PRE-DAWN, 1 MAY — Y.D.A.U. OUTCROPPING NORTHWEST OF TUCSON AZ U.S.A., STILL

‘Do you remember hearing,’ U.S.O.U.S.’s Hugh Steeply said, ‘in your own country, in the late I think B.S. ’70s, of an experimental program, a biomedical experiment, involving the idea of electro-implantations in the human brain?’ Steeply, at the shelf’s lip, turned to look. Marathe merely looked back at him. Steeply said: ‘No? Some sort of radical advance. Stereo-taxy. Epilepsy-treatment. They proposed to implant tiny little hair-thin electrodes in the brain. Some leading Canadian neurologist — Elder, Elders, something — at the time had hit on evidence that certain tiny little stimulations in certain brain-areas could prevent a seizure. As in an epileptic seizure. They implant electrodes — hair-thin, just a few millivolts or —’

‘Briggs electrodes.’

‘Beg pardon?’

Marathe coughed slightly. ‘Also the type used in pacemakers of the heart.’

Steeply felt his lip. ‘I’m thinking I’m recalling a tentative Bio-entry saying your father had had a pacemaker.’

Marathe touched his own face absently. ‘The plutonium-239 pack of power. The Briggs electrode. The Kenbeck DC circuit. I am recalling terms and instructions. Avoid all microwaving ovens and many transmitters. Cremation for burial forbidden — this is because of plutonium-239.’

‘So but you know of this old program with epileptics? Experiments they thought could avoid ablative surgery for severe epilepsy?’

Marathe said nothing and made what might be seen as slightly shaking the head.

Steeply turned back to face the east with his hands clasped before his back, wishing to speak of it one way or another way, Marathe could tell.

‘I can’t remember if I read about it or heard a lecture or what. The implantation was a pretty inexact science. It was all experimental. A whole lot of electrodes had to be implanted in an incredibly small area in the temporal lobe to hope to find the nerve-terminals that involved epileptic seizures, and it was trial and error, stimulating each electrode and checking the reaction.’

‘Temporal lobes of the brain,’ Marathe said.

‘What happened was that Olders and the Canadian neuroscientists happened to find, during all the trial and error, that firing certain electrodes in certain parts of the lobes gave the brain intense feelings of pleasure.’ Steeply looked back over his shoulder at Marathe. ‘I mean we’re talking about intense pleasure, Rémy. I’m remembering Olders called these little strips of stimulatable pleasure-tissue p-terminals.’

‘ “P” wishing to mean “the pleasure.” ’

‘And that their location seemed maddeningly inexact and unpredictable, even within brains of the same species — a p-terminal’d turn out to be right up next to some other neuron whose stimulation would cause pain, or hunger, or God knows what.’

‘The human brain is very dense; it is the truth.’

‘The whole point is they weren’t doing it on humans yet. It was regarded as radically experimental. They used animals and animal-lobes. But soon the pleasure-stimulation phenomenon was its own separate radical experiment, while the second-string neuro-team stuck with the epileptic animals. Older — or Elder, some Anglo-Canadian name — headed the team to map these what he called quote “Rivers of Reward,” the p-terminals in the lobes.’

Marathe idly felt at the little pills of cotton in his windbreaker’s cotton pockets, pleasantly nodding. ‘An experimental program of Canada, you stated.’

‘I even remember. The Brandon Psychiatric Center.’

Marathe pretended to cough in the recognition of this. ‘This is a mental hospital. The far north of Manitoba. Forbidding wastelands. The center of nothing.’

‘Because they were theorizing that these quote “rivers” or terminals were also the brain’s receptors for things like beta-endorphins, L-dopa, Q-dopa, serotonin, all the various neurotransmitters of pleasure.’

‘The Department of Euphoria, so to speak, within the human brain.’ There was no hint or suggestion yet of dawn or light.

‘But not humans yet,’ Steeply said. ‘Older’s earliest subject were rats, and the results were apparently sobering. The Nu— the Canadians found that if they rigged an auto-stimulation lever, the rat would press the lever to stimulate his p-terminal over and over, thousands of times an hour, over and over, ignoring food and female rats in heat, completely fixated on the lever’s stimulation, day and night, stopping only when the rat finally died of dehydration or simple fatigue.’

Marathe said ‘Not of the pleasure itself, however.’

‘I think dehydration. I’m fuzzy on just what the rat died of.’

Marathe shrugged. ‘But the envy of all experimental rats everywhere, this rat, I think.’

‘Then likewise implantations and levers for cats, dogs, swine, monkeys, primates, even a dolphin.’

‘Up the evolving scale, p-terminals for each. Each died?’

‘Eventually,’ Steeply said, ‘or else they had to be lobotomized. Because I remember even if the pleasure-electrode was removed, the stimulation-lever removed, the subject’d run around pressing anything that could be pressed or flipped, trying to get one more jolt.’

‘The dolphin, probably it swam about and did this, I think.’

‘You seem amused by this, Rémy. This was totally a Canadian show, this little neuroelectric adventure.’

‘I am amused while you make a way toward your point so slowly.’

‘Because then eventually Elder and company of course wanted to try human subjects, to see whether the human lobe had p-terminals and so on; and because of the sobering consequences for the subject-animals in the program they couldn’t legally use prisoners or patients, they had to try to secure volunteers.’

‘Because of a risk,’ Marathe said.

‘The whole thing was apparently a nightmare of Canadian legalities and statutes.’

Marathe pursed the lips: ‘I have doubts in my mind: Ottawa could easily have asked your then CIA for, what is the term, “Persons of Expendability” from Southeast Asia or Negroes, the subjects expended for your inspiring U.S.A.’s MK-Ultra.’ ¹⁹⁸

Steeply elected ignoring this, rummaging in the purse. ‘But what apparently happened was that somehow word of the p-terminal discovery and experiments had gotten out up in Manitoba — some low-level worker at Brandon had broken security and leaked word.’

‘Very little else to do in northern Manitoba besides leaking and gossiping.’

‘… And suddenly the neuro-team at Brandon pull in to work one day and find human volunteers lining up literally around the block outside the place, able-bodied and I should remember to recall mostly young Canadians, lining up and literally trampling each other in their desire to sign up as volunteers for p-terminal-electrode implantation and stimulation.’

‘In full knowledge of the rat’s and dolphin’s death, from pressing the lever.’

Marathe’s father had always assigned it to Rémy, his youngest, to go first inside some public restaurant or shop to check for the presence of a microwave or GC-type of transmitter. Of special concerns were stores with instruments for thwarting a shoplifter, the shrieking instruments at doors.

Steeply said ‘And of course this eagerness for implantation put a whole new disturbing spin on the study of human pleasure and behavior, and a whole new Brandon Hospital team was hastily assembled to study the psych-profiles of all these people willing to trample one another to undergo invasive brain surgery and foreign-object implantation —’

‘To become some crazed rats.’

‘— All just for the chance at this kind of pleasure, and the M.M.P.I.s and Millon’s and Approception tests on all these hordes of prospective volunteers — the hordes were told it was part of the screening — the scores came out fascinatingly, chillingly average, normal.’

‘In other words not any deviants.’

‘Nonabnormal along every axis they could see. Just regular young people — Canadian young people.’

‘Volunteering for fatal addiction to the electrical pleasure.’

‘But Rémy, apparently the purest, most refined pleasure imaginable. The neural distillate of, say, orgasm, religious enlightenment, ecstatic drugs, shiatsu, a crackling fire on a winter night — the sum of all possible pleasures refined into pure current and deliverable at the flip of a hand-held lever. Thousands of times an hour, at will.’

Marathe gave him a bland look.

Steeply examined a cuticle. ‘By free choice, of course.’

Marathe assumed an expression that lampooned a dullard’s hard thought. ‘Thus, but how long before these leaks and rumors of p-terminals reach the Ottawa of government and public weal, for Canada’s government reacts with horror at the prospect of this.’

‘Oh, and not just Ottawa,’ Steeply said. ‘You can see the implications if a technology like Elder’s really became available. I know Ottawa informed Turner, Bush, Casey, whoever it was at the time, and everyone at Langley bit their knuckle in horror.’

‘The CIA chewed a hand?’

‘Because surely you can see the implications for any industrialized, market-driven, high-discretionary-spending society.’

‘But it would be illegalized,’ Marathe said, noting to remember the various routines of movements Steeply made for keeping warm.

‘Stop with the babe-in-woods charade,’ Steeply said. ‘There was still the prospect of an underground market exponentially more pernicious than narcotics or LSD. The electrode-and-lever technology looked expensive at the time, but it was easy to foresee enormous widespread demand bringing it down to where electrodes’d be no more exotic than syringes.’

‘But yes, but surgery, this would be a different matter to implant.’

‘Plenty of surgeons were already willing to perform illegal procedures. Abortions. Electric penile implants.’

‘The MK-Ultra surgeries.’

Steeply laughed without mirth. ‘Or off-the-record amputations for daring young train-cultists, no?’

Marathe blew just one nostril of his nose. This was the Québecois way: one of the nostrils at a time. Marathe’s father’s generation, they had used to bend and blow the one nostril out into the gutter in the street.

Steeply said ‘Picture millions of average nonabnormal North Americans, all implanted with Briggs electrodes, all with electronic access to their own personal p-terminals, never leaving home, thumbing their personal stimulation levers over and over.’

‘Lying upon their divans. Ignoring females in rutting. Having rivers of reward without earning reward.’

‘Bug-eyed, drooling, moaning, trembling, incontinent, dehydrated. Not working, not consuming, not interacting or taking part in community life. Finally pitching forward from sheer —’

Marathe said ‘Giving away their souls and lives for p-terminal stimulation, you are saying.’

‘You can maybe see the analogy,’ Steeply said, over the shoulders to smile in a wry way. ‘In Canada, my friend, this was.’

Marathe made a very slight version of his rotary motion of impatience: ‘From the A.D. 1970s of time. This never has come to be. There would have been no development of the Happy Patch…’

‘We both went in. Both our nations.’

‘In secret.’

‘Ottawa first cutting the Brandon program’s funding, which Turner or Casey or whoever howled at — our old CIA wanted the procedure developed and perfected, then Classified — military use or something.’

Marathe said ‘But the civilian guardians of the weal of the public felt differently.’

‘I think I’m remembering Carter was President. Both our combined nations made it a Security priority, shutting it down. Our old N.S.A., your old C7 with the R.C.M.P.s.’

‘Bright red jackets and hats with wide brims. In the 1970s still on horses.’

Steeply held his mouth of the purse half up to the faint lights of Tucson, peering for something. ‘I recall they went in directly. As in guns drawn. Boomed the doors. Dismantled the labs. Mercy-killed dolphins and goats. Olders disappeared somewhere.’

Marathe’s slow circular gesture. ‘Your point finally is Canadians also, we would choose dying for this, the total pleasure of a passive goat.’

Steeply turned, fiddling with an emery board. ‘But you don’t see a more specific analogy with the Entertainment?’

Marathe tongued the inside of his cheek. ‘You are saying the Entertainment, a somehow optical stimulation of the p-terminals? A way to bypass Briggs electrodes for orgasm-and-massage pleasures?’

The dry rasp of the emerying a nail. ‘All I’m saying is analogy. A precedent in your own nation.’

‘Us, our nation is the Québec nation. Manitoba is —’

‘I’m saying that if he could get past the blind desire for harm against the U.S., your M. Fortier might be induced to see just what it is he’s proposing to let out of the cage.’ His training was such that he could emery without watching the procedure. For Steeply’s most effective interviewing tactic was this long looking down into the face without emotion of any kind. For Marathe felt more uncomfortable not knowing whether Steeply believed a thing than if Steeply’s emotion of face showed he did not believe.

Then tonight, at the prospect of boiled hot dogs, the two newest residents had pulled the typically standard new-resident princess-and-pea special-food-issue thing: the new-today girl Amy J. that just sits there on the vinyl couch shaking like an aspen and having people bring her coffee and light her gaspers and with just short of a like HELPLESS VICTIM: PLEASE CODDLE sign hung around her neck now claiming Red Dye #4 gives her ‘cluster migraines’ (Gately gives this girl like a week tops before she’s a vapor trail back to the Xanax ¹⁹⁹ ; she has that look), and the weirdly-familiar-but-Southernish-sounding girl Joelle van D. with the past-believing bod and the linen face announcing she was a vegetarian and would ‘rather eat a bug’ than even get downwind of a boiled frank. And but in an incredible move Pat M. has asked Gately, at like 1800h., to blast down to the Purity Supreme down in Allston and pick up some eggs and peppers so the two new delicate-tummied newcomers can make themselves quiche or whatever. To Gately’s way of thinking, this looks like catering to just the sort of classic addict’s claim of special uniqueness that it’s supposed to be Pat’s job to help break down. The Joelle v.D. girl seems to have like inordinate immediate weight and pet-status with Pat, who’s already making noises about exempting the girl from the menial-job requirement, and wants Gately to look for some kind of weird Big Red Soda Water tonic for the girl, who’s apparently still dehydrated. It’s sure a long way from making somebody chew feldspar. Gately has long since quit trying to figure Pat Montesian out.

It’s a weird-weather evening, both thundering and spitting snow. Gately had finally become able to distinguish genuine thunder from the Enfield sounds of ATHSCME fans and E.W.D. catapults, this after nine months of wearing a Goodwill rain-slicker every morning on the 0430 Green Line.

One of the possible weak spots in Gately’s AA recovery-program of rigorous personal honesty is that once he’s jammed himself into a black-as-water Aventura and watched the spoiler throb as he turns over the carnivorous engine, etc., he often finds himself taking a little bit less of a direct route to a given Ennet-errand-site than he probably could. If he had to come right down to the heart of the issue he likes to cruise around town in Pat’s car. He’s able to minimize the suspicious time any particular bit of extra cruising adds to his errands by basically driving like a lunatic: ignoring lights, cutting people off, scoffing at One-Ways, veering wildly in and out, making pedestrians drop things and lunge curbward, leaning on a horn that sounds more like an air-raid siren. You’d think this would be judicially insane, in terms of not having a license and facing a no-license jail-bit anyway, but the fact is that this sort of on-the-way-to-the-E.R.-with-a-passenger-in-labor driving doesn’t usually raise so much as an eyebrow among Boston’s Finest, since they have more than enough other stuff to attend to, in these troubled times, and since everybody else in metro Boston drives exactly the same sociopathic way, including the Finest themselves, so that the only real risk Gately’s running is to his own sense of rigorous personal honesty. One cliché he’s found especially serviceable w/r/t the Aventura issue is that Recovery is about Progress Not Perfection. He likes to make a stately left onto Commonwealth and wait to get out of view of the House’s bay window and then produce what he imagines is a Rebel Yell and open her up down the serpentine tree-lined boulevard of the Ave. as it slithers through bleak parts of Brighton and Allston and past Boston U. and toward the big triangular CITGO neon sign and the Back Bay. He passes The Unexamined Life club, where he no longer goes, at 1800h. already throbbing with voices and bass under its ceaseless neon bottle, and then the great gray numbered towers of the Brighton Projects, where he definitely no longer goes. Scenery starts to blur and distend at 70 kph. Comm. Ave. splits Enfield-Brighton-Allston from the downscale north edge of Brookline on the right. He passes the meat-colored facades of anonymous Brookline tenements, Father & Son Market, a dumpster-nest, Burger Kings, Blanchard’s Liquors, an InterLace outlet, a land-barge alongside another dumpster-nest, corner bars and clubs — Play It Again Sam’s, Harper’s Ferry, Bunratty’s, Rathskeller, Father’s First I and II — a CVS, two InterLace outlets right next to each other, the ELLIS THE RIM MAN sign, the Marty’s Liquors that they rebuilt like ants the week after it burned down. He passes the hideous Riley’s Roast Beef where the Allston Group gathers to pound coffee before Commitments. The giant distant CITGO sign’s like a triangular star to steer by. He’s doing 75 k down a straightaway, keeping abreast of an Inbound Green Line train ramming downhill on the slightly raised track that splits Comm.’s lanes into two and two. He likes to match a Green train at 75 k all the way down Commonwealth’s integral ς and see how close he can cut beating it across the tracks at the Brighton Ave. split. It’s a vestige. He’d admit it’s like a dark vestige of his old low-self-esteem suicidal-thrill behaviors. He doesn’t have a license, it’s not his car, it’s a priceless art-object car, it’s his boss’s car, who he owes his life to and sort of maybe loves, he’s on a vegetable-run for shattered husks of newcomers just out of detox whose eyes are rolling around in their heads. Has anybody mentioned Gately’s head is square? It’s almost perfectly square, massive and boxy and mysticetously blunt: the head of somebody who looks like he likes to lower his head and charge. He used to let people open and close elevator doors on his head, break things across his head. The ‘Indestructible’ in his childhood cognomen referred to the head. His left ear looks a bit like a prizefighter’s left ear. The head’s nearly flat on top, so that his hair, long in back but with short Prince Valiant bangs in front, looks sort of like a carpet remnant someone’s tossed on the head and let slide slightly back but stay. ²⁰⁰ Nobody that lives in these guano-spotted old brown buildings along Comm. with bars on the low floors’ windows ²⁰¹ ever goes inside, it seems like. Even in thunder and little asterisks of snow, all kinds of olive Spanish and puke-white Irish are on every corner, bullshitting and trying to look like they’re just out there waiting for something important and drinking out of tallboys wrapped tight in brown bags. A strange nod to discretion, the bags, wrapped so tight the outline of the cans can’t be missed. A Shore boy, Gately’d never used a paper bag around streetcorner cans: it’s like a city thing. The Aventura can do 80 kph in third gear. The engine never strains or whines, just eventually starts to sound hostile, is how you to know to hurt your hip and shift. The Aventura’s instrument panel looks more like the instrument panel of military aircraft. Something’s always blinking and Indicating; one of the blinking lights is supposed to tell you when to shift; Pat has told him to ignore the panel. He loves to make the driver’s-side window go down and rest his left elbow on the jamb like a cabbie.

He’s caught behind a bus whose big square ass is in both lanes and he can’t get around it in time to beat the train across the split, though, and the train crosses in front of the bus with a blast of its farty-sounding horn and what Gately sees as a kind of swagger to its jiggle on the street-level track. He can see people bouncing around inside the train, holding on to straps and bars. Below the split on Comm. it’s Boston U., Kenmore and Fenway, Berklee School of Music. The CITGO sign’s still off in the distance ahead. You have to go a shocking long way to actually get to the big sign, which everybody says is hollow and you can get up inside there and stick your head out in a pulsing neon sea but nobody’s ever personally been up in there.

Arm out like a hack’s arm, Gately blasts through B.U. country. As in backpack and personal-stereo and designer-fatigues country. Soft-faced boys with backpacks and high hard hair and seamless foreheads. Totally lineless untroubled foreheads like cream cheese or ironed sheets. All the storefronts here are for clothes or TP cartridges or posters. Gately’s had lines in his big forehead since he was about twelve. It’s here he especially likes making people throw their packages in the air and dive for the curb. B.U. girls who look like they’ve eaten nothing but dairy products their whole lives. Girls who do step-aerobics. Girls with good combed long clean hair. Nonaddicted girls. The weird hopelessness at the heart of lust. Gately hasn’t had sex in almost two years. At the end of the Demerol he physically couldn’t. Then in Boston AA they tell you not to, not in your first year clean, if you want to be sure to Hang In. But they like omit to tell you that after that year’s gone by you’re going to have forgotten how to even talk to a girl except about Surrender and Denial and what it used to be like Out There in the cage. Gately’s never had sex sober yet, or danced, or held somebody’s hand except to say the Our Father in a big circle. He’s gone back to having wet dreams at age twenty-nine.

Gately’s found he can get away with smoking in the Aventura if he opens the passenger window too and makes sure no ashes go anywhere. The cross-wind through the open car is brutal. He smokes menthols. He’d switched to menthols at four months clean because he couldn’t stand them and the only people he knew that smoked them were Niggers and he’d figured that if menthols were the only gaspers he let himself smoke he’d be more likely to quit. And now he can’t stand anything but menthols, which Calvin T. says are even worse for you because they got little bits of asbestosy shit in the filter and whatnot. But Gately had been living in the little male live-in Staffer’s room down in the basement by the audio pay phone and tonic machines for like two months before it turned out the Health guy came and inspected and said all the big pipes up at the room’s ceiling were insulated in ancient asbestos that was coming apart and asbestosizing the room, and Gately had to move all his shit and the furniture out into the open basement and guys in white suits with oxygen tanks went in and stripped everything off the pipes and went over the room with what smells like it was a flamethrower. Then hauled the decayed asbestos down to E.W.D. in a welded drum with a skull on it. So Gately figures menthol gaspers are probably the least of his lung-worries at this point.

You can get on the Storrow 500 ²⁰² off Comm. Ave. below Kenmore via this long twiny overpass-shadowed road that cuts across the Fens. Basically the Storrow 500 is an urban express route that runs along the bright-blue Chuck all the way along Cambridge’s spine. The Charles is vivid even under gloomy thundering skies. Gately has decided to buy the newcomers’ omelette stuff at Bread & Circus in Inman Square, Cambridge. It will explain delay, and will be a subtle nonverbal stab at unique dietary requests in general. Bread & Circus is a socially hyperresponsible overpriced grocery full of Cambridge Green Party granola-crunchers, and everything’s like micro-biotic and fertilized only with organic genuine llama-shit, etc. The Aventura’s low driver’s seat and huge windshield afford your thinking man maybe a little more view of the sky than he’d like. The sky is low and gray and loose and seems to hang. There’s something baggy about the sky. It’s impossible to tell whether snow is still actually falling or whether just a little snow that’s already fallen is blowing around. To get to Inman Square you veer over three lines to get off the Storrow 500 on Prospect St.’s Ramp of Death and slalom between the sinkholes and go right, north, and take Prospect through Central Square and all the way north through heavy ethnicity up almost into Somerville.

Inman Square, too, is someplace Gately rarely goes anymore, because it’s in Cambridge’s Little Lisbon, heavily Portuguese, which means also Brazilians in the antiquated bellbottoms and flare-collared leisure suits they’ve never let go of, and where there are disco-ized Brazilians can cocaine and narcotics ever be far away. The district’s Brazilians are another solid rationale for driving at excessive rates of speed, for Gately. Plus Gately’s solidly pro-American, and north of Central Square’s clot and snarl Prospect St.’s a copless straight shot through eerily alien lands: billboards in Spanish, plaster madonnas in fenced front yards, intricately latticed grape arbors looking seized and clutched at, now, by networks of finger-thick bare woody vines; ads for lottery tickets in what isn’t quite Spanish, all the houses gray, more bright plastic madonnas in nunnish getups on peeling front porches, stores and bodegas and low-suspension cars triple-parked, an all-out full-cast crèche-type scene hung from a second-floor balcony, clotheslines hanging between houses, gray houses in rows squished right up next to each other in long rows with tiny toy-strewn yards, and tall, the houses, like being squished in from either side distends them. A couple Canadian and Nuck-owned stores mashed in here and there, between the propinquous Spanish three-deckers, looking subjugated and exiled and etc. The street shitty with litter and holes. Indifferent drainage. Big-assed girls stuffed like stuffed sausage into cigarette jeans in always trios in the twilight with that weird blond-brown hair Portuguese girls dye their hair to. A store in good old English advertising Chickens Fresh Killed Daily. Ryle’s Jazz Club’s upscale pub-type bar, guys in tweed caps and briar pipes in mouths at angles taking all day on a pint of warm stout. Gately’s always thought dark beer tasted like cork. An intriguing single-decker medical-looking bldg. with a sort of tympanum over the smoked-glass door with an ad that says COMPLETE DESTRUCTION OF CONFIDENTIAL RECORDS that Gately’s always wanted to poke the old head in and have a look at what on earth they might be up to in there. Little Portuguese markets with food in there you can’t even tell what species it’s from. Once at a Portuguese take-out at Inman Square’s east end a coke-whore tried to get Gately to eat something that had tentacles. He had a sub instead. Gately now simply blows through Inman, heading for B&C over on the upscale northwest side nearer to Harvard, every light suddenly green and kind, the Aventura’s ten-cylinder backwash raising an odd little tornado of discarded ad-leaflets and glassine bags and corporate-snack bags and a syringe’s husk and filterless gasper-butts and general crud and a flattened Millennial Fizzy cup, like from a stand, which whirls in his exhaust, the tornado of waste does, moving behind him as the last pearly curve of the sun through baggy clouds is eaten by the countless Sancta Something and then whitewashed WASP church roofs’ finials farther west, nearer Harvard, at 60 k but sustained in its whirl by the strong west breeze as the last of the sun goes and a blue-black shadow quietly fills the canyon of Prospect, whose streetlights don’t work for the same municipal reasons the street is in such crummy repair; and one piece of the debris Gately’s raised and set spinning behind him, a thick flattened M.F. cup, caught by a sudden gust as it falls, twirling, is caught at some aerodyne’s angle and blown spinning all the way to the storefront of one ‘Antitoi Entertainent’ ²⁰³ on the street’s east side, and hits, its waxed bottom making a clunk, hits the glass pane in the locked front shop door with a sound for all the world like the rap of a knuckle, so that in a minute a burly bearded thoroughly Canadian figure in one of those Canadianly inevitable checked-flannel shirts appears out of the dim light in the shop’s back room and wipes its mouth on first one sleeve then the other and opens up the front door with a loud hinge-squeak and looks around a bit, viz. for who knocked, looking not overly pleased at being interrupted at what his sleeves betray as a foreign supper, and also, below that harried expression, looking edgy and emotionally pale, which might explain the X of small-arms ammo-belts across his checked chest and the rather absurdly large .44 revolver tucked and straining in the waistband of his jeans. Lucien Antitoi’s equally burly partner and brother Bertraund — currently still back there in the little back room where they sleep on cots with serious weaponry underneath and listen to CQBC radio and scheme and smoke killer U.S.A. hydroponic dope and cut and mount glass and sew flags and cook over sterno in L.L. Bean upscale survivalist cookware, he’s back there eating Habitant soupe aux pois and bread with Bread & Circus molasses and some sort of oblong blue-veined patties of a meat your thinking American wouldn’t even want to try to identify — Bertraund’s forever laughing in Québecois and telling Lucien he looks forward with humorous anticipation to the day Lucien forgets to check the big Colt’s safety before he jams it into the waistband of his pants and goes lumbering around the shop in his hobnail boots making every reflective and blown-glass item in the place tinkle and clink. The unautomatic revolver, it is a souvenir of affiliation. Once or twice doing work of affiliation with the Separatist/Anti-O.N.A.N. F.L.Q., they are for the most part a not very terrifying insurgent cell, the Antitois, more or less loners, self-contained, a monomitotic cell, eccentric and borderline-incompetent, protected gently by their late regional patron M. Guillaume DuPlessis of the Gaspé Peninsula, spurned by F.L.Q. after DuPlessis’s assassination and also ridiculed by the more malignant anti-O.N.A.N. cells. Betraund Antitoi is in charge, the brains of the outfit, pretty much by default, since Lucien Antitoi is one of the very few natives of Notre Rai Pays ever who cannot understand French, just never caught on, and so has very limited veto-powers, even when it comes to such harebrained Bertraund-schemes as hanging a sword-stemmed fleur-de-lis flag from the nose of a U.S.A. Civic War hero’s Boylston St. statue when it would simply be cut down by bored O.N.A.N.ite chiens-courants gendarmes the next morning, or taping bricks to the return-postage-paid solicitation cards of Sans-Christe Gentle’s C.U.S.P. party, or fashioning Astroturf doormats with a likeness of Sans-Christe Gentle on them and distributing them gratis to home-supply outlets throughout their insurgency-grid — puerile and on the whole rather sad little gestures that M. DuPlessis would have interdicted with a merry laugh and a friendly hand on Bertraund’s bowling ball of a shoulder. But M. DuPlessis had been martyred, an assassination only O.N.A.N. would be stupid enough to believe Command would be stupid enough to believe was merely an unfortunate burglary-and-mucus mishap. And Bertraund Antitoi, after DuPlessis’s death and F.L.Q.’s rejection left to his own conceptual devices for the first time since their all-terrain vehicle was packed with quality Van Buskirk of Montreal exotic reflective glasswares and glass-blowing hardware and broom and ordnance and survivalist cookware and hip postcards and black-lather gag soap and cheesy old low-demand InterLace 3rd-Grid cartridges and hand-buzzers and fraudulent but seductive X-ray spectacles and they were sent through the remains of Provincial Autoroute 55/ U.S.A. 91 in protective garb they’d shed and buried just south of the Convexity’s Bellow’s Falls VT O.N.A.N.ite checkpoint, sent as a kind of primitive two-celled organism to establish a respectable front and abet more malignant cells and to insurge and terrorize in small sad anti-experialist ways, now Bertraund has shown a previously DuPlessis-restrained flair for stupid wastes of time, including this branching out into harmful pharmaceuticals as an attack on the fiber of New New England’s youth — as if the U.S.A. youth were not already more than fiberless enough, in Lucien’s mute opinion. Bertraund had actually been credulous enough with a wrinkled long-haired person of advanced years in a paisley Nehru jacket also of great age and a puzzling cap with a skeleton playing at the violin emblazoned upon it, on the front, wearing also the most stupid-appearing small round wire spectacles with salmon-colored lenses, and also continually forming the letter of V with fingers of his hand and directing this letter of V at Bertraund and Lucien — Bertraund felt the gesture was a subtle affirmation of solidarity with patriotic Struggle everywhere and stood for Victoire, but Lucien suspected a U.S.A. obscenity laughingly flashed at persons who would not comprehend its insult, just as one of Lucien’s sadistic ecole-spéciale tutors back in Ste.-Anne-des-Monts had spent weeks in Second Form teaching Lucien to say ‘Va chier, putain!’ which he (the tutor) claimed meant ‘Look Maman I can speak French and thus finally express my love and devotion to you’ — Bertraund had been starry-eyed enough to agree to barter the person an antique blue lava-lamp and a lavender-tinged apothecary’s mirror for eighteen unexceptional-looking and old lozenges the long-haired old person had claimed in a jumble of West-Swiss-accented French were 650 mg. of a trop-formidable harmful pharmaceutical no longer available and guaranteed to make one’s most hair-raising psychedelic experience look like a day on the massage-tables of a Basel hot-springs resort, throwing in as well a kitchen-can waste bag filled with crusty old mossy boot-and-leg Read-Only cartridges, sans any labels, that appeared to have been stored in a person’s rear yard and then run through a gaseous dryer of clothes, as if Lucien did not have already more than plenty of crusty old cartridges which Bertraund removed from Inter-Lace dumpsters or was cheated in barters for and brought back to the shop for Lucien’s job to view and label and organize the cartridges for storing and were never bought except the occasional cartridge in Portuguese, or pornographical. And the aged person had flopped off in his cap and sandals with a lamp and an apothecary’s mirror to which Lucien had been personally much attached, particularly to the lavender mirror, flashing this covert obscenity of V and with smiles urging the brothers to write their name and address on the palm of their hands with the drenching-sweat-proof ink before they dropped any of the so-called ‘tu-sais-quoi,’ if they were going to be the persons who ingested these lozenges.

The front door squeaks loudly of the hinge and Lucien recloses it and drives the bolt home: squeak. The upper hinge squeaks no matter the oil, as the shop drives Lucien crazy by becoming again dusty each time the door is opened to the street’s grit, and from the dust of the alley with so many dumpsters behind the back room which Bertraund refuses not to open the iron service door of, to spit. The squeak functions in the place of a customer-bell, however. The front knock of the closed door clearly is once again big-bottomed Brazilian children playing at unamusing pranks. He does not pull the window shade, but he does grab the stout trusty homemade broom he sweeps the shop all day with and stands there, chewing anxiously the nail of a thumb, looking out. Lucien Antitoi enjoys standing at the door’s glass pane and looking blankly out at the light snow of dust bright against the blue-shadowed twilight eating the American street outside. The door continues to squeak faintly even after he’s driven home the bolt. He can stand here happily for hours, leaning on the sturdy broom he’d carved from a snow-snapped limb as a boy during the Gaspé’s terrible blizzards of Québec of A.D. 1993 and bound broom-corn onto and sharpened the tip of, as a sort of domestic weapon, even then, before O.N.A.N.ite experialist impost made any sort of struggle or sacrifice remotely necessary, as a silent boy, keenly interested in weapons and ammunitions of all the different sorts. Which along with the size thing helped with the teasing. He could and does stand here for hours, complexly backlit, transparently reflected, looking at alien traffic and commerce. He has that rare spinal appreciation for beauty in the ordinary that nature seems to bestow on those who have no native words for what they see. ‘Squeak.’ The visual bulk of the shoproom of Antitoi Entertainent is devoted to glass: they have set curved and planar mirrors at studied angles whereby each part of the room is reflected in every other part, which flusters and disorients customers and keeps haggling to a minimum. In a sort of narrow fashioned corridor behind one gauntlet of angled glass is their stock of gags, notions, ironic postcards, and unironic sentimental greeting cards as well. ²⁰⁴ Flanking another are shelf after shelf of used and bootleg InterLace and independent and even homemade digital entertainment cartridges, in no discernible order, since Bertraund handles acquisition and Lucien’s in charge of inventory and order. Nevertheless, once he’s viewed it even once, he can identify any used cartridge in stock and will point it out to the rare customer with the sharpened whitewood tip of his homemade broom. Some of the cartridges do not even have labels, they’re so obscure or illicit. To keep up with Bertraund, Lucien must watch new acquisitions on the small cheap viewer beside the manual cash register as he sweeps the shop with the imposing broom he has loved and kept sharpened and polished and floor-fuzz-free since adolescence, and which he sometimes imagines he is conversing with, very quietly, telling it to va chier putain in tones surprisingly gentle and kind for such a large terrorist. The viewer’s screen has something wrong with its Definition and there is a wobble that makes all cartridge performers on the left section of it appear to have Tourette’s syndrome. The pornographical cartridges he finds nonsensical and views them in Fast Forward to get them over with as quickly as possible. So but he knows all but the most recent acquisitions’ colors and visual plots, but some still have no labels. He still has not gotten to see and shelve many of the massive assortment Bertraund lugged home and out of the all-terrain vehicle in Saturday’s chilling rain, several old exercise and film cartridges a small Back Bay TelEntertainment outlet was discarding as outdated. Also there were one or two Bertraund claimed he had picked up literally on the street downtown from the site of the flag-draped Shaw statue from untended commercial displays that stupidly contained detachable cartridges anyone could detach and lug home in the rain. The displays’ cartridges he had immediately viewed, for though they were unlabelled save for a commercialed slogan in tiny raised letters of IL NE FAUT PLUS QU’ON PURSUIVE LE BONHEUR — which to Lucien Antitoi signified zilch — each was stamped also with a circle and arc that resembled a disembodied smile, which made Lucien himself smile and pop them in right away, to find to his disappointment and impatience with Bertraund that they were blank, without even HD static, just as the old rude person’s bartered tapes he had removed from the waste bag of their storage for viewing had proved, blank beyond static, to the satisfaction of Lucien’s disgust. ²⁰⁵ Through the door’s window, passing headlights illumine a disabled person in a wheelchair laboring along the rutted walk outside the Portuguese grocery opposite Antitoi Entertainent’s storefront. Lucien forgets he was eating bread with upscale molasses and soupe aux pois; he forgets he is eating the moment the food’s taste leaves his mouth. His mind is usually as clean and transparent as anything in the shop. He sweeps a little, absently, in front of the pane, watching his face’s reflection bob against the blackening night outside. Light snowfall almost is bouncing back and forth between sides of Prospect’s canyon. The broom’s bristles say ‘Hush, hush.’ The tin-and-static sound of CQBC has been silenced, he can hear Bertraund moving about rattling some pans and dropping one, and Lucien works his sharp-pointed broom against the chipped Portuguese tile of the nonwood floor. He is a gifted domestic, the best 125-kilo domestic ever to wear a beard and suspenders of small-arms ordnance. The shop, crammed to the acoustic-tile ceiling and dustless, resembles a junkyard for anal retentives. He bobs and sweeps, and bobbing shafts of mirror-light gleam and dance, backed by night, in the locked door’s pane. The figure in the wheelchair still labors at his wheels, but appears, queerly, still to be where he was before, in front of the Portuguese grocery. Moving closer to the pane, so that his face’s transparent image fills the glass and he can now see clearly beyond it, Lucien sees that what it is is it’s a different figure in a different wheelchair from the one before, this new figure’s face also downcasted and queerly masked, laboring around the sidewalk’s jagged holes; and that not too far behind this seated figure is yet another figure in a wheelchair, coming this way; and as Lucien Antitoi twists his head and presses his hairy cheek to the glass of the squeaking door — except but now how can a door’s upper hinge loudly squeak when the door is tightly closed and the bolt driven home with the solid snick of a .44 bullet slipping home in a revolver’s chamber? — looking due southeast up Prospect, Lucien can see the variegated glints of passing low-chassis headlights off a whole long single-file column of polished metal wheels stolidly turning, being turned by swarthy hands in fingerless wheelchair-gloves. ‘Squeak.’ ‘Squeak.’ Lucien has been hearing squeaks for several minutes from what he had naïvely like the babe assumed was the door’s upper hinge. This hinge does truly squeak. ²⁰⁶ But Lucien now hears whole systems of squeaks, slow and soft but not stealthy squeaks, the squeaks of weighted wheelchairs moving slow, implacable, calm and businesslike and yet menacing, moving with the indifference of things at the very top of the food-chain; and, now, turning, heart loud in his head, can now see, in the carefully placed display mirrors’ angles, spikes of light off rotary metal rotating at a height about waist-level to a huge standing man w/ broom clutched to barrel chest, there are great quiet numbers of persons in wheelchairs moving in the room with him, in the shoproom, moving calmly into position behind waist-high glass counters full of wacky notions. The street outside is flanked on both sidewalks by defiles of wheelchaired, blanket-lapped persons whose faces are obscured by what look like large and snow-dotted leaves, and the shades of the Portuguese grocery have been drawn and a ROPAS sign hung by a circumflex of twine in the pane of the front door. Wheelchair Assassins. Lucien has been taught the glyph of a profiled wheelchair with an enormous bone-crossed skull below. It is the worst possible scenario; it is worse than O.N.A.N.ite gendarmes by far: A.F.R. Whimpering to his broom, Lucien disengages the mammoth Colt from his pants and finds that a length of black thread from the denim panel that surrounds his zipper has gotten looped around the barrel’s sight-blade and comes ripping out with a long high squeak from the pants with the convulsive force of his drawing the weapon, so that his pants split open alongside the zipper and the force of his mammoth Canadian gut extends the tear all up and down the front so that the snap unsnaps and the jeans burst open and fall immediately to his ankles, puddling around his hobnail boots, revealing red union-suit underwear beneath and forcing Lucien to take tiny undignified shuffling steps frantically toward the back room as he tries with the thread-snagged Colt to cover every piece of fragmented waist-high motion the mirror’s shards of light reveal in the shoproom while scuttling as fast as the fallen jeans allow toward the back room to alert, nonverbally, using the sort of demon-eyed tongue-protruded neck-corded tortured rigid bug-eyed face a small child makes when he is playing Le Monstre, to alert Bertraund that They have come, not Bostonian gendarmes or white-suited O.N.A.N.ite chiens but They, Them, Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents, A.F.R.s, the ones who come always in the twilight, implacably squeaking, and cannot be reasoned with or bargained with, feel no pity or remorse, or fear (except a rumored fear of steep hills), and now they’re all in here all over the shoproom like faceless rats, the devil’s own hamsters, moving with placid squeaks just beyond view of the shop’s mirrored peripheries, regally serene; and Lucien, with the big broom in one hand and the thread-webbed Colt in the other, tries to cover his little-stepped flight with a thunderous shot that goes high and shatters an angled full-length planar door-mirror, spraying anodized glass and replacing the reflection of a blanket-lapped A.F.R. wearing a plastic fleur-de-lis-with-sword-stem mask on his face with a jagged stelliform hole, with glittered shards and glass-dust in the air all over the place and the unperturbable squeaks — ‘squeak squeak squeak squeak,’ it is awful — sounding right through clatter and tinkle and frantic hobnailed bootfalls, and through the flying glass, aiming every which way behind him, Lucien bursts almost falling through the curtains, bug-eyed and corded and webbed in thread, to alert Bertraund facially that the shot had signified A.F.R.s and to break out the sub-cot weaponry and prepare to bunker for encirclement, only to horrifically see the shop’s rear service door standing agape in a gritty breeze and Bertraund still at the card table they use for their supper — used — with pea soup and troubling meat-patty still on his ration-tray, sitting, squinting piratically straight ahead, with a railroad spike in his eye. The spike, its tip is both domed and squared, also rusty, and it protrudes from the socket of his brother’s former blue right eye. There are maybe about six or nine A.F.R. here in the drafty back room, silent as ever, seated with motionless wheels, flannel blankets obscuring an absence of the legs, also of course flannel-shirted, masked in synthetic-blend heraldic-flag irises with flaming transperçant stems at the chin and slits for eyes and round utter holes for mouths — all except for one particular of the A.F.R., in an unpretentious sportcoat and tie and the worst mask of all, a plain yellow polyresin circle with an obscenely simple smily-face in thin black lines, who is speculatively dipping a baguette’s heel in Bertraund’s metal soup-cup and popping the bread into his mask’s mouth’s cheery hole with an elegantly cerise-gloved hand. Lucien, staring goggle-eyed at the only brother he’s ever had, is standing very still, face still unwittingly teratoid, the broom at an angle in his hand, the Colt dangling at his side, and the long black zipper-thread he’s pulled from his zipper caught somehow now and wrapped around his thumb and hung trailing on the spotless floor with slack between gun and thumb, his pants woppsed around his red woolen ankles, when he hears a quick efficient squeak and feels from behind a tremendous wallop on the backs of his knees that drives him down to his knees on the floor, the .44 bucking as it discharges by reflex into the wood-pattern Portuguese tile, so that he’s down in a supplicant’s posture on his red knees, encircled by fauteuils des rollents, still holding his broom but now down near the broom-corn’s wire binding; his face is now of equal height to the yellow empty smiling chewing face of the A.F.R. as this leader — everything about him radiates pitiless and remorseless command — rotates a right wheel to bring himself about and with three squeakless rotations has his hideous blank black smile within cm. of Lucien Antitoi’s face. The A.F.R. bids him ‘’n soir, ’sieur,’ which means nothing to Lucien Antitoi, whose chin has caved and lips are quivering, though his eyes are not what you would call jacklighted or terrified eyes. Lucien’s brother’s pierced and rigid profile is visible over the leader’s left shoulder. The man still has some soup-sopped bread in his glove’s left hand.

‘Malheureusement, ton collégue est décédé. Il faisait une excellente soupe aux pois.’ He looks amused. ‘Non? Ou c’était toi, faisait-elle?’ The leader leans forward in the graceful way people who always sit can lean, revealing wiry hair and a small and strangely banal bald-spot, and gently removes the hot revolver from Lucien’s hand. He engages the safety without having to look at the revolver. Spanish-language music is thinly audible from somewhere up above the alley. The A.F.R. looks warmly into Lucien’s eyes for a moment, then with a professionally vicious backhanded motion pegs the gun at Bertraund’s profiled head, striking Bertraund in the side of the head; and Bertraund rocks away and then toward and forward and slides forward-left off the rickety camping-chair and with a ghastly and moist thump comes to rest chairless but upright, his left hip on the floor, the eye’s sturdy railroad spike’s thick tip caught on the edge of the card table and tilted up as the table tilts downward and cookery slides nautically off and onto the tile as the weight of Bertraund’s large upper body is somehow held by the spike and tilted table. His brother’s face is now turned away from Lucien, and his overall posture is of some person crumpled with hilarity or regret, maybe beer — a man overcome. Lucien, who never has apprehended what the safety-switch is or where, thinks it a small miracle that the Colt .44 with its tail of thread does not discharge again as it wangs off Bertraund’s temple and hits the slick tile and slides from sight under a cot. Somewhere in the tall house next door a toilet flushes, and the back room’s pipes sing. The black thread has remained snagged on the Colt’s sight-blade and in the middle caught somewhere on Bertraund’s ear; the other remains also attached to Lucien by a persistent hangnail on his well-gnawed right thumb, so that a black filament still connects the knelt Lucien to his hidden revolver, with a surreal angled turn at the ear of his overcome frère.

The happy-masked A.F.R. leader, politely ignoring the fact that Lucien’s sphincter has failed them all in the small room, after complimenting them both on the craftsmanship of some of the front’s blown-glass notions, pulls his velvet gloves tighter and tells Lucien that it has fallen to him, Lucien, to direct their attention without delay to an entertainment item they have come here to acquire. And require, this Copy-Capable item. They are here on business, ne pas plaisanter, this is not the social call. They will acquire this thing and then iront paître. They have no wish to disturb anyone’s repast, but the A.F.R. fears that it is fearfully urgent and key, this Master item they now require without delay or dissembly from Lucien — entend-il?

The vigor with which Lucien shakes his head at the leader’s meaningless sounds can’t help but be misinterpreted, probably.

Does this shop have the 585-rpm-drive TP somewhere about here, for running Masters?

Same vigorous negative-looking denial of comprehension.

Can a mask’s drawn smile widen?

From the front of the shop come whole symphonies of squeaks and low trilled r’s and the sounds of a densely packed area being swiftly dismantled and searched. A few legless thick-armed men climb the shelves by hand and hang up near the drop-ceiling by special climbing equipment and suction-cups fitted to their stumps, brown arms busy in the upper shelving, dismantling and searching upside-down like obscene industrious bugs. The outline of Lucien’s quivering mouth is being traced by a mammoth-torso’d A.F.R. in a Jesuitical collar who holds Lucien’s own trusty broom inverted and leans in his chair to caress Lucien’s full Gaspé-provincial lips (the lips are quivering) with the handle’s wicked tip, which is sharply white, whittled free of the sienna glaze of broomstick-varnish that patinas the rest of the big stick’s length. Lucien’s lips are quivering not so much from fear — although there is certainly fear — but not from fear so much as in an attempt to form words. ²⁰⁷ Words that are not and can never be words are sought by Lucien here through what he guesses to be the maxillofacial movements of speech, and there is a childlike pathos to the movements that perhaps the rigid-grinned A.F.R. leader can sense, perhaps that is why his sigh is sincere, his complaint sincere when he complains that what will follow will be inutile, Lucien’s failure to assist will be inutile, there will be no point serviced, there are several dozen highly trained and motivated wheelchaired personnel here who will find whatever they seek and more, anyhow, perhaps it is sincere, the Gallic shrug and fatigue of the voice through the leader’s mask-hole, as Lucien’s leonine head is tilted back by a hand in his hair and his mouth opened wide by callused fingers that appear overhead and around the sides of his head from behind and jack his writhing mouth open so wide that the tendons in his jaws tear audibly and Lucien’s first sounds are reduced from howls to a natal gargle as the pale wicked tip of the broom he loves is inserted, the wood piney-tasting then white tasteless pain as the broom is shoved in and abruptly down by the big and collared A.F.R., thrust farther in rhythmically in strokes that accompany each syllable in the wearily repeated ‘In-U-Tile’ of the technical interviewer, down into Lucien’s wide throat and lower, small natal cries escaping around the brown-glazed shaft, the strangled impeded sounds of absolute aphonia, the landed-fish gasps that accompany speechlessness in a dream, the cleric-collared A.F.R. driving the broom home now to half its length, up on his stumps to get downward leverage as the fibers that protect the esophagal terminus resist and then give with a crunching pop and splat of red that bathes Lucien’s teeth and tongue and makes of itself in the air a spout, and his gargled sounds now sound drowned; and behind fluttering lids the aphrasiac half-cellular insurgent who loves only to sweep and dance in a clean pane sees snow on the round hills of his native Gaspé, pretty curls of smoke from chimneys, his mother’s linen apron, her kind red face above his crib, homemade skates and cider-steam, Chic-Choc lakes seen stretching away from the Cap-Chat hillside they skied down to Mass, the red face’s noises he knows from the tone are tender, beyond crib and rimed window Gaspésie lake after lake after lake lit up by the near-Arctic sun and stretching out in the southeastern distance like chips of broken glass thrown to scatter across the white Chic-Choc country, gleaming, and the river Ste.-Anne a ribbon of light, unspeakably pure; and as the culcate handle navigates the inguinal canal and sigmoid with a queer deep full hot tickle and with a grunt and shove completes its passage and forms an obscene erectile bulge in the back of his red sopped johns, bursting then through the wool and puncturing tile and floor at a police-lock’s canted angle to hold him upright on his knees, completely skewered, and as the attentions of the A.F.R.s in the little room are turned from him to the shelves and trunks of the Antitois’ sad insurgents’ lives, and Lucien finally dies, rather a while after he’s quit shuddering like a clubbed muskie and seemed to them to die, as he finally sheds his body’s suit, Lucien finds his gut and throat again and newly whole, clean and unimpeded, and is free, catapulted home over fans and the Convexity’s glass palisades at desperate speeds, soaring north, sounding a bell-clear and nearly maternal alarmed call-to-arms in all the world’s well-known tongues.

Date: 2016-03-03; view: 601