Chapter Seventeen
“Plot-Twister, Plot-Twister, Twist Me a Twist”
Evelyn stomped through the college grounds, frosted grass making crunching sounds as she walked across mounds each of which abounds with the art of students who like James T. Kirk did not shirk from large metal work for a quirk or a…
She stopped and pounded her head against a conveniently located granite sculpture. She realized that this sculpture was a very stylized (or at least it seemed stylized) crucifixion, swore "Zounds," and started a new, harder rhythm of bone against stone to stop the drone that was the tone of the poem chromosome...
Ev clutched her head to her neck like a starving woman holding a poisoned pineapple and fell to a ground that writhed and receded before her, always remaining just beyond gravity's reach.
It was, on the whole, not a good trip.
•
On the opposite side of the art building, Brittany was having a much better trip. She had woken from a relatively sound sleep with the sure knowledge that a trip was about to start. At first she, being a rational person, had ignored the thought and rolled over to return to sleep, but the way the world moved gently back and forth after the motion, like a marble settling to the bottom of a bowl, changed her mind.
Well, she thought, this does put a kink in dear Elgin's theory about the mythical nature of flashbacks
Above her, Inspector Graves moved about, opening drawers and moving each of his possessions. Why, for God's sake, would a man decide to pack at three in the morning? His rubber sneakers snaked across the floor with horrible ssshhhk noises that were, Brittany finally concluded, a failed attempt to be considerate of his neighbors.
Something about Graves' movements worried Brittany, but what exactly that worry was ran away from her. She got up and chased it down a long tunnel with spiral walls that moved forever inward, downward, and then Brittany was tumbling down a hole, the thought having made good its escape, and she had to blink a few times before her vision channel changed back to her bedroom's suspended ceiling.
Jesus!
She tried concentrating on the British émigré's snores, but the rhythm seemed to blend with Graves' sneakers and she would find herself trying to follow his actions from the sounds—normally an easy task, but for some reason her brain felt coated with cotton. Sound of a large piece of fabric being thrown across the room—his window drapes? Something heavy and cumbersome dragged across creaking wood—his bedframe! He had stripped his mattress of sheets, and now was taking the mattress off the bed. Why, for God's sake, was he doing that at four in the morning? Graves grunted a grunt that seemed most un-Graves-like, and Brittany wondered if he had gone mad.
James Dean next door, who had been absolutely silent through all of this, suddenly snapped a piano wire in two—would he never run out of them?—the little holes in the ceiling tiles danced, but only on the edges of her vision so she couldn't quite catch them doing it, and then Brittany presumed that she had decided to take a walk, for she found herself in sneakers under bunny slippers, her Dr. Denton's pajamas (themselves under a fuzzy-edged bathrobe), a wide-brimmed hat piled with fake fruit, complex dangling earrings, a thick housewife's coat, many hair pins twinkling with fake jewels, and little else, walking by the art building. For no discernable reason, she was very happy.
•
Albert, on the other hand, felt quite the opposite of happy. Indeed, had happiness somehow slithered into Jill's hospital room at that moment, Albert would have snarled at it in instant recognition of something not only utterly foreign but altogether hostile to his life of late. Even Jill, that formerly ceaseless dispenser of good cheer above and beyond any easily imaginable call, was now lying in a coma, her soul a translucent echo of her body, neither in nor out. Albert felt betrayed by her. She had abandoned him just at the one time in his life when he had actually needed the twit.
Carefully not touching the soul (which was a few inches to the right and below the body, and sunk a little into the mattress, a sight that might have been interesting but instead strained to look like a poor Dr. Who effect), Albert leaned over the hospital bed (which—like the walls, the stripes on the shined floor, the trimming around the windows, the hospital robe Jill's body wore, and the veins in the calves of the nurse sitting in the corner of the room, almost hidden by tall piles of machinery, reading Feminism Unmodified and making dry clucking noises from the unguessable depths of her throat—was a sickeningly smurph-blue) and studied Jill's face.
He started with the mousy brown hair, which ought to have be hanging lankly about Jill’s face but which instead, due to one male nurse's apparently pathological need to wash it every day (Albert, who believed that no one is capable of escaping their stereotypes, assumed the man was homosexual), was dry and fluffy. Each morning the nurse, who had one of those fat male bodies that seemed forever suspended in the moment before a gigantic sag, would come in, exclaim in surprised pleasure at the cleanliness of Jill's hair (Why, Albert wondered, was this a surprise? Did the nurse suspect that mischievous elves, tired for the moment of hidden car keys and printer's errors, might sneak in during the night and grease Jill's hair? Given Jill's activities of late, her only genuine hair hygiene problem was probably dust), and then rewash it, all the while talking about his father, how his father had never had nicely shampooed hair. Occasionally one of the many doctors—all white, all male, Albert noted, glad that the patriarchy, at least, remained secure—would walk in during the nurse's monologue and the nurse would stop talking in midsentence, his cheeks and lips sucked in as if to prevent the next word from committing a dazzling and mighty escape.
The result of this was Jill's hair, cleaner and—as has been noted—fluffier than Albert had ever previously seen it. Her hair, Albert realized, was much closer to dirty blond than mousy brown when washed, and he unenthusiastically wondered if Jill had ever been anything but a lying slut after all.
(Precisely three weeks and twelve seconds from that moment, although Albert had no way of knowing this, on board the FTS Nosferatu, Alastair, who was, after all, only mortal, and who was also, although Albert had no way of knowing this either, Albert's genetic father, was in the process of dying of a heart attack brought on in part by his pathetic habit of eating uncooked, bloody meat. The process took about five minutes; when the Gaunt Man, two hours later, discovered the body, he was no more surprised, and no more emotionally impressed, than a human would be upon discovering an unusually personable goldfish floating belly-up in its bowl.)
While that narrative cheap shot was going on, Albert worked his way past the overall facial flesh (which seemed, without an animating presence, to have the consistency of Jell-O Gelatin suspended inside a thick balloon) and closed eyelids (Jill's eyelids had thin skin, making the fact that her eyes were spheres, round sacks of smooth and skinless flesh not moving back and forth, nor up and down, but instead ceaselessly revolving, horribly apparent) and had almost followed a nicely yellowing scar (one of five gorgeously profound scars that now decorated her face) from the corner of an eye to her lips when, scolding himself for proceeding in such a untidy manner, he drew his own eyes up to Jill's nose. From the top, downward: an admirable procedure, even though it wasn't working.
Albert's opinions concerning his lovers had always been, of course, fussy, but his actual choice of a girlfriend was anything but. Albert preferred his girlfriends slim, he preferred his girlfriends playful, he preferred his girlfriends admire him utterly; but superseding these and many other preferences, he preferred his girlfriends to be women who made a pass at him first, because Albert's ego, a cautious and vigilant creature, had never once allowed Albert to make the proverbial first move.
By the lofty (or at least rare) characteristic of wanting to kiss Albert Feinstein badly enough to do something about it, Jill had made she and Albert a pair. Still, that didn't change the fact, damnably embarrassing as it was, that whatever else Albert occasionally—even usually—told himself, Albert actually found Jill's face to be the most abominably beautiful he had ever seen.
And, good god (ha!) damn fuck piss it all, she wasn't even especially pretty.
So Albert, under the neutral florescent lighting, the reasonable assurance that Jill was not about to move, and the unusual assurance that at whatever angle he might examine her, his own shadow would not interfere with this process, had now set out to discover once and for all just what it was about this girl. But in spite of near-perfect conditions, the truth of the wretched matter stubbornly remained a mystery to Albert.
Sighing, he bent to study Jill's left nostril. He traced his fingernail along the outer rim of the nostril, from the point where it grew from the skin half an inch above her lip to where it smoothly moved into the dark regions inside her nose, one curve of a slow spiral. A bit of dry, suspended snot was just inside the nostril; passing his finger back and forth through it, Albert was just able to set it trembling. The artificial lighting made the mucus seem greener than it properly should have, and that combined with its vaguely spherical shape made Albert decide that it was actually a miniature world globe. Squinting, he could almost make out the shape of the Americas.
The last time Albert had been peering intently up one of Jill's nostrils she had, in an apparently unrelated action, slipped far enough out of her body to talk to again; although actually, they had mostly fucked instead (death, or whatever, seemed to increase Jill's ardor). Afterwards, they had again been unable to touch each other, although Albert suspected that the slut was doing it on purpose. All of Albert's previous girlfriends (all two of them) had very much liked cuddling (which sounded to Albert like something two cows would do) after intercourse, which had allowed Albert to enjoy this activity while pretending to dislike it. Jill, annoyingly enough, had a strong aversion to any afterfuck physical contact, and so for the past semester Albert had been forced to go without his favorite part of sex—although occasionally he had disguised his hideous impulse as an eagerness for "a second round," a promise he could only very rarely live up to.
On that occasion when Jill had come almost entirely out of her body, a virtual army of doctors (none of whom usually worked at this hospital) had been summoned to come individually to Jill's bedside, examine the body, and panic—an activity that served, to Albert's best knowledge, no purpose. Jill had eventually drifted back into her body, much to the relief of the physicians' physicians, and the next day (when they had previously planned to be helicoptering Jill to Washington), enough expensive machinery to make a Pentagon official pale had been brought into the hospital room, necessitating the removal of two inconvenient walls and the annexing of the two adjoining rooms.
Catching himself in a smile, Albert shook his head—a gesture that, like nearly all of Albert's physical motions of late, was made more for the principle than for any actual effect—and put his concentration back on Jill's nose. The nose was shaped with a small but definite pug at the end that was actually, Albert noticed with dawning shock, uneven.
Albert positioned his head with difficulty directly above Jill's face, his hands and knees sinking into Jill's body (which Albert would have found revolting had he noticed) and stared carefully not at any feature but at the entire face. For the first time, he noticed that the left eye was higher than the right by a significant degree. The pug of the nose was, in fact, nicely centered on the face, but the nose as a whole was off a touch to one side. The lips, disturbingly, were not exactly centered to the chin. Something also seemed odd about the cheekbones, although he couldn't make out what; then he noticed that one cheekbone actually came farther forward than the other.
Albert sat back on his heels, his buttocks sinking into Jill, although, as mentioned, Albert was ignorant and thus avoided revulsion. Then, very quickly and for the first time since Jill had entered the room, Albert left it, flinching invisibly as he strode through the closed door.
•