Going, Going, Gone Page 17

  ‘All’s prepped, Walter.’

  ‘You’ll read magazines?’ I asked. ‘Are these magazines?’

  She shook her head. ‘I require treatment as well. Same procedure, different space. I’ll meet you here when I’m done.’

  I walked through the door. There was nothing in the room but a chrome table shiny as the bumper on an old Pontiac. I was admiring my profile in the reflection when I heard the lock behind me click.

  ‘Denude,’ the ceiling said, speaking with the cab’s voice.

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘Denude and prone.’

  I was getting better at figuring out the lingo – I took off my clothes and got ready to lie down. ’Beelzebub!!’ I shouted, hopping on the slab and immediately flash-freezing my ass. Didn’t get much chance to complain, though. Without warning, the table had me in a full body-lock. Grey plastic bands came out of the table and wrapped around my wrists, something I couldn’t see came up under my back and my feet sailed into the air; two big chrome clamps popped up and locked them in place, leaving my toes wiggling hello at the ceiling. That was pleasant, compared to what happened next. Two steel octopi with beady red eyes rolled up on either side of me. Their tentacles were tipped with needles and thermometers and sanders, and without a word of warning they started drilling in. Felt like I was sealed inside a wasp’s nest, rolling downhill. ‘Mute,’ the voice said, but I didn’t care to oblige. Goodbye a moment later to the metal monsters as the table rolled forward toward the wall. The wall opened up and I slid right into what looked like a white plastic sewer pipe not much wider than my shoulders. Thousands of bright green flashbulbs went off and something began to hum. Felt at first like I was lying out in the sun copping rays, but as you might have figured this bunch couldn’t keep from going overboard, and I started to develop a crispy outside crust while staying moist and juicy on the inside. The hum turned into a hiss and something wet spritzed over me. Refreshing for a second or two, and then it started to sting, then burn. Just when I thought I was going to pass out yet again, I was shot out of the tube back into the room; the table tilted as the bands holding me disappeared, and I slid down onto the floor which – like the table – was freezing cold.

  ‘Clarified,’ the voice said. ‘Regarb.’

  ‘Refreshed?’ Eulie asked when I finally managed to stumble back into the waiting room. She sat on the couch, staring up at a tiny movie screen built into the wall. I couldn’t tell what it was; whatever was playing made as much sense as the magazines.

  ‘What is that?’ I asked, but she turned it off.

  ‘Follow, Walter.’

  We walked back into the hall and she did the face thing against the wall again. Nothing happened. She tried it again, and again nothing. I looked down at my arms; my skin was lingerie-pink, as if the top layer had been sanded away. ‘We’ll take the service lift.’ She pressed her hand against the opposite wall and it slid open. I followed her in, but before I could jump back out the door had disappeared. In the service elevator the walls, the roof and the floor were transparent. It was like stepping off a cliff. ‘One forty,’ she said.

  ‘Ascending,’ said the elevator. We reached one forty, five minutes ahead of my stomach, but my nose didn’t let me down this time. The door reappeared and we stepped into a hall that was much wider, with a shiny black floor and sky-blue walls that must have been twenty feet high.

  ‘Identify.’ The hall spoke with a different voice, some gravel-throated yegg who sounded like the actor Larry Tierney.

  ‘Eulalia Bax with outland transient,’ she said, not breaking stride, heading the end of the hall. Just when I thought she was going to lead us straight into the wall another door appeared, and we entered what I assumed was a reception area, uncluttered by receptionists. There were six king-size bruisers, orangutan-armed, all in black, tall as Chlojo and twice as wide. Only one had ears. They were all female.

  ‘As appointed?’ the biggest asked, speaking with the voice of a Barnard grad. I started to think that City Hall in this New York must be headquartered down in the Duchess Club on Sheridan Square.

  ‘AO,’ Eulie said. Big Bertha twisted her bracelet and yet another opening appeared in yet another wall. Doorknobs must have been as much use as buggywhips around here. Eulie led me through, and it didn’t make me unhappy that none of those Junior League linebackers followed. Now we were walking through another hall, one that seemed normal at first until it struck me that everything was just slightly larger than it really needed to be.

  ‘Where we going?’ I whispered. Somehow, as in a museum, or church, it seemed like the thing to do.

  ‘Superior notification.’

  ‘Who’s superior? I thought you were the director.’ ‘Of the Lucidity Institute, yes,’ she said. ‘But this is Dryco.’ ‘And now we’re in executive bathroom land, in other words.’

  No answer, but I didn’t expect one. At the end of this hall was a sight I could not have predicted – doors that looked like doors. Eulie stopped before going in, and knocked.

  ‘Madam,’ she called out, and the door creaked open. I couldn’t help but think of Inner Sanctum, but there was no grisly-voiced host in sight; only a round space as wide as the plaza we’d first come out in. I wondered why we weren’t given sunglasses before going in; the floor was shiny as a ballroom and the walls were toothpaste white. At first I couldn’t tell where the light in the room was coming from, even though there were windows; the walls were nothing but windows, in fact, the closer I looked. Remembering that it had seemed like a cloudy day outside, near as I could tell, and recalling how high these buildings seemed to go, I could only imagine that we had to be somewhere up in the midst of the stratocumulus. Just as I was starting to get my bearing a thin white wall as wide as the room came up out of the floor. The wall glowed from within, and at any second I expected to hear the voice of W.C. Fields saying, I Am Oz the Great and Powerful but no such luck. The voice that came out of the wall was female, and old; grandmotherly, you might have said, but there was a quality in the tone of her voice that made me think grandma was packing heat.

  ‘Eulalia Bax, Lucidity Institute. Madam?’

  Grandma answered. ‘Speak.’

  The wall lit up like a movie screen, and then I saw the old battleaxe. The picture was clearer than any movie I’d ever seen. I suddenly remembered an invention I’d read about in Amazing Stories, back when I was a kid, before they’d started running that Shaver nonsense and I realized there wasn’t any future in science fiction – visual radio. Every home was supposed to have it by 1960, but as with so much else whenever the future came into it, somebody missed the boat. I tried to listen to Eulie and Ma Barker as they gabbed away, talking in Estonian or Hungarian or whatever they liked to use when they talked to each other over here, all the while staring up at the big screen. Granny’s head was maybe fourteen feet high; the little hair she had left was chalk-white, and she’d lost her choppers. The veins on her temples looked like snakes beneath the skin. Her eyes were about sixty years younger than the rest of her, and from the looks she threw us I suspected she’d be just as happy to squash us like bugs if the mood struck her. But what I really couldn’t get over was the fact that she was as dark as milk chocolate. I had a hunch she’d have slapped you down if you even brought up the question of passing.

  ‘This is your man from over the mountain?’ I heard her say, surprised to hear anything that was recognizable as English.

  ‘Node and conduit.’ Eulie said.

  ‘Current status?’ Granny’s head started rolling upward, fluttering and I wondered why the projectionist wasn’t paying attention. Then it was brought home hard to me that this was no movie. ‘Walter,’ she asked, ‘How are you?’ I was glancing out the window, thinking I saw something fly by. ‘I’m speaking to you.’

  Eulie nudged me in the ribs, and I gave the old gal my full attention. ‘Feel like a top,’ I said. ‘Couldn’t be better.’

  ‘Fabricator,’ she said. ‘Bestill yourself.’
>
  Those shifty eyes of hers returned to my tour guide. The two of them started jawing again, louder and faster this time. They sounded even more incomprehensible than the taxi had. Sometimes, as if accidentally, phrases in English burst through the static, but faded out just as fast. Finding my eyes drawn back towards the windows, I watched some kind of little blue helicoper whiz by. The thing didn’t have any windows, and the only thing I could figure was that the pilot used a periscope to get by.

  ‘Comprehended,’ I heard Eulie say. The old woman nodded, and peered down at me, shaking her head. The screen went blank. Her expression hadn’t really changed throughout the entire conversation, so I assumed that whatever Eulie had told her, it hadn’t been anything different, or worse, than what she’d expected to hear.

  ‘Let’s go, Walter,’ Eulie said. ‘Superior notification continues.’

  ‘Who was that?’

  ‘Madam,’ she said. ‘Chairperson Emerita of Dryco.’ ‘She’s not the head honcho?’

  Eulie’s face was blank as the clouds outside. ‘Her granddaughter publics Dryco. We see her now.’ Eulie tried out a smile but it looked more like a grimace. ‘Follow, Walter …’

  ‘Eule,’ I said. ‘Is everything all right?’

  ‘With us, yes,’ she said. ‘With everything, no.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry about Chlo. I never thought –’

  ‘Unavoidable event,’ she said, pushing open the doors. ‘Follow, Walter.’

  Then it was back out in the reception room, a nod to the Holiday Girls, out and down another hall and then into another elevator, this one thank Sophia not as see-through as the last. I began to understand why so much time passed between Eulie and Chlo’s trips over to my neck of the woods – clearly, once they were back home they had to spend whole days, maybe even weeks, just going from one office to the next. When we got out of the elevator I was glad to see we’d descended, and not risen higher – it was hard to tell while we were still inside. At least this was what I thought when we emerged; windows seemed to line the hall, and it was only after a minute or so that I realized the blue sky I thought I was seeing was actually a very good paint job. We weren’t the only ones in the halls down here; there were dozens of wage slaves roaming about, and save for the fact that they came in all colours, most didn’t look so different from the people I saw all the time back in my neighbourhood.

  ‘The old lady start all this?’

  Eulie frowned. ‘Madam succeeded the successor.’

  ‘That would have been Dryco?’

  ‘The successor was Mister O’Malley,’ she said. ‘The founder, Dryden.’

  She stopped long enough to touch the nearest wall, and another picture took shape – it wasn’t on a screen; the wall became the picture, that’s the only way I can put it. Three goonpusses huddled face-on, evidently in some steakhouse, judging from how dark it was. The central figure was a nasty-looking woman filling the seat of a wingchair, flanked fore and aft by a pair of stupes. The younger one was wearing what looked like a shirt and a leotard, and lay at her feet as if ready to give her a pedicure. Some rough old piece of work stood behind the chair, lean and hungry, using a baseball bat as a walking stick. Real dark alley characters, that was for sure.

  ‘The Drydens. Still present, not voting.’

  We walked a little farther down the hall, until we came to yet another spot where she could put her face up against the wall. Another magic door opened up with a clank.

  ‘Here we are, Walter. Mute yourself.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Granddaughter is difficult,’ Eulie said.

  The room we entered looked almost like a receptionist’s office as I might have known it. There was a desk, and chair; on top of the desk was a small pad with another little movie screen. Probably no need to add that there wasn’t a receptionist in sight. There were, however, a couple of bruisers – males, this time, about the size of the teamsters downstairs. They wore black suits with a close-in neckline that fell somewhere between Beatle and Mao. Both of them resembled funeral home bouncers hauled into service whenever the box proved too heavy for the pallbearers. Eulie nodded at them and they nodded in return, and one of them opened the door to the next room – once again, at the top level, there were real doors with real knobs. As I followed Eulie inside, I immediately wondered what exactly she was leading me into.

  ‘Lucidity girl,’ said the granddaughter, spotting Eulie. ‘I’ve problemed. Assist.’

  In her haste to get us down here, my little co-conspirator had neglected to mention that the old bat’s granddaughter couldn’t have been any older than fifteen. Granted, the older I get the harder it is to tell, but in this case I’d have been willing to bet money. She sat yoga-style on top of her desk; it looked like she’d cleared a space by throwing everything onto the dark brown carpet – at least I thought it was a carpet. Not much of it showed through beneath the tossed-aside clothing, purses, shoes, empty boxes and all the standard teenage girl debris. This room wasn’t as big as the old lady’s, but it wasn’t small, and had a fireplace, which blazed away even though the air conditioning was running full blast. On the wall behind her desk hung the original of that picture Eulie’d called into existence out in the hall. Judging from the holes in the canvas it looked like the little minx had been using it as a dartboard, with icepicks.

  ‘What troubles?’ Eulie asked, holding tight to my arm as we cleared a path through the undergrowth.

  ‘This unworks. Alice unhelps,’ she said, holding out a shiny green hockey puck. ‘Command her.’

  ‘Alice has silenced,’ Eulie said. ‘Show me.’

  Although the little missy wasn’t more than five feet away I did everything possible to keep from looking at her. It’s always been my experience that girls her age are shy even when they’re running around beaches half naked, but this one didn’t seem shy at all. She was dark as a Greek, and wore her hair pixied; probably couldn’t get the kink out, and didn’t want to flaunt it. That wasn’t what distressed me so, however; granddaughter wore what looked like pink pipecleaners in her ears, dirty white ankle socks and a purple stripper’s gaff, and nothing else. It didn’t seem to matter to her who might have seen what.

  ‘Dislodging,’ said Eulie, taking the puck and tapping it. Trying not to even come close to catching granddaughter’s eye, distracted by a buzz of voices, I craned my neck around and saw, behind us, a wall covered with about fifty of those little screens. Every single one was showing a different movie; on the second row from the bottom, on the far left, I even recognized Humphrey Bogart. It was impossible to hear what was really being said on any of the screens, though; music – I guess that was what it was supposed to be, although it didn’t seem to be much more than a steady driving rhythm – filled the room. Wherever the speakers were, they must have been concert-size. Granddaughter had incense burning in several different censers, but the smell of the room, and of granddaughter, still came through painfully clear.

  ‘Corrected,’ said Eulie, handing her back the puck. Granddaughter lay her little mitts on it and then shoved it into her mouth as if intending to swallow it, but she didn’t. All of the pictures on the screens as a single big movie filled the entire wall. It was doubly unsettling to suddenly see a much larger version of our hostess, wearing even less, stomping through what seemed at first to be a toy city, until I realized it was some actual anonymous burg – Omaha, or Cleveland, maybe. She knocked over buildings, crushed people underfoot, slung cars through the air like frisbees.

  ‘We’ve paid respect,’ Eulie whispered to me. ‘Follow.’

  Eulie bowed down before Topsy, and as I took her literally I did as well. No surprise to find out that I shouldn’t have. Without taking her eyes off the wall she snatched up a rock-hard plastic mug and bounced it off my noggin. It didn’t break the bone, or even the skin, but it wasn’t a sensation I enjoyed. Soon as I recovered my footing I backed out of the room, fast. Neither of us said a word until we were back in the el
evator, heading somewhere below.

  ‘Apples don’t fall far from the tree,’ I mumbled. She shook her head.

  ‘Adopted,’ Eulie said. ‘Childhood friend’s daughter, heard. Friend died postbirthing. Cancered. Father in absentia, dead.’ She shrugged. ‘Environment, heredity. Onesame.’

  Thought it best to keep the talk light while we were still in hearing range of Sassy Sue. ‘She’s older than she looks?’

  ‘Thirteen,’ Eulie said. ‘Figureheads, sole, installed by Madame. Dryco runs itself, or did until recent disruptions.’

  ‘What disruptions?’

  ‘We’ll homeways now, Walter. You need knowing.’

  ‘Homeways where?’

  ‘My home.’

  ‘Where’s that? Up here in the clouds, somewhere –?’

  ‘Jersey.’

  So I was right, after all. As we plummeted down I still tried to get it through my head that the Pi had somehow been removed from my system; that none of this was a hallucination. I’d be just as glad, I thought, to get out of New York; because how much weirder could their Jersey be? Her place, as well. Taking another gander at those sad, glistening eyes of Eulie’s, I felt that old springboard go. Forgive me for being so blunt, my brothers, but it was the only thing on my mind at that moment; that after months stuck in drydock, I thought I was finally going to get my chance to open the savoury bivalve. But I should have known better than that.