The Müller-Fokker Effect (20 page)

He escalated to the top of Calvary, passing on the way a figure in a white robe. Drawn slowly upward by a buried cable, it made mechanical toiling gestures under its huge cross. At the top there were more diversions: dicing for Crusade T-shirts; a photography studio where figures with heads cut out portrayed all fourteen stations of the cross, enabling one to take any part in any scene; and the main event, shortened from the original three hours to twenty minutes, and played out in a big tent by mechanical figures.

‘Show’s about to start, brothers and sisters, any minute. On the inside,
the one show you cannot miss
. Show’s about to start any minute. See it all, acted by living audioanimatrons.’

The barker paused to ask the suspect for his ticket. ‘Two bucks, bub.’

The man gestured over his shoulder with a thumb. ‘He paid,’ he said, and shoved on through the wicket. The barker looked for the payer and saw no one, only the figure in white. Having toted its cross to the top, it was being backed down again.

The two Crusade cops looked at each other. ‘He slipped in? Well I guess we got enough on him, then. Where is he now?’

‘It’s real funny. I seen him go in,’ said the barker. ‘But I didn’t see him come out.’

‘Okay, then. We might as well check out Heaven and Hades.’

Hades Land was run by the management of ‘Harry’s Hollywood Happening’. It masqueraded as a respectable restaurant with demonized waiters, red lighting and many flambée specialités. But once a customer had entered—and abandoned hope by means of signing a waiver—it became a painfully elaborate fun house.

A polite demon led the suspect to his table and held his chair for him. The chair had no back legs. Another demon waiter rushed out with a plate of rubber food.

The stranger seemed to take it all good-naturedly. No one laughed harder than he when his table proved to be topless, and he saw his dinner sink out of sight in the folds of the tablecloth. Nor when a pair of waiters whipped off the red cloth, tucked it around his neck and began giving him a haircut. Nor when they snipped off his tie and one sleeve of his suit.

Baffled and angry, they gave up on him and concentrated on more likely targets. A woman’s dress blew up, a table collapsed. There were screams as a waiter uncovered a dish of live squid; elsewhere diners made the mistake of ordering the special chili. Still laughing, the stranger headed for the door.

‘Just a minute, sir,’ said the headwaiter. ‘Haven’t you forgotten something?’ He held out the check.

The stranger laughed again. ‘That’ll be fourteen dollars, sir,’ the headwaiter insisted, and his seriousness seemed to delight the man in dark glasses even. more. He held out his empty billfold, laughing. Laughing harder, be began the laborious process of transferring prizes and souvenirs from one hand to the other. Still laughing, he then seized the check and impaled it on one of the headwaiter’s horns.

They tried to kick him, but he ran too fast.

Heaven Land was a genuine night club and restaurant of quality, set into a dwarf replica of the cathedral of Notre Dame. The floor was nearly full-scale, but the roof had been lowered to a comfortable height of fifteen feet, and other dimensions harmoniously warped.

Walls and table linen were eyeshadow blue, and ornaments had been plated with yellow metal. The waitresses wore pink and white to match the cloud-pattern carpet, and they glided about so softly on it that patrons could catch every bounce of the Melodiak background. The music, specially written for this place by a writer of successful musical comedies, was designed to uplift without spoiling the digestive processes. Even more soothing was the sound of the baptismal font, gurgling something that looked like liquid gold.

Into Heaven Land stormed an asymmetric wild man in a tattered suit, around his neck a red tablecloth from Hades Land, half his hair cropped. Customers and angels looked up as he brushed the maitre d’ aside, bending his halo.

‘Sir, have you a res…’

‘I want to see the Head Man! Where is He? Got a message for Him, been working on it for three days!’

‘Sir, if you’ll just…’

‘
GAWD! GAWD
!’ He lurched to the center of the dining room, the nave, and stood looking about. He was sweating, and patches of his hair clung to his forehead and to the red cloth, ‘
GAWWWWD
!’ One lense of his sunglasses was missing, and a fierce blue eye glared through the rhinestone rim.

‘
WHERE ARRRRE YOU
?’

Then he saw the pulpit. Before the angels could stop him, he leapt the plush rope and scrambled up the steps.

‘Brothers and sisters,
GAWD
is not with us here today.’ He paused to slip on a rubber crown of thorns. The Red Sea keychain was entangled with it, and hung near his forehead like a bouncy droplet of blood. At the base of the pulpit an angel dialed a white telephone and hysterically spoke to the Crusade cops.

‘My sermon today is addressed to you and to
GAWD
, Gawd rest his soul. Taken from the Flying Roll as revealed to Joe Jezreel: “To be a stranger is to be called, chosen and elect.” ’ He shook out Veronica’s veil and draped it over the front of the lectern. From a tiny scap of paper he read:

‘I my speak leak as has a the stranger manger. Stranger manger still will are bar many any stories glories about without Jesus Ceasahs. Some come say may that splat he me…was because conceived believed of love the a Holy goalie Ghost post, born torn out about of above the a Virgin sturgeon Mary dairy, suffered buffered from some Pontius conscious Pilate, eyelet, died fried, was because buried married, rose froze again amen on upon the a third curd day whey, and sand ascended blended to into Heaven leaven.

‘Others mothers brothers say may bray he me be was muss buzz conceived misbelieved bereaved by my belie this miss bliss Holy moley be lowly Ghost most boast upon moron baton that mat bat Virgin mergin’ burgeon Mary marry bury, lashed mashed bashed by my bye P.P. M.M. B.B., died bide misguide upon moron baton the ma ba cross moss boss, was moss because buried married berried, and mand band that mat bat he me be rose morose bestows in margin bin three me bee days maize baize, but mutt butt they may bay deny misery belie he me be ascended mended bended.

‘Tho som know God’s son of Holy Ghost got, of not-fork’d Mom born, flogg’d, got on cross, sod plot on top of body, so loft’d on to God & so forth;
not so
for body on top of sod. No, God’s son stood not.

‘Still diff’ring wits think…’

No one seemed to get the point of his sermon. Some went on eating, some thought he was drunk and some wondered if this were part of the floor show.
^*
The Crusade cops (who now collared him, dragged him out in the desert well away from the sight of Bibleland, and beat and kicked him for half an hour) were of the opinion that he was speaking in Tongues.

There was no use sitting around waiting for the lawsuits to come pouring in, the directors reasoned. Next morning after the Auditorium Incident they met at Headquarters.

All regular work had been suspended. The great neon cross on the roof (with its slogan,
RELIEF IN CHRIST
) was unlighted. Marilyn Temblor was out of a job. She allowed the curly-haired bible student to take her to a nearby golf course and feel her breasts for an unexciting hour.

The press hung around the closed-door conference all morning. From time to time an ashen-faced director came out and declined to say whether the Crusade would march on or not. One was off to the Deeper Life Convention at Lourdes, one was flying direct to Mexico City, to help organize Radio Free Will.

The first vice-president, Dr Paen, was the only one who finally remained in the country. He moved to Washington and began a syndicated column,
Dr Norm Understands
. Readers were requested to ‘send in your problems, accompanied by a five dollar contribution and a snapshot for Dr Norm to pray over.’

He advocated punishment. ‘Don’t be afraid to
whip
your child,’ he wrote. ‘God wasn’t slow to punish those He loved most. So-called psychologists tell you to spare the rod and darn the consequences, but I say those men need a good thrashing themselves!

‘Trust God’s methods. Whipping not only builds character and improves the circulation, it is the sincerest form of prayer.’

Dr Normal Paen was lynched during the Washington Riot.

‘Now wait.’ Bradd threw a friendship arm around her shoulders. ‘Before you say no, hear me out. First, what do you do all week? Ten, twenty hours on the set, and four more learning your part, right? And what do you do the rest of the time?’ He made her sit with him on the edge of his
Din-Din
box desk. ‘Be honest, now.’

‘Oh…nothing much, really…’

‘You mope around the house. You fiddle around with drugs—don’t deny it, I can see the signs. But there’s something else you do, babe.

‘You
age
. And that’s a problem. We can’t use you up any faster than we’re going right now; how do we know what kind of commercials to make for next year? But at the rate we’re going, you’ll be too old in maybe ten, fifteen years. I mean, face it, pal, nobody needs granny love.

‘But on the freeze you can stay
the same age
for as much as a hundred and thirty hours a week! That means fifteen years from now you’ll be about three years older than you are now. Hell, by the time I’m a hundred you’ll only be forty-eight!’

‘It’s hard to think, Bradd. I know…’

‘Wait. Don’t make up your mind today, keed. We all know you’ve been in a slump; we’ve all been pulling for you, the whole team. But look at it this way—this is a chance to
get away
from your problems for awhile. It’s the kind of Nirvana that keeps you young while you get richer. While this…’

He dug in her purse and came up with a bottle of pills. ‘This is the
other
kind of Nirvana. Richer? Yes, we’ll pay your salary while you’re in there. And the company undertakes to pay for the freezing itself, and keep up payments on anything you’ve got going, like keeping your kid in school—now what could be fairer?’

‘Undertakes,’ she said distantly. ‘That’s appropriate.’

‘Ha haha haha, Bette, you’re a born comic. Okay, I say no more, think it over and let me know by this time tomorrow. Oh, before you go, there’s something else I’d like to show you, in the studio.’

Part of the kitchen set had been pushed back, leaving a blank patch of white wall. A projector TV unit stood by. Bradd dimmed the lights and switched on a test pattern.

‘Our new
TOTAL
commercial,’ he said. ‘Some of the boys thought it would be fun to see what would happen if we tried selling
you
, and everything you stand for. So we made this up out of bits of all your other commercials, just slung ‘em all in the old computer and gave it the juice.

‘It’s a really interesting sorting job, but the censors would never let us use it commercially. Too sexy, and in a funny kind of way. There’s no explicit sex on the screen, just a funny
ambiance
of sex. It depends on visual stimulation of the brain or something, I don’t know.’

He picked up a telephone receiver and began dialing the long computer library code. ‘By the way, I loaned Glen Dale a copy for his porno collection—hope you don’t mind.’

Marge didn’t mind anything at the moment. The combined day’s load of shock, stimulants, depressants, sedatives, euphorics and stabilizers was catching up to her, and now as the final our house before it will is as leaves for have be in high for washing steamer quite place the thrill illustration party scale leaves by the thread of a flight of a message to show in eraser for train side…

‘Think I’ll take a nap or something.’ He went, falling forward and catching himself at every step, into the bedroom, where he stopped at the mirror.

The hat was a brown, irregular earthenware bowler, unglazed and about size three. Either the Utopis were pinheads or they thought he was, for the crown was slightly bigger than a tennis ball and the brim, a thick slab of hard clay, did not quite span his head. He held it on with elastic, like a party hat.

Trying to sleep was useless. He could see it above him, the reflection of the silly, stupid hat.

It looked like a pile of dogshit.

He took it off and dropped it on the floor. ‘Made a fool of myself. All these years.’ Through the darkness he could imagine
Bertha Venus
watching him, x-ray eyes right through the wall from the living room…laughing. Bitch goddess iron maiden sacrifice…