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Chapter 22:
Later, they
sat in a booth at a coffee shop, a clean and attractive place with young
waitresses and a reasonably loose patronage. The jukebox drummed out Louis
Panda's "Memory of Your Nose." Jason ordered coffee only; Miss Dominic had
a fruit salad and iced tea.
"What are
those two records you're carrying?" she asked.
He handed
them to her.
"Why,
they're by you. If you're Jason Taverner. Are you?"
"Yes." He
was certain of that, at least.
"I don't
think I've ever heard you sing," Mary Anne Dominic said. "I'd love to, but
I don't usually like pop music; I like those great old-time folk singers
out of the past, like Buffy St. Marie. There's nobody now who could sing
like Buffy."
"I agree,"
he said somberly, his mind still returning to the house, the bathroom, the
escape from the frantic brown-uniformed private cop. It wasn't the
mescaline, he told himself once again. Because the cop saw it, too.
Or saw
something.
"Maybe he
didn't see what I saw," he said aloud. "Maybe he just saw her lying there.
Maybe she fell. Maybe- " He thought, maybe I should go back.
"Who didn't
see what?" Mary Anne Dominic asked, and then flushed bright scarlet. "I
didn't mean to poke into your life; you said you're in trouble and I can
see you have something weighty and heavy on your mind that's obsessing
you."
"I have to
be sure," he said, "what actually happened. Everything is there in that
house." And on these records, he thought.
Alys Buckman
knew about my TV program. She knew about my records. She knew which one
was the big hit; she owned it. But -
There had
been no music on the records. Broken stylus, hell - some kind of sound,
distorted perhaps, should have come out. He had handled records too long
and phonographs too long not to know that.
"You're a
moody person," Mary Anne Dominic said. From her small cloth purse she had
brought a pair of glasses; she now laboriously read the bio material on
the back of the record jackets.
"What's
happened to me," Jason said briefly, "has made me moody."
"It says
here that you have a TV program."
"Right." He
nodded. "At nine on Tuesday night, On NBC."
"Then you're
really famous. I'm sitting here talking to a famous person that I ought to
know about. How does it make you feel - I mean, my not recognizing who you
are when you told me your name?"
He shrugged.
And felt ironically amused.
"Would the
jukebox have any songs by you?" She pointed to the multicolored Babylonian
Gothic structure in the far corner.
"Maybe," he
said. It was a good question.
"I'll go
look." Miss Dominic fished a half quinque from her pocket, slid from the
booth, and crossed the coffee shop to stare down at the titles and artists
of the jukebox's listing.
When she
gets back she is going to be less impressed by me, Jason mused. He knew
the effect of one ellipsis: unless he manifested himself everywhere, from
every radio and phonograph, jukebox and sheet-music shop, TV screen, in
the universe, the magic spell collapsed.
She returned
smiling. "'Nowhere Nuthin' Fuck-up,'" she said, reseating herself. He saw
then that the half quinque was gone. "It should play next."
Instantly he
was on his feet and across the coffee shop to the jukebox.
***
She was
right. Selection B4. His most recent hit, "Nowhere Nuthin' Fuck-up," a
sentimental number. And already the mechanism of the jukebox had begun to
process the disc.
A moment
later his voice, mellowed by quad sound points and echo chambers, filled
the coffee shop.
Dazed, he
returned to the booth.
"You sound
superwonderful," Mary Anne said, politely, perhaps, given her taste, when
the disc had ended.
"Thanks." It
had been him, all right. The grooves on that record hadn't been blank.
"You're
really far out," Mary Anne said enthusiastically, all smiles and twinkly
glasses.
Jason said
simply, "I've been at it a long time." She had sounded as if she meant it.
"Do you feel
bad that I hadn't heard of you?"
"No." He
shook his head, still dazed. Certainly she was not alone in that, as the
events of the past two days - two days? had it only been that? - had
shown.
"Can - I
order something more?" Mary Anne asked. She hesitated. "I spent all my
money on stamps; I -"
"I'm picking
up the tab," Jason said.
"How do you
think the strawberry cheesecake would be?"
"Outstanding," he said, momentarily amused by her. The woman's
earnestness, her anxieties ... does she have any boy friends of any kind?
he wondered. Probably not ... she lived in a world of pots, clay, brown
wrapping paper, troubles with her little old Ford Greyhound, and, in the
background, the stereo-only voices of the old-time greats: Judy Collins
and Joan Baez.
"Ever
listened to Heather Hart?" he asked. Gently.
Her forehead
wrinkled. "I - don't recall for sure. Is she a folk singer or -" Her voice
trailed off; she looked sad. As if she sensed that she was failing to be
what she ought to be, failing to know what every reasonable person knew.
He felt sympathy for her.
"Ballads,"
Jason said. "Like what I do."
"Could we
hear your record again?"
He
obligingly returned to the jukebox, scheduled it for replay.
This time
Mary Anne did not seem to enjoy it.
"What's the
matter?" he asked.
"Oh," she
said, "I always tell myself I'm creative; I make pots and like that. But I
don't know if they're actually any good. I don't know how to tell. People
say to me -"
"People tell
you everything. From that you're worthless to priceless. The worst and the
best. You're always reaching somebody here" - he tapped the salt shaker -
"and not reaching somebody there." He tapped her fruit-salad bowl.
"But there
has to be some way -"
"There are
experts. You can listen to them, to their theories. They always have
theories. They write long articles and discuss your stuff back to the
first record you cut nineteen years ago. They compare recordings you don't
even remember having cut. And the TV critics -"
"But to be
noticed." Again, briefly, her eyes shone.
"I'm sorry,"
he said, rising to his feet once more. He could wait no longer. "I have to
make a phone call. Hopefully I'll be right back. If I'm not" - he put his
hand on her shoulder, on her knitted white sweater, which she had probably
made herself - "it's been nice meeting you."
Puzzled, she
watched him in her wan, obedient way as he elbowed a path to the back of
the crowded coffee shop, to the phone booth.
Shut up
inside the phone booth, he read off the number of the Los Angeles Police
Academy from the emergency listings and, after dropping in his coin,
dialed.
"I'd like to
speak to Police General Felix Buckman," he said, and, without surprise,
heard his voice shake. Psychologically I've had it, he realized.
Everything that's happened ... up to the record on the jukebox - it's too
goddamn much for me. I am just plain scared. And disoriented. So maybe, he
thought, the mescaline has not worn completely off after all. But I did
drive the little flipflap okay; that indicates something. Fucking dope, he
thought. You can always tell when it hits you but never when it unhits, if
it ever does. It impairs you forever or you think so; you can't be sure.
Maybe it never leaves. And they say, Hey, man, your brain's burned out,
and you say, Maybe so. You can't be sure and you can't not be sure. And
all because you dropped a cap or one cap too many that somebody said, Hey
this'll get you off.
"This is
Miss Beason," a female voice sounded in his ear. "Mr. Buckman's assistant.
May I help you?"
"Peggy
Beason," he said. He took a deep, unsteady breath and said, "This is Jason
Taverner."
"Oh yes, Mr.
Taverner. What did you want? Did you leave anything behind?"
Jason said,
"I want to talk to General Buckman."
"I'm afraid
Mr. Buckman -"
"It has to
do with Alys," Jason said.
Silence. And
then: "Just a moment please, Mr. Taverner," Peggy Beason said. "I'll ring
Mr. Buckman and see if he can free himself a moment."
Clicks.
Pause. More silence. Then a line opened.
"Mr.
Taverner?" It was not General Buckman. "This is Herbert Maime, Mr.
Buckman's chief of staff. I understand you told Miss Beason that it has to
do with Mr. Buckman's sister, Miss Alys Buckman. Frankly I'd like to ask
just what are the circumstances under which you happen to know Miss -"
Jason hung
up the phone. And walked sightlessly back to the booth, where Mary Anne
Dominic sat eating her strawberry cheesecake.
"You did
come back after all," she said cheerfully.
"How," he
said, "is the cheesecake?"
"A little
too rich." She added, "But good."
He grimly
reseated himself. Well, he had done his best to get through to Felix
Buckman. To tell him about Alys. But - what would he have been able to
say, after all? The futility of everything, the perpetual impotence of his
efforts and intentions ... weakened even more, he thought, by what she
gave me, that cap of mescaline.
If it had
been mescaline.
***
That
presented a new possibility. He had no proof, no evidence, that Alys had
actually given him mescaline. It could have been anything. What, for
example, was mescaline doing coming from Switzerland? That made no sense;
that sounded synthetic, not organic: a product of a lab. Maybe a new
multi-ingredient cultish drug. Or something stolen from police labs.
The record
of "Nowhere Nuthin' Fuck-up." Suppose the drug had made him hear it. And
see the listing on the juke box. But Mary Anne Dominic had heard it, too;
in fact she had discovered it.
But the two
blank records. What about them?
As he sat
pondering, an adolescent boy in a T-shirt and jeans bent over him and
mumbled, "Hey, you're Jason Taverner, aren't you?" He extended a ballpoint
pen and piece of paper. "Could I have your autograph, sir?"
Behind him a
pretty little red-haired teenybopper, bra-less, in white shorts, smiled
excitedly and said, "We always catch you on Tuesday night. You're
fantastic. And you look in real life, you look just like on the screen,
except that in real life you're more, you know, tanned." Her friendly
nipples jiggled.
Numbly, by
habit, he signed his name. "Thanks, guys," he said to them; there were
four of them in all now.
Chattering
to themselves, the four kids departed. Now people in nearby booths were
watching Jason and muttering interestedly to one another. As always, he
said to himself. This is how it's been up to the other day. My reality
is leaking back. He felt uncontrollably, wildly elated. This was what
he knew; this was his lifestyle. He had lost it for a short time but now -
finally, he thought, I'm starting to get it back!
Heather
Hart. He thought, I can call her now. And get through to her. She won't
think I'm a twerp fan.
Maybe I only
exist so long as I take the drug. That drug, whatever it is, that Alys
gave me.
Then my
career, he thought, the whole twenty years, is nothing but a retroactive
hallucination created by the drug.
***
What
happened, Jason Taverner thought, is that the drug wore off. She -
somebody - stopped giving it to me and I woke up to reality, there in that
shabby, broken-down hotel room with the cracked mirror and the
bug-infested mattress. And I stayed that way until now, until Alys gave me
another dose.
He thought,
No wonder she knew about me, about my Tuesday-night TV show. Through her
drug she created it. And those two record albums - props which she kept to
reinforce the hallucination.
Jesus
Christ, he thought, is that it?
But, he
thought, the money I woke up with in the hotel room, this whole wad of it.
Reflexively he tapped his chest, felt its thick existence, still there. If
in real life I doled out my days in fleabag hotels in the Watts area,
where did I get that money?
And I would
have been listed in the police files, and in all the other data banks
throughout the world. I wouldn't be listed as a famous entertainer, but
I'd be there as a shabby bum who never amounted to anything, whose only
highs came from a pill bottle. For God knows how long. I may have
been taking the drug for years.
Alys, he
remembered, said I had been to the house before.
And
apparently, he decided, it's true. I had. To get my doses of the drug.
Maybe I am
only one of a great number of people leading synthetic lives of
popularity, money, power, by means of a capsule, while living actually,
meanwhile, in bug-infested, ratty old hotel rooms. On skid row. Derelicts,
nobodies. Amounting to zero. But, meanwhile, dreaming.
"You
certainly are deep in a brown study," Mary Anne said. She had finished her
cheesecake; she looked satiated, now. And happy.
"Listen," he
said hoarsely. "Is my record really in that jukebox?"
Her eyes
widened as she tried to understand. "How do you mean? We listened to it.
And the little thingy, where it tells the selections, that's there.
Jukeboxes never made mistakes."
He fished
out a coin. "Go play it again. Set it up for three plays."
Obediently,
she surged from her seat, into the aisle, and bustled over to the jukebox,
her lovely long hair bouncing against her ample shoulders. Presently he
heard it, heard his big hit song. And the people in the booths and at the
counter were nodding and smiling at him in recognition; they knew it was
he who was singing. His audience.
When the
song ended there was a smattering of applause from the patrons of the
coffee shop. Grinning reflexively, professionally in return he
acknowledged their recognition and approval.
"It's
there," he said, as the song replayed. Savagely, he clenched his fist,
struck the plastic table separating him from Mary Anne Dominic. "God damn
it, it's there."
With some
odd twist of deep, intuitive, female desire to help him Mary Anne said, "
And, I'm here, too."
"I'm not in
a run-down hotel room, lying on a cot dreaming," he said huskily.
"No, you're
not." Her tone was tender, anxious. She clearly felt concern for him. For
his alarm.
"Again I'm
real," he said. "But if it could happen once, for two days -" To come and
go like this, to fade in and out -
"Maybe we
should leave," Mary Anne said apprehensively.
That cleared
his mind. "Sorry," he said, wanting to reassure her.
"I just mean
that people are listening."
"It won't
hurt them," he said. "Let them listen; let them see how you carry your
worries and troubles with you even when you're a world-famous star." He
rose to his feet, however. "Where do you want to go?" he asked her. "To
your apartment?" It meant doubling back, but he felt optimistic enough to
take the risk.
"My
apartment?" she faltered.
"Do you
think I'd hurt you?" he said.
For an
interval she sat nervously pondering. "N-no," she said at last.
"Do you have
a phonograph?" he asked. " At your apartment?"
"Yes, but
not a very good one; it's just stereo. But it works."
"Okay," he
said, herding her up the aisle toward the cash register. "Let's go."
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