MEMP’IS
BOOK
FIVE – “YOGA IS, as YOGA DOES”
(Saturday,
January 6, 2035)
“Good of you to mention it.
This game, then, will be called ‘Me and My Shadow’. It is the simplest of games - no doubt all of
you, most of you, played it as children.
Each of you," Shore addressed his own savants, conspicuously
ignoring the policemen on the dais and their girlfriends squared within his
circle, "will pair up with that scholar directly opposite, across the
circle, and… upon my signal… mimic that opposite's motions, as if you were
staring into a mirror. That is… if King
Jack lifts his left knee, Pisgah lifts his right. And, not only physical gestures, but those
incriminatory revelations which are to be reflected… let us say, for example,
that Rocky blurts out details of his busting up a doop
bar... the Wide Angel... for instance; well, it would be Zihei's
obligation to confess a reciprocal, but mirrored, felony. I think the both of you understand the
implications of that, right?"
"Keb you!" replied the tranny brute who, then, lifted and wagged his ponderous,
hairy genitalia - the floral housecoat a crumpled bouquet in the Crisis Room's
sprawling puddle of fex.
"Your
arranging us like this was a set-up,"
Bobby bleated, balling his fists in rage.
"You set us up!"
"As
criminals set up their communities for depredations... right, Jack?… law enforcement is obligated to resort to effective
countermeasures."
Lola
grimaced as a latecoming wave of nausea pushed a thin
gruel of fex trickling, then spurting, down her
thigh, saying: "And what about us, Doctor-man? Do we
get to play this crimery game with all of you, the
smart people… stop looking at me that way!..."
she chastised Bobby, "and what about those Scotty yard polices?" she
pointed. “And is there a janitor in this
house… and a mop?”
"Well
certainly… certainly," Dr. Shore repeated as one of the Stimwood nurses turned at mention of his name. "Why don't you pair up with… is it Miss Slencher across the circle?
And you other two…"
A
long, rattling snore issued from Terushka Batter, who
had sunk, barefoot, back into her chair - a pale, white face in fex-dampened chiffon.
"Wake up, you!" Peg shook her...
"Attorney
Martin Ransome turned my bridegroom into
furniture..." allowed sleepy Troosh. "Managed furniture!"
"As
for the police," Shore addressed his savants, after an appropriate pause
"they will observe and, if necessary, make corrections. That is the function of the Trouble Factory. Of course, they may shadow each other, the
better to throw any of you off false trails, so bringing the resolution of this
case to proximity…"
"Somebody
volunteer to give that boy a Lewinsky," Lola
sniped, as Bobby continued staring and drooling…
"Me!"
Rocky proposed and Bobby spat out a mouthful of puke.
"Kebbed if I'll participate in any games with that
freak," Zihei complained.
"Scotty?"
Dr. Shore nodded, and the nurse... relieved now, of ambiguity... lifted the lid
of the traitjacket briefcase and turned some knob or
lever within. The killer-ninja's legs
turned to jelly and Zihei fell, face first, into a
puddle of fex amid a great sputtering and sizzling.
The raw smell of scorched flesh mingled with the stink of sewage…
"How did he do that?" Homer asked Norlin.
"Subdurals,
probably. We have our trade
secrets, Stimwood has theirs…"
Rocky belly-dived into the fex,
splashing and whooping, mocking and mirroring Zihei
as both flopped and flailed on the Crisis Room floor…
"That's the
spirit!" Shore slapped his thigh, sending little droplets of fex flying… Norlin and Homer
spattered, Henry Hat adroitly sidestepping.
"All of you! Jud and Wilson… what about those bank robberies? Jack and Pisgah… Blue City. Mars!
Venus! Dawn and Lucy…"
"She ain't doin' keb…" the stripper
pointed. Lucy had slumped back down into
the chair… twitching and muttering to herself, scrubs
bunched around her ankles…
"Well, that is
a problem," Shore said… "Kid and Bobby, then… you take the Tulane
Hotel, move around a little bit, figure out who did the job on all those
clones…"
"Who gives a keb?"
Bobby spat more chunks back. "Good kebbin' riddance," he added before Norlin
or Henry Hat could remind Dr. Shore that the culprit had already been
identified (and, just as promptly, released under the ministrations of the Law
Firm).
"Tony and… aw, jesk'ball!"
the Doctor sighed, glaring at Starrett, the cat-man
whose mouth sagged open, emitting a pitiable mewl. "Figure something out… children!…" he addressed Zihei and
Rocky, motioning for Scotty to stop shocking the former, "you get the
Specimen Depository. Who stole that fex?" and Shore, himself, fairly dissolved in throes
of braying, knee-slapping, fex-spattering
hilarity. "Who stole the fex?"
"I got it, Doc!" Rocky scooped up a brown
handful, flinging it back at Shore, then turning
towards the police. "Case
closed!"
"What do we
do?" Lola demanded to know.
"Figure something out!" Dr. Shore charged her…
and the rest of Norlin's girlfriends… all the while
rubbing his hands, dismissively, gainst his
trousers. "I'm hot! O Jates… how I am hot… you're not moving around enough,
right officers?"
"If you say so," Henry Hat said, stepping back
with a precognitive... or, perhaps, merely pre-emptive... caution.
"Kebbin' right!" the
Doctor pumped his fist. "Thor!… fire up the quba, you know what
to play…"
"You got it, boss," Thor said. There was a quba in
the corner - a small one, but loud… and Miles F. Shore threw his head back like
a turkey in the rain, waiting for the laser-speakers to work their magic…
The first drums pity-patted; the firstchords
resonated… Norlin almost imagining the King's lip
curling. Not King Jack, the real King in
his vault in Memphis…
"Hey
everybody gather round...
Listen to that bongo sound...
Grab the first one in your reach...
Now we're going to shake the beach..."
"Dance!" Dr. Shore
commanded, bending at the waist, then thrusting his tongue out, hands into the
air. "Dance! Our medications have begun their great
venture of loosening your astringent bowels, liberating your essence from
decades of rank, Jatesian suppression - fex freely, now, and dance... let Elvis ride your wretched
saddles - taboos toppling like dominoes.
Loose your souls, and dance.
Dance... and confess! Do the
Clam! Fight crime! Do the Clam!…
Officer Norlin," Stimwood's
fex-spattered Solomon charged as his vassals' shanks
rotated and spewed anew... "you may begin asking
these dancers your questions now…"
"Very well," replied the Corporal, surveying the
Crisis Room - taking short, shallow breaths so that the reek of fex wouldn't trigger his gag reflex again. It was a mixed, mottled fandango… of Shore's
six pairs, only Zihei/Rocky and King Jack/Pisgah had
thrown themselves into the moment - naked, abandoned,
swept away across a tide of fex, flailing limbs and
Elvis Presley. Kid MacBeth,
Tony and Dawn danced alone… their counterparts across the circle eerily stilled
(Bobby sneering, Starrett uncomprehending, Lucy… in
her chair… flicking flecks of fex from her
knee). Judson Crawford and Dr. Wilson
merely stared at one another across the reeking circle - the latter hatefully,
the former with self-important dignity.
But what really astonished Norlin
was the enthusiasm with which his girlfriends bounced and bopped to the Clam…
not merely Vona Rae and Lola, but Peg and Terushka Batter, dancing in the ankle-deep diarrhea, too…
"I adore
Elvis Presley," Troosh gushed, ancient, enormous
breasts bobbing pendulously.
"He's not playing!" Peg paused, pointing an
accusing finger at Dr. Wilson…
"Let's get him!" Lola pounced and, diving…
sliding on a carpet of fex across the Crisis Room,
Peg and Lola tackled the bodysnatcher, riding him
down and slapping sweaty, fexxy limbs across his
ghostlike frame…
"Do
the Clam, do the Clam...
Grab your barefoot baby by the hand!
Turn and tease, hug and squeeze...
Dig right in and do the Clam..."
The pneumatic door hissed open - Norlin
glanced across the room at a gaggle of visiting dignitaries from one of those
Asian states emerging out of the post-Cannonball re-alignments. Their hands rose towards their mouths in
horror and disgust and, then, more horror… and then the door hissed shut,
again. "With your
permission..." Homer Sack addressed the Corporal...
"What? I... oh
why the hell not, everything else kebbed up..." Norlin scowled as the mute began unbuttoning his
shit-spattered shirt. Henry Hat,
retreating further across the dais, situated himself behind his revolving
chair, placing both hands atop its rail.
His yellow suit had not even suffered the slightest spatter of communal
excrement during Rocky's exuberant bellyflop; Norlin turned to him
apologetically even as he bent to begin undoing his shoelaces...
"Go on!" the suncop
prompted. "Jates
knows!... police work can, sometimes, be messy."
Homer had folded his filthy uniform shirt and trousers
neatly but, as his raiments were personal, and not
the property of Barataria, Norlin
simply tossed them onto the chair, even the underpants. Maybe his shoes could be salvaged - with
considerable polishing. If necessary, he
presumed he could walk out of Stimwood with just his
overcoat - barefoot and humiliated... but alive.
"Corporal Norlin!"
whistled Lola, and he returned a queasy smile.
Well there was crime to be forestalled - a mystery to be
solved, so Norlin stepped off the dais and into the
reeking brown swamp of fex, attuning himself to the jibberish of Dr. Shore's savants. Because they were nearest the dais... and
because neither had developed an ability to shut up, mouth nor ass... the Corporal sidled past King Jack and Pisgah,
nodding pleasantly as he eavesdropped.
If Bard was worried he might implicate himself in further
criminal entanglements, pride had overcome prudence; so Norlin,
coughing to command attention, said "Dr. Shore implies that one or the
other of you might have information regarding that incident in Blue
City..."
"I enjoyed a sabbatical, once, in Blue City," the
mad monk swaggered. "My order
maintained an extensive library of forbidden literature..."
"Funny," replied the King. "I
used to rob houses up there - maybe we passed, shites
in the night, sleepwalkers, like Elvis.
Had about a hundred parking meters to service... my own, of course...
an' twenty thousand zeks' worth of hot paint, the
good stuff, I'll have you know."
And Vona Rae Sletcher
turned stupidly, stubbornly, pointing at the crimelord
with hateful intent. "The falseness
you carry with you in glasses you keep in your glasses case that you keep in
your pocket..."
"Don't have pockets," the naked Bard reminded
her, "only a rocket on my docket."
And he performed an obscene pantomime, bringing a sharp rebuke from Norlin.
"Police
officers, everywhere, need not make the acquaintance of your crotch."
"As you will, then, copper," King Jack leered,
wielding his spotted, chancred snake at the
Corporal. "Want some of this...
anytime... you know where to find me..."
"And for a long, long time to come," Norlin answered, "Jates
willing."
"Sleep well," Vona Rae
pointed towards Jack and Pisgah, too, "and may all your dreams be dreams
of death."
"Dedge, dedge,
dedge..."
Out
of the corner of his eye, the Corporal saw three pink orbs ascend, slowly
rotating, then fall - only to rise again.
"I can do that," Bobby rasped.
"If you think so," the Kid replied, and Norlin had to strain to hear him. As the globes passed, hand to hand, he tossed
them to the scrawny bombmaker, but Bobby couldn't
even hold two of them in both hands - dropping one, than the other two. Scrabbling through the Crisis Room's colloid
carpet, he gathered up all three balls... quite befouled with fex, by now... and thrust them forward towards the juvenile
magician.
"Keep them," the Kid demurred with evident
distaste. Although, like Bobby, he had
cast off his clothes, the high hat remained pristine, atop his head. "They're cheap, glastic..."
"Kid hates me - 'cause of my brother," Bobby told
Norlin.
"Why you won't get an honest word out of his mouth... giglio at the Tulane him and Frank knew was gonna give 'em
a lotta zeks, but
Frank..."
And Bobby's face sagged southwards in an idiot's grin...
"The Tulane?"
Addressing McBeth...
"Yeah, kebbin' giglio who..."
"Bobby," Norlin sighed,
"I was asking the Kid. Unless you
were there... or your brother is here..."
"Frank's in Feliciana," Bobby said, and not
without some pride. "I can fix
things so that it goes hard for Jody," he added...
"Then things would go hard for you," Norlin replied, and the poisonous little delinquent gulped,
lost his tongue for a few seconds, and the Corporal was able to face down Kid McBeth...
"Tell me about that man at the Tulane."
"He hired us."
The Kid smiled nervously under the leaning top hat - hands reaching up
to keep it from plunging into Stimwood filth. "I knew Frank from... like... around, we used to go places together..."
"Like the Tulane," Bobby smirked, "they'd
find dons flyin' on alcohol n' jack 'em..."
"Lifestyle criminality is as LC does," Norlin reminded the pair.
"You were saying..."
"Swiff had a suite on the
top floor... he sees us in the lobby and asks if we'd like to make a few fatmen each for a day's work, I figure there's probably
something sort of queer about the deal, but Frank always needed money, and it
wasn't as if I'd turn away an opportunity.
At least I figured I'd listen.
Turns out that the gig wanted us to go down way south, into the swamps -
all the way to New Sulphur where they got the fires
of Hell runnin' day and night, talk about your Solar
Furnace!... well..."
"Tell 'im about..." and
Bobby's mouth slithered into an unpleaseant grin,
"th' thing..."
"Mmmm... that! Our employer called it a graffalkin... like the bird, you
know? A great, big German bird... but it
wasn't... it was a kebbin' orm that was, I think, about
sixty meters long, and had..."
"Back up," Norlin
stopped him. "This swiff from the Tulane have a kebbin'
name?"
"Never told me, he did go off with Frank," McBeth simpered, "maybe Frank tells Bobby something,
like his name..."
"Don't know nothin'!" Bobby
denied...
"Too bad," Norlin
shrugs. "Money in it, maybe... if I
had a name..."
"Never gave a name.
Never came through with the zeks, either,
thanks to his kebbin' pyro
brother... swiff drives us all the way down almost to
the kebbin' gulf in this big, ol' hydro and gives
each of us a pile of genuine paper leaflets that we're supposed to hand out,
door to door in New Sulpher, promising a big reward
to any zook as contributes to the sighting and
capture of this Graffalkin. Made the picture too kebbin'
scary though - big Orm with big, sharp teeth an' a
sort of human intelligence, like anyone as saw the keb
wouldn't live to collect any reward.
Said that it glides through sewer pipes and busted oilwells
and through the bayous, clear up to kebbin' Jatesland and back..."
"He's holdin' back on
you," Bobby blurted out. "It
was big - some sort of big, scientific
fex, Wilson would know. Dr. Wilson..." the boy pointed towards
the disgraced surgeon, still engaged in vehement argument with Brother
Pisgah...
"Nonsense!" Kid McBeth denied, his limpid eyes suddenly growing cold under
the tilting high hat...
"You believe what you want," Bobby sneered,
"Stimwood... it's like a kebbin'
iceberg that sunk that boat, the Titania? Nine-tenths of what goes on goes on below the
surface..."
"If Frank has information about the worm-hunter from
the Tulane, well... it could have an influence on his sentencing..."
"Keb 'im!" Bobby chortled. "Used to beat the fex
out of me, all the time when I was growing up... he can rot in Feliciana till
he's old an' gray as those crazy hags you brought up from the Trouble Factory, rollin' round in fex wit' Doctor
Shore..."
Norlin knew that the boy was
referring to his girlfriends and, rather than see for himself, nodded towards McBeth to complete his story.
"New Sulphur's a fexpot... you know that!"
the Kid answered. "Nothin' down there since the oil ran out, full of creepy
old people waitin' to die... most of 'em not even answerin' the door, goin' out
into backyards to take a dump. Afraid that Graffalkin would pop up out
of their fexxers an' bite their heads off - an' maybe
they were right. So Frank... that
keb's brother... gets the idea that he can glom all
the money an' the glory for himself by taking out that big, old Orm. He's come down
prepared with a few of his friends, you know... whole kebbin'
family's been makin' bombs since the Eisenhower
administration, almost as long as they’ve been makin’
shine..."
"And that's why people don't keb
wit' us..." Bobby reminded him...
"Boys!" Norlin lifted a
finger, waving it in a gesture of denial, then aiming it at Kid McBeth to continue.
"He took unauthorized action?"
"He starts tossin' kebbin' grenades down the sewer where all the gases...
what's left over from the oil bust, plus what's built up from all them dead
people and garbage washed down from the kebbin'
Mississippi River over twenty kebbin' years. Methane an' propane, fexxane an' nitro.
There's this kebbin' rumbling... then there's
sewers an' houses an churches and fex explodin' all on fire... far as the eye can see..."
"And the man from the Tulane?"
Norlin asked.
"He was to meet us at this sort of park at the center
of town," Kid McBeth slumped, a hand rising to
steady the top hat. "Only there was
nothin' but fire - far as an eye could see. Well, either he got burned up, too, or
managed to split... thing is, we had to walk half the way back an' get rides in
the back of fertilizer hydes and fex,
an' we never got paid..."
"Considering the outcome of your mission, a not
unreasonable consequence," declared Henry Hat, who had cautiously approached
the slobbering sons and daughters of Poseidon, flailing and disputing in Stimwood's shallow sea of fex. His yellow shoes reposed barely an inch from
the dirty tide - his eyes darting from the boys to his feet...
"Jates!..."
Bobby objected, "Frankie took care of business, didn't he? Anyone ever seen a Graffalkin
down in New Sulphur since? It's like my grandfather used to say - and he
was in the war, some war. Sometimes you
got to burn the hooch to save it..."
"Perhaps. But..." and the Solar policeman raised a
finger, stepping back as Bobby's agitation (and a particularly violent eruption
from the bowels of a naked Peg Reilly had pushed the lip of the swill a quarter
inch nearer the yellow shoes, "have you given consideration to the
possibility that your employer did not
want the Orm destroyed, rather captured?"
"Why?" wondered a puzzled Kid McBeth,
hands rising to his head to keep the high hat from slumping off.
"Because it played a necessary part in certain rituals
that the natives of New Sulphur devised in those
superstitious days after the K'ball? Or," Hat posited, "that there was substance
in its constitution that might prove useful to a man of medicine... or
science?"
"Dr. Wilson. I
told you!" Bobby leered at the Kid...
"Hardly. Or, if so," the suncop
corrected him, "as a mere agent, a procurer. You think you are in the presence of a
Frankenstein," he pointed, "where Wilson is nearer an Igor. Or a Renwick, if you will..."
"Who's Renrick?" Bobby
rasped...
"A famous Judge, wasn't he?" Kid McBeth volunteered, and Henry Hat merely smiled.
"Oh no... Doctor Man!" Lola cried out,
distracting everyone as she lunged out of the fex and
wrapped her strong, slimy arms around Shore's haunches, riding him down into
the mire. "You 'n me got business to
transact..."
Squalch! came a loud,
sucking noise as Bobby massaged the fex with his bare
feet.
"I din't do
nothin'..." the young delinquent whined
Agitated, now, to hear his name arise above the chatter of
the actors and their shadows and the Clam, Dr. Wilson's rage finally boiled up
and sputtered out his thin, gray lips.
"Someone had to
photograph John Paul Sartre floating off atop his iceberg," he accused
Crawford, whose sleepy expression belied the frequent jets of fex still spurting from arse, symmetrized by the drizzly emanations of a weak
bladder. "Otherwise, there never
would've been that manned floe flowing downstream towards Life. That resolution with which the savant set his
nose high against the sky cannot have been any less than that which..."
"Dedge, dedge,
dedge!" Pisgah screeched again.
Afoot now, girlfriends left panting in the great puddle of fex, Miles F. Shore looked from Norlin
to Wilson, lips curling into a crazy smirk.
"We often contract with the Trouble Factory," said the dirty
Doctor, "as, for example, in the breeding and cultivation of houseplants
that are able to detect and record emanations one might consider
criminal..."
"You sent
the begonias," Wilson pointed.
"And, very soon," observed Judson Crawford,
"Dr. Wilson was, himself, begone. But my
ancestor was an officer in bloody Kansas during the Civil War - in 1868, he was
released from prison on condition that he carry Morgan's coffin ‘cross the
desert, on his back. He never succumbed
to the temptation to open it, and look inside, despite many adventures with the
Indians, and outlaws..."
"Hey Kid," Jack Bard ventured, "if magicians can, you know, make rabbits disappear, what can
they do to a copper?"
Figuring that Henry Hat would take the matter of New Sulphur... their fire and their worm, and rabbits, too...
into his clean, capable hands, Norlin moonwalked across a membrane of fex
to where a choleric, naked Rocky was angrily thrusting his balled fist in the
direction of Zihei, as the ninja stood stolidly, arms
crossed, as if daring the fat deviant to actually strike him.
"... an' I was in a neckbrace
for three kebbin' months!" At some instance, Rocky must've taken another
header into the fex, because fresh, semiliquid brown smears overlaying the drying sewage on his
cheeks and forehead swirled into the smudged rouge, giving his face the aspect
of a dusky harlequin from one of those places where naked savages daubed mud
onto their bodies for reasons of faith (or protection from the insects). New Guinea, perhaps...
The naked ninja glanced over his shoulder at Norlin, spat into the brown, ankle-deep pus.
"Before being swept up into King Jack's entourage,
Rocky was a sort of bodyguard for the Swami..."
"That was..." Norlin
cast his mind back...
"The Swami Yodl Wadl," Rocky said, "the greatest Messiah Barataria has ever known, subsequent to Triple-J's
Ascension, of course..."
"A cheap thug," Zihei
disagreed, "one of many who descended, like vultures, over the carcass of
the great man's legacy - Aapex Artificial Eyes, the
Solar Furnace..."
"The doctrinal descendant... Jack..." and Rocky
thrust a thumb across the circle towards the crowned head of Baratarian crime, "learned everything he knows from
the Swami..."
"Would you like to know how I did Wadl... Sean Hilton, in actuality, from Illinois?"
There was somewhat less zen, now,
radiating off Zihei... his voice becoming more a
thing of EastAmi, perhaps some outer ring of Yorktown
- Breaklyn,
before the K'ball, or the Jersey archipelago,
mobbed-up overnight between quake and tsunami by a million escaping
flatlanders...
And Norlin, up to his ankles in fex with his career in ruins, replied "Why not?"
Zihei mimed a few steps of the
Clam. "God bless Elvis... God, not Jates. Oh, the little keb
was one hot log of fex in his lab, but no Messiah...
not by a long shot!... and Sean was just this thing as
passed through Jates and plopped out the rear
end. No relation to Paris, by the
way..."
"He's just sayin' that
because the Swami wanted part of those rackets his Elementals tried to horn in
on, after Ascension. Just
a fair share. For us, and for the
ordinary zooks - that them kebbin'
hi-rollers in Mormentz an' their puppets everywhere
been workin' overtime to deny..."
"Well, Corporal?
It'd be a coup for the Trouble Factory - bustin'
the case. Tho'
you can't hurt me now, I'm crazy..."
the ninja winked...
"Why not?"
"Wadl used to drive around
the Strip in this big ol' petrosmokin' Cadillac
convertible, makin' his collections and givin' orders. Show
you what I mean, he kept it after the Council banned everything but hydros, subject to provisions as amounted to the Golden
Rule – bein’ as them what's got the gold makes the
rules..."
"I have heard of that," Norlin
agreed...
"Sometimes I'm available for hire," explained the
Jerseyish ninja, "sometimes I just do what's
right. A fluk
like Wadl, you, him and his goons..."
"Chucky, Robbie, Squatch,"
Rocky blurted out. "They was
good people, they had kebbin' names an' families, an'
he wasted them all!"
"I was responsible only incidentally. Circumstances killed them... circumstances,
and greed. And their
own poor judgment. They were all
dead, or nearly so... Wadl was the only one I personally finished off..."
"He makes it sound like he dispatched the Swami in
some sort of single combat... he ran him through when he was lyin' in the car, paralyzed..."
"I let you
live..." Zihei reminded the stubbly fop, whose
voice was so like his own...
"To make me your horse. He thinks me headaches," Rocky accused, clasping
his filthy hands over his ears, "he's doin' it
now. Sometimes, he makes me think things
what ain't there... he did the Swami that way,
too..."
Zihei turned, giving Norlin a derisive snort.
"What got Sean cancelled was his tryin'
to run me down on th' grounds of the old Aapex Works out there a ways – which was just a bunch of
ruined factories an' warehouses before Dane Varrick
snapped it up. I go into this place,
used to be a furnace with a lift and stairs, goin'
upstairs towards the roof where I might be able to find something useful to stayin' alive. Kebbin' zooks drive the Caddy
into the lift and trip one of them old handcranks to
beat me upstairs - except that there ain't no top
floor where they could stop. The lift
goes roarin' up to the roof like an ol' freight train
and stops, but there's nothing there to keep the petro from stopping so it pops
up like a slice of toast, flips over the side of the furnace and whoosh!...
seven stories' freefall, upside-down, into a courtyard full of all kinds of hard, sharp, jagged
junk..."
"Broke my back in two places, my hip... my jaw,"
Rocky caviled, "messed up th'
inside of my head something awful..."
Zihei shrugged. "Truth of the matter, Mary, is that I
thought you were a goner too, like the rest of 'em; who'd ever have known that
you'd come back as the fat lady in a bad opera..."
"You din't have to cut off
the Swami's head!"
"Actually," Zihei
turned to explain, "I did. It's what
I was paid for... my employer wanted that head like he wanted that trophy from
the Specimen Depository. Something in
Hilton's brain, or eyes, or maybe just as some sort of voodoo souvenir... and
he paid cash so it's none of my business..."
"Him!" Rocky pointed
across Lake Fex to Crawford and Wilson...
"Might've been," Zihei
allowed, "might not." Since he
was facing Norlin, now, back turned to Rocky, he
muttered... with no little pride... "Hell no, it wasn't! Guy sent me out there alone, after Sean, he's
the genuine article.... an artist, Off'cer, a
connoisseur of scientific crime. Worth
the consequences," the bald man added, "would've let me out with a
fat reward if I were to name names, but I ain't a rat. Not a
cartoon mad scientist, not a rattin' pickpocket wit'
a paper crown..."
"Not a real ninja, either," Rocky swore, yanking Zihei around with a ponderous left hand. "Real ninjas confront their enemies, they don't trick
'em into car crashes, an' then cut off their heads." And then Rocky swung a roundhouse right,
rising up from somewhere far, far off... Breaklyn,
perhaps... and knocked the bald, blue ninja flat on his fexxer
in the soiled sea. Quick as a serpent, Zihei whipped a leg around his adversary's knee and Rocky
tumbled atop him and they began grunting and punching and purging, stirring up
even more fex in a weird, shambling sort of
horizontal dance Elvis Presley probably had never dreamed grown men would do as
he'd warbled The Clam on a Sunkist Hollywood beach...
"Do
the Clam, do the Clam...
Grab your barefoot baby by the hand!
Turn and tease, hug and squeeze,
Dig right in and do the Clam..."
Stimwood's attendants and even
sallow Nurse Deandra (of the tainted smilk and cookies) were dancing now... hands flailing, feet
kicking up viscous colloids of fex as if, Norlin intuited, playing in a grimy sandbox. And the smell! The smell, the beastly gruntings
to the music - the vista of swamp and Dane Varrick's
adventure, out the bay window, the talents... Stimwood's
and Norlin's own... the nudity, the fex, the gaping, moonstruck faces bouncing to the Clam, Kid
McBeth’s topper and King Jack's bobbing cardboard
crown, the squirting and slopping, bopping, jiggerpopping
and bellyflopping fellaheen of fex...
"Dig right in," the naked Doctor cackled, extending
a prehensile tongue out of the pile of fusty, geriatric flesh towards the
policemen, "and do the Clam..."
The smell! The
dangling genitalia and withered pudenda and... the smell!
And then the pneumatic hiss of the green door... affording
access to a compact, wrathful goblin at the head of a trigonal
phalanx of official officialdom... a fierce, pustulant
djinn with thick white hair sprouting from scalp and
chin and every facial orifice, gliding forward on an ancient, ancient wheelchair pushed by a leonine
mute who glared contemptuously at Starrett and Homer
Sack as the former hissed and the latter stepped back, reaching for badge or prancer...
"Shore!"
the hirsute gnome ordained, "have you been abusing your privileges,
deluding civilians and the police alike?
Have you gone off your medications... again?"