait, applause
]

And great ratings, too. [
wait, laughter
]

The story was a natural, wasn't it? A public building scandal in Massachusetts—fascinating. Heroic stuff, [
pause, reflect
] Do you remember the scene where the bad guys had me down in the mud, tangled in twine? Do you remember? I was down and shivering and they stood up there, pointing a gun.

[
pause, suspense
]

A fearful moment, yes. Fearful—and heroic. [
pause
]

My point—aside from bragging on myself—[
wait, laughter
] is that we in this room understand, as professionals, the power of story. We know High Concept and how to fit it on the small screen. [
smile
] But outside this room [
gesture, doors
] remain the unprofessional. The proles—outside the media. And when I was down in that muck, tangled and exposed and scared, then I too was outside the media.

An actual long-dead, my Sandinistas. The lips turned to tree bark and the clothes hardly there. And yet the corpse is contemporary. The fossil is us.

The cutting edge, in this case, cuts backward: it's archaeologists who've been hep. Dig-sters, get it? They found the guy down in the soon-to-be T, the station under excavation. Only, some Head Guy somewhere declared the find, uh, sensitive. Uh, requires further study. Uh, needs protection from public scrutiny.

Ah, but they
didn't count on our kind, did they, my
compañeros?
Cellars by starlight means celestial navigation, and a little razor wire and security can't hold back the likes of us. I was in a hot minute after nightfall. Into the “lower site,” hee hee. And as for the stranger on the floor—barkeep, I'll have whatever
he
had.

I could have been anybody, tangled and exposed and scared. I couldn't have been further from a hero. [
wave award
]

But now [
lean into mike, intimate
] I'm in. I'm up here.

[
pause for emphasis, & CHECK TRUSTEES. okay to keep talking?
]

Now what made the difference, you ask? I went from a naked nobody in the muck to a one-man judge and jury in a silver suit. [
smile
] What did it? [
wait
] Well, my colleagues—I had to get arrested, [
wait, laughter
]

The police had to come and cuff me, yes. They had to hold me—actually put me in a cell. [
gesture, bars
] You all remember the scene, I'm sure. My heroic call to my lawyer, you remember, [
gesture, telephone
]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nonetheless, this one's a weird one. It's this year's model, and also the last millennium's fossil. It's our leather, also leather-y. Like, what sort of a story have we
got
here? Like, a historical novel about the present?

Chapter One:
In the Grid
. Why, what's that strange grid, down there? That grid or graph or sumpin, laid over the stinking earth? Why, it
is
a graph! A sorta 3-D graph, sticks and string! And good Lord, what's that under square A-3 …

Chapter Two:
Criticism/Self-criticism
. Man, oh man, what am I doing here?

Chapter Three:
All Alone by the Skele-tone
. Judging from the dimensions of the pelvis (squares H-2 through H-5), and the .

 

Popkin had, as before, his own vocabulary. When Kit at last reached him from the phone in the police station: “Finding other counsel seems indicated.” And when Kit explained why he'd missed their appointment: “Not a
useful
development, certainly.”

I had to get arrested, yes. I had to make that humiliating call to my attorney. That's what it took to become a hero.

[
CHECK TRUSTEES—if no okay to go on, cut to last graphs
]

Or that's part of it, at least. [
IF okay TO GO ON:
]

You see, all I knew was verbal. [
head down
] That was my problem, before I joined the media. Everything was verbal. I was muttering, I was dreamy.

I was a loser. [
wait, laughter
] In order to join the winners, [
smile, ESP. AT TRUSTEES
] to break the grip of my word-based mucking around—word-based and low-paid [
wait, laughter
]—well I needed
more
than my lawyer. I needed the cold, stony city itself. Only when I got back out into the city did I at last realize that, nowadays, winners don't bother with words.

[
no joke, no smile
]

Chapter Three:
All Alone by the Skele-tone
. Judging from the dimensions of the pelvis (squares H-2 through H-5), and the proportions of shoulders to head (3:1, see illustration), as well as the overall size of the remains (est. height, alive: 6' 2”; est. weight: 180), we would conclude that the subject was a mature male of Scandinavian type, not yet 30 at the time of death. The ID we found helps too.

Chapter Four:
He Died With His Boots On
. L.L. Beans, in fact.

Chapter Five:
He Died With His Boots On, Part II
. Look there! The pockets of his disgusting coat are bulging! Your coat pocket of today is constructed so as to contain a variety of materiél, such as sammiches and weaponry and folding cash, and these yield an illuminating fossil record.

The attorney arranged to have a paralegal run over to the waterfront station. Popkin himself had no time till after five. Kit, nursing fresh aches and pains, a deep new remorse—Kit was just as happy to put off seeing the man.

I needed this cold stony city. I needed the city to show me—nowadays words get in the way, if you want to be a winner.

[
no joke, no smile
]

I was heading for the MTA, for my office. [
upright at mike, a talking head
] I had a list of the Monsod contractors in my office, a list my lawyer needed to see. And I had other reasons for heading that way, instead of for instance heading home, but I won't go into them here.

[
shake head, smile
] If I went into every last little reason I did anything, you see, I'd go back to being a loser. If I wasted my time with every last shadow of motive and personality, I'd still be caught up in words words words.

[
shake head
] No, never mind my grubby little handful of motives. What matters is—then I saw the record store.

Your coat pocket of today is constructed so as to contain even sammiches, hero sammiches. It yields an illuminating fossil record. Why, look there—a stupid Press card! “Alternative” Press! And there—a worm on his back! Not your ordinary worm, either, just a-lookin' for a home; rather a creature far more insidious—the worm of doubt! Good Lord, I know who this is.

Oh, my old moles
. There were secrets to be gleaned here, dark secrets. But if you jump to conclusions—well, don't. The darkest secret here turned out to be Madame Z's. My own. A dark spell, cast by the dirty dead.

I knew the guy, my guerrilleros. I mean, for starters

… I
knew
this fossil. He was none other than our Pseudo, our week's worth of contempt: the tourist.

Though of course Popkin needed to go over Kit's own testimony, the attorney was even more interested in any “neutral documents.” He wanted to see corroboration.

“Do you have anything to back up your story?” Popkin asked, in plain English. “A memo? Even a business card?”

Kit thought of the contractors list Rick DeMirris had put together, still on his desk at the office. He thought of the card from Croftall's aide. Between those two however there was another thought knocking, some connection to Bette.

*

The record store, that's what I needed. [
close to mike, intimate
] A store in the middle of a square. A vivid full-window display, just across from the T stop. [
intimate, switching to present tense
]

It's a display of a single LP: THIS JUST IN. Copy after copy of a single album checkers the window, glossy 12x12 covers strung up corner to corner, an inch or so behind the glass. [
gesture to clarify
] A grid.

The LP isn't particularly bright—a deep red, except the title—but the day is. Winter sun blasts the display, the metal and glass Boston surfaces. [
example: hold award to light
] A sheen of cold lies over the square. And at the center of this square, this freezing turnaround under a distant sun, there's the repeated red cover of the LP reflected in the back of its broad storefront window, reflected too in the facing windows, in the sheen of the sign for the T stop, in the windows of passing cars and trolleys, even in the glasses and visors of bundled riders and pedestrians. [
w/ award under light, flash at faces nearby
]

The tourist. I'd know that jacket anywhere. And even with brown rotten-apple skin, even with hair like strands of bomb wreckage—even so, there could be no mistaking that wolf's jaw, that fadeaway forehead.

Pseudo Bowie, check. Right down to his Bean waffle stompers. All our man lacked was his sidekick, the mysterioso “Garrison.” The ghost guard never showed. Never; our tourist had put one haunt to rest at least. And I mean, we were sitting in the middle of a haunted harbor.

See, this time, my mad bombers—this time maybe I was the ghost. Madame Z, maybe. See, I didn't just know
who
the guy was, I also knew
where
he was. I knew where he'd gone when he died. I mean, in his pockets he had Pompeii, and all of a sudden I could read Latin. I found myself going into every last little reason he had for being there.

Every shadow of a motive.

Without end it multiplies, this cover. This blank bright sheet pasted over cardboard. It multiplies and soon there's no telling which is LP, which is the city, its carriers or passersby. A grid without end [
flash award in new face w/each rep]:
Talking Heads: 77. Talking Heads: 77. Talking Heads: 77. Talking Heads: 77.

[
pause, lower award
]

So I had my vision. I saw my new medium.

Where do we go when we die?
Well, how about the MTA? So help me. Our Scandie had a pass—hey,
there's
a clue—though the name on it was a woman's. “Elizabeth,” that's all. Last names had been erased, some kind of selective erosion, over centuries of shuffle time. See, that's what we're talking about here, shuffle time. Our loser of the moment (dilettante '77) was also a tourist of the future (I mean, this is a station under
excavation
) and the past (I mean, his pocket was
Pompeii
). Shuffle time and deal again.

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