CHAPTER NINE

D had his head in his hands. What had he set in motion? He was mired in consequences beyond his calculation when so light-hearted he had invented a couple of gestures then flung them to the wind.

This is called Having a Life.

"The toe bone connecta to a footbone..." These were the words of the Lord. And the fear of the Almighty took D and shook him, there in his lair, in his rathole where Heaven's Hound had run him down. His, the Cosmic Hangover; his, the fault, Mea culpa, mea culpa culpa culpa, mea culpa culpa, he was crooning, head now a little to one side, listening-like, to the tune of Que Sera, Sera. Doris Day had long been his idol. He prayed to her now.

"O Dododay, hear me now and at the hour of my setting-forth, and at the hour of my kneeling-down, and at the hour when I envy my lover's car, for it supporteth her buttocks and knoweth the grip of her small hand upon its gearshift. It hath purpose, in following her; it hath ends and goals. But upon the likes of me, O Dodo, the bald blank world breaks into a million smithereens of erstwhile intention. Dodo, oh show me the way."

D prayed this prayer or one much like it several times each day. He liked Doris Day's earlier movies best, and held to this prejudice throughout the days of his long, long life thereafter. She had a certain vulnerability back then, and it made her indignation more credible. And her indignation and her anger, what else had she to offer? Her radiant smile was a dima dozen phenomenon. No, Doris Day spoke to his outrage. And spoke in a low, husky voice that transported him beyond sex to a realm of bliss such as he had only Actually known in his mother's arms, infant-wise. There, on the edge of her infanticidal tendencies. "There is where we truly live," D thought, anguished. But the good lord in his infinite wisdom had taken Doris Day and scattered her qualities throughout a score, nay a hundredfold, of women. D was aware that the real Doris Day lived in Beverly Hills with her husband, Marty Melcher, and that she wouldn't hear a word against the nogoodnik and therefore would never give D a tumble, would forever remain beyond his possessing, forever condemning him to the Egyptian labor of reassembling her from the Daylike portions and qualities of other women.

An angry voice from the street broke in upon his self-indulgence, causing him to suffer even greater pangs of self-recrimination. When so many are substantially troubled, who wants to hear such private crap? If D had had a gun, he would have shot the lout then and there. Doris Day had felt to be but a skipping heartbeat away. He liked the movie with Danny Thomas best. But the innocuous Gordon McRae had proved a pretty decent foil , also. "We were sailing along, on Moonlight Bay; you could hear the darkies singing,..." For "darkies" substitute "voices". Transcendence there is, but never untrammeled; the past comes at us pitted with dents like a dead moon subject to meteorites.

They had hauled Franklin Garshaw off to the city morgue. His resemblance to Pat Boone, commented upon by M, had become a passing one.

Franklin had been not shot but gang-raped, and penetrated finally by a mightier tool than this planet of the apes had intended to be used in such fashion. Pat Boone crooned on unscathed.

D feared that he would lose his job for not having noticed anything untoward during his shift. Surely there had been screams? Doubtless, but D had as per usual been catching forty winks on the daybed in the office of the Downtowner Motel and so had nothing of value to tell the authorities. But it wasn't going to look good on his resumé. We aren't paid to sleep in this vale of tears.

We are bent upon a quest, and if D's was to assemble the scattered portions of an ideal bandsinger turned movie star, he could count himself lucky; so many drift without purpose in this Sargasso Sea of the second half of the twentieth century, fanning their flickering Existence with the palmetto leaf of Being. Of course, he counted himself no such thing.

"My God what have I done!" he wailed now, causing M, who was fiddling with the knobs of the office radio, attempting to bring in some late Schubert, and succeeding, to roar back at him "For Krrzzsake Broadbent! Decease and cyst! Isn't it enough that Pat Boone ISN'T dead?!? Must I also put up with your mewling and puking sensibilities?!? Good God man, get a grip on yourself! - No, not there!@! - Remember, Food teaches us that God is good." And he produced the remains of a Cornish pasty from under his black fake velvet Brooks Brothers-type jacket.

M had been noticeably on edge ever since the Great Flash incident on the bridge. Something weird had happened to his hair, as G had remarked. The chicken drumsticks had been late twice in a row, spoiling M's chances to review a couple of winningly artsy-fartsy flicks for CBC. He had been bumped from his role in Prester John's play, and much to his seething displeasure had been replaced by none other than G himself, who had used the opportunity - as M had feared would happen - to cop a feel of Dorcus Davenport, hot from Prester John's imagination. And to top it all off, he had believed he had seen the still-warm corpse of Pat Boone, his bete blanche (a rebel's hot lunch), only to find it was a case of mistaken identity.

"A Mace of Striking Misanthropy!" M's wrath, like his memory for words, knew no bounds.

But so what, thought D, so what? He had other fish to fry. Since we left him at that party, D had aged ten years, twenty. His brown hair was streaked with blond. He had wrinkles beneath his tan. Having been thrown out, eventually, as was the custom when D attended such parties, D had set out on foot, an ancient mariner looking for a wedding guest. Turned out no one at the party had given credence, despite muffled and muttered affirmations from M and G, to D's account of the Big White Flash that had blossomed for a breathless moment from behind the ducal skyline of the North Shore Mountains, then faded in a trice, like a cast of the dice, leaving our three anti-heroes waiting in the dark, the new dark, the darkness post-Flash, for a sound, the merest of muffled booms, anything but the ingesting that same dark had gradually delivered and kept on delivering. No one had wanted to decipher hieroglyphs, not while Seagrams continued to distill, and hormones to ring.

To whom should he unfold his tale? He was crossing a golf course, arriving at a street. There was a window. And at it, or in it, or protruding from it, two faces, faint and rosy, flowers reflecting the madrugada of northern midsummer. One of these opened and spoke. "Time for a sex scene in this fucken novel." D couldn't care less how he made it up the stairs. Her rough bud slithered along his tongue. Their breasts hung like pears, pairs of pears. Parts of them sprouted, like mustard and cress. The witching odor of Coal Harbour at low tide dragged him lower, deeper. Anyone has seen, and even eaten, a persimmon. The velvet loges of their theatres accommodated the silken buttocks of his glans. Somewhere, in a still room like a nun's cell, a Q-tip is being inserted into the corolla of a floral arrangement. Now a rough cut of a grave at dusk, with rain overflowing the runnels of the departed marblist. D was engrossed in his comparison and contrast assignment. The sticky seam gaped at his effrontery. Securely mounted, and one hand jollying up his mount's companion, D spoke: "Just two nights ago, or was it three, three nights ago, I stood on the Burrard Street Bridge in company with G and M-you know them?..." They shut his gob with the Greek salad of their attributes , the Renaissance Faire of their simian resourcefulness. Bats shrilled their radar in remotest caverns of the ganglia. Stop-motion photography was being invented on sepia postcards for the first time in this Kalpa, the thirty-seventh time in the history of the planet. Somewhere deep inside the British museum, a book slapped shut as Ezra Pound scrawled "H.D., Imagiste" across the bottom of a sheet bearing the poem every one wakes up from a dream nearly able to recall in its unimaginable toto. Large raptors were dragging his naked body across dense tufts of lavender, marjoram, oregano, fennel. A statue of David, only with its knees bent, was ported by lustily chanting laborers in a prone position across a courtyard cobbled with raw filet mignon. Surrealism shorted out like a two-bit length of wire. The OED fell from the top shelf and burst into words like thigh, dimple, jamjar, derringer, aureole, follicle. Charles Chaplin ingenuously removed the piece of wood that was keeping the halfbuilt ship on shore. Down the slip it slid, beneath the calm mirror, and its sinking would have been the end of the matter, save that vasty gouts of water welled up through its unreadied ribs. Emblematic beasts went nose-to-tail down a long corridor of some filthy European palace. Anomolously, that farting Royal Berkshire was trotting through the Louvre sporting Fee McMannic's raincoat. A welcome mat had been spread over his face, a magic carpet substantial angels were using for a surfboard. So far, so good. But later, he found palliatives and medicines in the bathroom cabinet that implied that his two companions of the night had diseases of a sexually transmissible sort. Also, the prescription labels were from a local prison. D fled, undeterred by their friendly shouts of See ya later and Come back for some more.

D knew the works of Malcolm Lowry, and the phrase "This unprophylactic rejection" entered his memory field as he jogged along Arbutus. Although it was still early, he could see Montgomery Incline fighting with his wife in the kitchen. A plate of ham and eggs went to the ceiling and most of its contents remained behind, dripping gradually onto the rapt combatant couple. D crept into a dumpster and went blank.

D sat on a log on First Beach, head in hands, recalling all this, aye, and more. Though not much more. What has been indited above very nearly covers the case. Something of M's beaded string of words - fungible, autosynthesis, beeswax, corrida, sturm-und-drang - now caught in his attention-net. He and M had wandered this way, once D had been released after intensive questioning by a Rotweiler and an Old English Bulldog, to watch yet another dawn come up on the greatest little city that literature ever had at the moment for inspiration.

"...fungible. So Fee said that he wandered off and two girls invited him up and yanked his pants off and had their way with him then and there and then he found out that they had escaped from Oakalla and were taking part in a gonorrhea experiment. He's quite upset."

What was this? Though he knew it was rude to do so, D interrupted, and adding to his list of social gaffes, demanded of M that he repeat himself. M, mouth in an oval O between its decorative frieze of black beard and mustache, eyebrows slightly raised as if in polite rebuke, obliged. "...fungible. So Fee said that he wandered off and two girls invited him up and yanked his pants off and had their way with him then and there and then he found out that they had escaped from Oakalla and were taking part in a gonorrhea experiment. He's quite upset."

"M, this is uncanny. What you're telling me happened to Fee happened to me. How can such things be?"

"Broadbent, it's a sign of incipient schizophrenia to rime like that. I recently read some pretty jazzy poems by some American called Sylvia Plath who on the evidence of her chiming rimes is clean round the bend dementia-praecox-wise. Now I grant you that the events of this night - and the night before this - and the night before that - ahem, tell me, Broadbent, have you ever considered a visit to the campus shrink? Dog-faced Nick Dixon, with whom you acted in Seattle, swears by him. Reportedly he cured Richard of a very severe case of hydrophobia."

"Yes, he didn't exude his usual odor of lanolin and wormwood when I was crushed in Prester's back seat next to him. But tell me more about Fee, about his encounter with two bad girls next to the golf course."

"How do you know they live next to the golf course?"

"I could describe their apartment intimately. I could describe their parts intimately."

"Well that deplorable litany you'd better save for Fee. If we hop a bus right now we can probably catch him before he leaves for the VD clinic. I believe a bus headed in his direction departs this stop yonder in another five minutes. Just time for me to purchase a salami and two pounds of apfelstrudel at this delicatessen. Are you sure you won't join me?"

But D never ate before the pubs opened; scarcely ate before they closed. He shuffled amiably along with M on his errand. His mind was working overtime. "M, was I thrown out of Fee's party?"

"You were indeed. Rather splendidly, by Billy O'Shea. "

"And what happened then?"

"That I can tell you, because I was thrown out immediately afterwards. We went to the White Spot."

"It was still open!?"

"Alas, no. We damaged some of its windows, and then we walked to Trafalgar Beach. You said you wanted to see the herons."

"And we never crossed a golf course?"

"Not once. After a while, you found a public telephone and called your spouse to come and fetch us. Naturally, she did. I approve these unions of the bohemian with the middle-class. Their mutual need is so clearcut."

D wanted to protest that Beth was not so middle-class that she had refused his dare a week before to take her clothes off and walk home naked from a previous party, but his eye was on even bigger game.

"Then I don't have gonorrhea!"

"That's not for the likes of me to say. Perhaps you could go to the clinic with Fee. He might be glad of the company."

"But M, how can such things be? I recall it so clearly - what actually happened to Fee!" He made the leap. "It's that white flash. I've been radiated with some power to switch identities."

"And I haven't?"

"Because your name doesn't rime with Fee's. D rimes with Fee. The flash makes use of the power of rime, don't you see?"

"No, I don't. D rimes with G, too. Had any of HIS experiences lately?? Just more of your nauseating understanding, Broadbent, always anticipating others with your nigh-psychic sympathetic powers - it's revolting."

Just then, the bus rolled up. D dropped his fare-money, and stooped to retrieve it. M was already boarding. As D straightened up, he felt something hard and metallic nudging his back.

"Don't give us a hard time. Just get in the car."

M, looking around, glimpsed D being shoved into a black Daimler that had several black-coated figures already in it. He hopped back to the sidewalk as the car sped off. M made a note of the license plate. Anachronistically, it read NO ONE U NO.

The Daimler was taking him through Stanley Park. The man with a scar on his face was doing the talking.

"So shut up about this big white flash, see? Just shut up about it, okay? You didn't see it: it didn't happen. There was no big white flash. Got it?"

D shifted uneasily. He was squeezed between two other men whose muscles felt like triple-layer stove-piping. His interrogator was seated in the passenger side, twisting around to face him. This position was easier than it would be today, for he was not obliged to wear a seat belt.

"Got it?"

"Do you mean to tell me," D began carefully, "That the big white flash - the flash that uses the power of rime - Ugh" - here he stopped speaking, for an elbow had been jabbed into his stomach.

"I don't mean to tell you anything, asshole. The one question is for you, and it's this: do you think you can forget what we want you to forget? Cause if you can't, you're gonna end up down there." He indicated the tide race in First Narrows. "Sooner or later."

"Why not kill me now and save us both some trouble?" D found he had asked.

"Cause you been spillin' your guts already, and if you wash up it might raise some questions. But if you don't clam up, we're just gonna have to take that chance."

"No chance if he's garbage," put in the man on D's right.

"Right, drowning's too good for him," the interrogator agreed. "Let him be landfill, him and his fucken rime."

"I think I can remember," D said. "Ouch! I mean, forget. I meant to say, remember to forg- "

The elbow again. D couldn't believe how real this felt, how unreal. Now the car, having reached the North Shore end of Lions Gate Bridge, was turning to head west. D could see his friends Ham and Leona Bremser's shack, with Ham and Leona in front of it, yab-yumming. D could tell from Ham's beard that a stiff breeze had sprung up over the Gulf.

"Lookit there, willya? Dee-sgusting!"

"Dirty beatniks."

"Oughta ship em to Cuba."

"Jeez, is he really doin' that or do my eyes deceive me?"

The company of the Daimler had not been this animated until now. Thinking to take advantage of the more relaxed mood, D asked where he was being taken.

"Where would you like to go, your royal highness? Just name it, and Louie'll take you there. Right, Louie?"

"Whatever," grunted the driver, shifting his dead cigar.

"I'd like to be taken to Southwest Marine Drive," said D, adding "If Louie knows where that is?"

"Is that back? We don't do back. Try again."

"Well, okay, how about right here?"

"Too short," the man on his right said.

"We were thinking of somewhere like Squamish," said the man in the passenger seat. "To give you time to think. To remember, uh, to forget."

They drove on in silence for a spell. Finally D summoned up some courage and spoke: "Does any of you gentlemen know anything about, well, hieroglyphs?"

It was a bright morning, altogether too bright, thought G Delsing, his eyes screwed up against it. He would sooner still be asleep, nestled in his single bed with A. But he had to get to the stacks and get on with his thesis. And the next issue of Hits was overdue. He had to get to the mimeo machine in the English Department when no one was looking and run off a couple hundred copies free gratis.

He had padded outside barefoot to get the paper before his landlady could get it. Standing there in his very striped pjs, the sleeves cut off at the biceps, the thin arms of a poet sticking out, he resembled nothing more than a deckchair in a stiff breeze. The Vancouver Province lay rolled up on the sidewalk, when it should have lain on the front walk at the bottom of the landlady's wooden stairs.

"Bad shot," said G to himself, to himself and the grass of the lawn, and the shrubs of various shapes, sizes and hues, and to the birds and the sky and the trees of the street, and the big car just turning the corner, and he padded out to the curb and bent down. He felt something hard poking into his back.

"Don't give us a hard time. Just get in the car."