Going, Going, Gone Read online

  Trails.

  Utmost fabulousity. I felt myself floating towards the floor. Eulie was tumbling with me. We hit the ground and I bounced up. I wondered if I could bounce higher when I landed the second time but Eulie held me down. She was saying something.

  Walter

  ‘Kiss the boot,’ I said, ‘of shiny shiny leather –’

  What

  ‘Waffles,’ I said. ‘Waffles, waffles, waffles –’

  Looking upwards into a dome I saw ourselves apotheosized. Chairs flew across the dome like grey metal cherubs; and then I saw Chlo hovering like a gigantic hummingbird, holding a chair under either arm, her blonde ropes loose and swinging around her head. She’d shed her muumuu and was back in rubbery lizard black. There were dancers on the stage when she landed, running back and forth. The percussion drifted in from somewhere in the wings, crazed polyphonists beating out Gold Coast rhythms as the mamas wailed.

  ‘Whoa daddy,’ I said. Eulie began fading in again, her signal stronger this time.

  ‘Walter, connect! Walter –’

  Chlo flung chairs like she was dealing cards. The dancers caught them and, once partnered, leapt with them to the floor. The chandeliers overhead swung back and forth, stirred by wind, their glass chiming. Chlo snapped her dozens of right hands and things slid into them, flexible black sticks; one stick. She lifted her arms and a ten-foot long silver cord shot out. Letting the end swing free, Chlo began pirouetting like a ballerina. Eulie pressed my face against the floor, the rug burned my cheek. Managing to stare up between her fingers I glimpsed the corps de ballet removing parts of themselves and tossing them, chair-like, towards heaven. Fireworks burst red.

  ‘Stay down,’ Eulie said, this time sounding strangely near. For a moment I imagined it was morning, and we’d just woken up.

  ‘Chlo’s a good dancer.’

  ‘She’s activated.’

  ‘Pixilated?’

  Eulie didn’t answer. She faded. The next thing I knew she’d hauled me to my feet and I was standing; the sudden rush of blood to my head cut the buzz down to size. This clarity wouldn’t last, no question about that, so I figured I might as well make the best of a difficult situation in the meantime. There was no one else left in the audience. Chlo whipped a large heap of clothing on the floor. I saw Burt’s orange sweater, covered with tiny red whales. The rug squished beneath my feet, sounded like we were walking in a swamp, down deep in the reeds with the two-headed men. Eulie was speaking again.

  ‘Disarm, Chlo. Disarm! Disarm!!’

  She reached up behind Chlo’s neck and massaged it. The big gal stopped at once, shook her arm and her stick slid back into her sleeve. She panted as if she’d just run here from Philadelphia. Drool hung from her lower lip, and her face was the colour of Harvard beets.

  ‘Maxed po,’ Chlo gasped.

  Eulie shook her head. ‘Overreactive, Nonthreats, all. Level, Chlo, level.’

  ‘AO.’ Chlo nodded, and tossed us a beatific smile; for an instant, she was her father’s little girl again. ‘Guide.’

  ‘Interior transfer nonsustainable,’ Eulie said. ‘Outside us.’

  I felt Eulie take my arm as my blood started to simmer again, and without feeling my feet in the swamp we started moving toward the ballroom’s closed doors. The doors started to breathe in and out; then started to shout.

  ‘Chlo,’ I heard Eulie say, ‘activate.’

  She lifted one of her silver-toed boots, followed by the other. Looked as if she were levitating, five feet off the ground, it was the old rope trick. The doors splintered and opened as soon as her heels hit the knobs. It looked to me that she turned at least two somersaults before coming down boots-first on gents who had the look of house dicks about them. Others – bellboys, desk clerks, the concierge – ran towards us, pouring up the marble stairs. Chlo lifted her arms until they were perpendicular and jerked her body; something shot out of her from the front – couldn’t tell what, but every single guy trying to make it up the stairs took a tumble before they were halfway. Once they were all down Chlo ran, kicking them out of our way as Eulie and I followed. At the foot of the stairs Chlo grabbed the bust of Doctor Oscar and we bore left. I wondered why she’d wanted it until she threw it at the man blocking the back exit. He caught the bust and leapt backwards through the door. Breaking glass chimed like chandeliers in the wind.

  ‘Chlo, pause,’ Eulie shouted as we stepped into Schubert Alley. It was intermission, and dozens of playboys and girls were out there stretching their legs, getting quick smokes, making with the wry eye. On the wall directly in front of us were posters for My Darlin’ Aida and Cole Porter’s Out of This World. The colours were Kodak sharp. Eulie fumbled in her bag until she found something the size of a transistor radio. ‘Tighten grouping. Hold Walter –’

  ‘Freeze!’

  A sudden rush of blood to my head, and reality lurched briefly into view. Running down the alley at us at top speed were two boys of Killarney. One had the old reliable Smith & Winchester .44, and the other held tight onto a twelve-gauge. Chlo stepped in front of us and started walking towards them. Sound of gunshots and of hail on a tin roof, fortissimo shouts and murmurs in the background molto presto, playboys skedaddling, Chlo not breaking step as the cop fired his gun. Then a cannon-blast as his partner unloaded both barrels. Chloe’s right arm took leave of her body. The metal part, no doubt; erector set sticking out of her elbow. Didn’t faze her. With her left arm she swung forward, hitting the cop’s neck with the side of her hand while plunging the sharp stump of her right arm into the shotgun cop’s breadbasket. He fired again, directly into her midsection. A butcher shop, the display counters full of schnitzel and weisswurst.

  ’Chlo!’

  As the big one fell backwards Eulie gave her neck a fast one-hand clamp while with the mitt she ran her digits down the sides of her little black radio. There were more cops coming down the alley, a lot more cops. But I didn’t hear them saying anything, which seemed surprising. Suddenly I saw the cops still running towards us, but now as if from far down a country road, seen through the shimmering orgone as it rises off asphalt in the heat. Chlo and Eulie stood in front of me, and the three of us looked solid, but they didn’t move and I couldn’t either. Schubert Alley was hit by a blizzard; everything around us whited out; but there was no movement, no wind, and I thought I’d even stopped breathing. There was an absence of air movement. I hardly felt I could breathe, but I was. Then my ghost appeared, now solo, without his friend. Old see-through wasn’t a ghost any more. His suit might have looked white once. He had brown hair and pale skin, and ran towards us, never seeming to get any closer, never falling any further back. Seemed like we could do this for hours, but then my internal organs felt as if they’d been filled with hydrogen and getting ready to take the zeppelin route. Closed my eyes as I doubled over, the blood leaving my head like the tide. Saw nothing but millions of multicolour flashes, Pi-addled phosgenes. Then I felt breeze on my face; heard background sounds – low humming, the rustle of traffic, distant sotto voce dialogues.

  ‘Walter,’ I heard Eulie say. ‘Walter.’

  Eased open my eyes, not sure what I was going to see. A world of colours once again, though I couldn’t tell how real these were. I faced a big yellow circle. Two dots and a curve glowed red from within. Then I heard Eulie again. ‘Home,’ or ‘Chlo.’ I was projectile vomiting when she said whatever it was she said, and couldn’t be sure.

  ‘Walter?’ Eulie asked as she gave me the maraca treatment. My brain wobbled like a plate of Jell-O; looking up I saw Eulie’s face, and beyond them both two big green Coke bottles taller than the Empire State building. No doubt I looked like a turkey in a rainstorm. She wiped my mouth with something that felt like terrycloth and looked like bubble gum. ‘Done?’

  ‘I think I maybe –’ I heard myself sputter and then gave up. Someone else was there, an older woman with brown hair. With dozens of hands she gave Eulie something.

  ‘Walter,’ she said. ‘Hold.’ A
paper punch going in, right where my arm met the shoulder, as if she were giving me a vaccine. When I blinked again, I was no longer hallucinating; was in fact dead sober as a park ranger. ‘Clarified?’

  ‘What?’ I asked, shaking my head, unable to imagine that I’d come off the trip so soon. ‘What’d you give me? Antihistamines?’ The woman and Eulie helped me get to my feet. Then, my brothers, I realized that even though I should have been staring deep into my own imaginings, I wasn’t. We stood in the midst of a circular plaza, maybe a hundred feet across and surrounded by low metal carports, real Levittown specials; atop the ones that were facing me was that big yellow circle with the dots I saw when I first opened up. The Coke bottles were buildings, all right; there were twelve others just in my line of sight even taller, their tops swallowed in deep grey felt. The other buildings were in colours other than green – blue and purple and red and yellow. Some had tubes running along their sides, looking like the piping on Marines’ pants. Running horizontally between most of the buildings were other tubes, in other hues and I wondered if those helped the things stand up. All the buildings looked as if they were made out of the same kind of plastic used in telephones. Hundreds of little bugs flitted around the tall boys. ‘Where are we, Eulie?’

  ‘New York,’ she said.

  ‘No. Where are we? Where are we now?’

  ‘New York,’ she said, looking down at the ground. Chlo lay there, not moving. She’d lost the muumuu I’d bought her, earlier that day, and wore only what remained of her jumpsuit. A sharp metal shard emerged red from her elbow, and the rest of the arm was missing; as was a good deal of her midsection. Her blonde ropes lay all around her head, and I thought of those clocks they used to make in the fifties, the ones that were supposed to resemble suns. Eulie knelt down, and stroked her face; with her thumb and forefinger, pulled her eyelids shut. ‘My New York. Come on, Walter. Come with me.’

  ‘Chlojo?’

  ‘Retired,’ Eulie said. ‘Come on, Walter.’

  Streets sloped downward all around the plaza, on hills steep as San Francisco’s. In the sky, clouds of lighter colours kept showing pictures. ‘She’s dead?’

  Eulie wiped her eyes with her hand. ‘As risked. Come on, Walter.’

  The woman with brown hair and a couple of large guys in black were wrapping Chlo’s body in clear plastic; once she was enshrouded, it turned opaque. They lifted her up and carried her across the plaza, towards one of the carports. I started trying to walk, but while we were in transit I’d gone all gimpy; it felt like I was trying to stroll across gravy.

  ‘Where’re we going?’

  ‘Required checkover and superior notification,’ Eulie said. ‘Necessaried to reduce potential harm.’

  ‘To?’

  ‘You.’

  When we reached the edge of the plaza she lifted her arm and a lemon whizzed to a stop. The rind peeled away from the top, the sound of birds chirping floated out and Eulie helped me climb in. Between the front seat and the back seat was a heavy black barrier with a tiny slot. The windows were tinted a deep Rayban-green.

  ‘Dryco,’ Eulie said. One second we were parked, the next we were shooting off at a fast clip.

  ‘We’re making tracks where?’ I started to ask. No sooner did I open my trap than somebody else started outyapping me; a recording, I gathered. Couldn’t see the speakers, couldn’t tell if the speaker was male or female, grownup or kid. When I tried to make out the lingo I felt like a missionary among the heathen chinee.

  ‘Interavesting per sliptimper transgratisfy allayvoo –’

  ‘Not the old klaatu barada again,’ I said, turning up my speaker to be heard over the foofaraw. ‘What happened to Chlojo –?’ But it got louder every time I did.

  ‘Doublatar whilomit extronon whang –’

  ‘Eulie –’

  ’Thinthin delavooz maximate coladwalpter –’

  ‘Eulie, what the hell –’

  ’URGALL VOX MAGNAWAIL BLAP –’

  ‘EULIE –!!’

  She fixed her mouth on my ear like she was going to slip me some tongue. ‘Taxitalk impossibled, Walter,’ she shouted. ‘Adspace precedents. Mute til we decab.’

  That made as much sense as whatever the taxi was saying, so I just lay back and gave a listen to some sexless goofball sputter out songs of the Pogo. I kept looking to my left, thinking Chlojo would still be there, but of course she wasn’t. All at once the cab stopped without braking; we slid forward a little on the seat and then slid back. Eulie pushed a little white card into the slot in the black barrier and something clicked. ‘Come, Walter.’ I looked out over another plaza as she helped me out, this one wide as Washington Square. In the centre of this plaza, where broom-dry grass sprang up between the cracks in the terrazzo, was a statue of some husky boy in a plumbers’ suit and a high collar. He held a pipe up to his face as if thinking he’d see what clogged the drain.

  ‘Who he?’ I asked.

  Eulie glanced over, muttered ‘E,’ and kept walking. In front of us was what looked like an upside-down golf tee. Piss-yellow, round at the bottom like the top half of a globe, the shaft getting narrower as it rose. I couldn’t see the top of the damned thing. Probably no one could. This plaza, unlike the other one, was populated; hundreds of people wandered about beneath the shadow of the plumber. Felt like August, but there’s never this many people around at that time of year in the city. Everyone had the look of a typically cheerful New Yorker but there was one big difference, the difference that gave the game away. The faces were different colours _ au lait, milk chocolate, chopped liver, blutwurst, espresso. I’d never seen so many coloured folk in my life.

  ‘Eule,’ I said, as my sometimes-slow mind started to click in. ‘We’re in the future?’

  ‘My present. Come.’

  Eulie pressed her hand against the side of the building when we reached it, and where there’d been a blank wall, a large door opened up. Two teamster-size characters in dark suits stood just inside the entranceway.

  ‘Tarcial,’ Eulie told them. ‘Gamamye.’

  Something like that, anyway. Didn’t look like their suits were tailored to conceal weapons. Before I knew what was up, Vinny from Local 136 had my shoes half a foot off the floor as he held me up by the jaw. Rocco had pulled a bright green popgun out from under his jacket and looked set to let it fire, right between my peepers.

  ‘Aggro nya!!’ Eulie said, intervening. ‘Approval met.’

  ‘Explitail!’ he shouted back. English fell by the wayside and some odd combo of Hungarian and Urdu took over. This Buck Rogers business was the last thing I needed, just then. Couldn’t help wishing I’d been more of a futurian, might have been ready for anything under those circumstances. I thought of what you were supposed to do if you found yourself in the future – look to see how the market was doing, check out property values, tell Nixon to make sure he went to New Orleans, try not to kill your own grandfather – no, that was what you did if you found yourself in the past – so hard to tell the difference, sometimes.

  ‘Walter, come.’

  Having appeased the teamsters, Eulie guided me into the building’s lobby. I thought the walls were marble, at first; found out they weren’t when I ran my finger along the wainscotting and carved a line through it with a dull fingernail. Hanging from the ceiling, six storeys overhead, was a long chrome steel bar – seventy feet long, maybe – that slowly glided back and forth, barely missing the surface of another chrome steel bar that rose up out of the floor. Words were engraved into the sides of each bar. DO GOOD, read the bar that moved. FEEL REAL, read the one that was stationary. Looked around for anything that said OR ELSE, but no go. I supposed anyone they caught in this building without permission would wind up strapped onto the gliding surface of their choice of bars.

  ‘What is Dryco, anyway?’ I asked as Eulie pressed her hand against a wall on the far side.

  ‘Dryco,’ she said. I nodded, figuring there was no point in pressing the issue. An oval opening appeared in
the wall. Eulie stepped forward and put her face against it. A quick blue flash on our left and an elevator door opened. Inside, it looked like an elevator.

  ‘Eighty,’ Eulie said, and the door disappeared. It seemed like we were going nowhere, until suddenly I felt my head attempting to slide down through my body, as if not feeling safe until it nestled at my feet. As I slumped against the wall of the elevator I looked at her; she was crying as she had back in the museum, just that afternoon, and I pulled myself forward until I could hold her. Then gravity got the better of me again, and I blacked out.

  EIGHT

  By the time Eulie picked me up off the floor the elevator had stopped. This high up it took half a minute for the door to open – took time to depressurize, I assumed. Blood poured out of my nose until she put some more of that bubblegum against my face and I was once more dry as a bone. ‘Where now?’

  ‘Essentialled protectives,’ said Eulie.

  ‘What kind?’

  ‘Med. This way.’

  In New York – my New York, that is – there’s probably a hundred sawbones happy to deal with the scurviest clientele – old geezers who’ll tear off scrip for reds or beauties or barbs if a three-year-old came in describing symptoms. Not many deal in my brand of esoterica though, so it was a rare thing for me to need their services. Croakers have their uses, but by and large I steer clear. This’d be the first physical I had since I was fourteen – wouldn’t hurt, I figured, to have one. Eulie led me down a white-walled hall to a small grey room with two red couches, a metal door and a low table covered with magazines.

  Eulie pointed to one of the couches, took something small and blue from her bag and tapped its surface. While she busied herself I picked up one of the magazines, thinking I might be able to figure out something more about where I was. Silly me. At first I thought somebody’d gone one better on Life and got rid of the articles, leaving only pictures; then I noticed that at some angles, if the light hit the pages right, words popped up out of the photos. Even so, the type was so small that you’d have needed a magnifying glass to read it. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what kind of magazine it was; there were photos of what looked like the insides of transistor radios, followed by photos of naked women – too skinny for my taste, and one was missing a leg – followed by landscapes that would have looked like Arizona if the sky hadn’t been pinkish-red. There were pictures of that plumber whose statue I’d seen outside, looking somewhat livelier (if fatter) and some other characters who didn’t appear to be the sort you’d trust alone with either your brother or your sister. There were several pages where I couldn’t tell what was even being photographed, that is to say if what I was looking at were photographs in the first place.