Chapter 10: The day's "work" invariably commenced at O'Tylenol's Allnite! Family Restaurant. After a hasty organic breakfast with the Denzil Hents, Olney would hightail it to the famed mecca for Silent Majority gastronomes. He would have preferred a bistro on the Place Saint Michel, but a cup at O'Tylenol's was all his karmic account would spring for. There, surrounded by a scattered debris of America's morning and hungover backbone, he did the unthinkable Chez Hent: he smoked cigarette after cigarette, drank coffee until his nerves rattled, and studied the help wanted pages. Mission: look for the job that would save him, and hope like hell it was already taken. The Hent's had volunteered to look after him during these weeks of crisis. Yet, within hours of his moving in, Daisy Hent began to feel that her generosity had been coerced, and what's more, was being taken for granted. Denzil, who had known him longer, tried to soothe her by explaining that Olney's regal attitude toward benefactors was an unintentional quirk. Still, after nearly three weeks, their good will was degenerating rapidly; Olney had better find a job soon. Denzil was a poet, an easy going man, and Olney's oldest friend. He taught a night school course in poetry in the bowels of the local state college. The income from this position hardly mattered, but it helped his pride. A few years before his marriage, Denzil spent a year hitchhiking America with Olney, who was a seasoned veteran by then. Their travels led them through the hell and hope of America's soul, from two weeks incarceration on a hitchhiking charge in the Pecos, Texas jail, where they held their own with convicted murderers and sadistic trustees, to a night at the Five Spot Cafe in New York City, where they heard Thelonius Monk with no chasers and plenty of reefer. Olney often played the role of an artless agent of justice in Denzil's poetry, especially the political poems reflecting the writer's diagnosis of America as an autistic nation. For his part, Denzil rarely protested his own role as Olney's favored host and chief money lender, Western States Division. By contrast, Daisy Hent felt up to her eyeballs in the life and times of Olney Garkle. Daisy toiled as a secretary in a warehouse, the local distributor for one of the nation's leading washing machines. She loved her husband and his poetry, but secretly rued its position at the bottom of incomes, lower even than welfare. And she wished he would get over his infatuation with the old days. After twelve years of marriage, he had certainly changed, but whenever Olney was around, he seemed to revert. They got to reminiscing and guffawing about all those experiences that frankly offended her. Daisy wasn't sure why, but she didn't trust Olney. Maybe it was because he seemed totally alien to any life she had ever known. He lived a weird, unsettling sort of far-flung existence. Denzil might think the world of him, but Olney scared her. To make matters worse, she knew he wasn't taking this job business seriously. At least not when it came to actually getting one. She couldn't prove it, but Daisy was certain that most of his efforts had little to do with the old go-get-'em, and more to do with putting off the interviews that would eventually get him out of her house. She had agreed to let him stay for three weeks, and now that his time was just about up, with no sign of progress, she was loath to be civil. For all of her complaints, Daisy still sort of liked Olney, though usually from a distance. She wanted to feel sorry for him, and she might have if he'd stayed out of the way a little more. But no, he seemed underfoot all the time. Above all, had he left the house before breakfast, her attitude would have improved significantly. Burdened with the task of cooking for two men and a young son and then working all day to support them, the least she expected was that they eat like civilized people and clean up after themselves. She'd trained Denzil and young Dexter well, but watching Olney massacre her arduously concocted porridge (which contained every organically produced grain known to Mother Nature) and then leave the bowl surrounded by a marsh of slopped-over goo, was cause for eviction. And it was clear that young Dexter was gleefully emulating the goofy boarder's slovenly ways. As for Olney, he would have liked to spend all morning at the kitchen table, leisurely and alone. He wished they would all get up earlier and be gone by the time he was ready to greet the world. But then, that wouldn't have helped either. Smoking was forbidden in the Hent household, as were coffee and newspapers. Furthermore, Daisy was becoming downright unfriendly. Olney was sorry, because she was attractive "in a genetically diluted way," as he increasingly put it. Yes, Olney Garkle's manly response to her resentment of his intrusion was the malicious slandering of her character. When discussing the situation with himself, he would say, "Hent's wench is betraying her philistine upbringing again." And his sneering, inner sexists were delighted when he described her as "the former Daisy Duct, whore of all high schools." Alas, the pimple that symbolized Olney's life and its effect on others was coming to a head. He did want a job; he just didn't want the bother of looking for one. And the offers he was finding in the newspaper weren't helping his increasing apathy. This morning, for example, his attention had been collared by three ads, each one more absurd than the last. Olney dealt with the first--a clerk in an adult book store--by using the phone booth at O'Tylenol's. A wary volition warmed in Olney's groin as he waited his turn while another supplicant demeaned himself via the public horn: did he really want to drown in a pictorial sea of dripping orifices? The hardon poking at the polished cotton of his pants liked to think so. Besides, poverty was throwing up a Gardol shield no fullblown erection could hope to break. He didn't dare ask a girl to coffee for fear she would order something to go with it. Olney needed a regular income to disintegrate the invisible barrier between his lovelusts and those 1001 delights who passed him by every day. He could hardly stand it. Whiffs of their lightly sweated bodies were shattering his usual zaniness into cringing leers. At length, the man in front of him slunk away with a scribbled address of hope in his sweating hand and Olney entered the booth. An older woman answered the phone. Her voice squawked out of a larynx warty from years of whisky and cigarettes. She informed her caller that the clerk had already been hired, but they still needed a general maintenance man, in particular someone to mop up every morning at this and the other three outlets. The caller's stomach suddenly registered a rumbling complaint, no doubt against last night's organic dinner, which it was still trying to break down. Now, its owner, insignificant job-seeker Olney Garkle, had more than once shaken off his third dimension and slipped through the cracks of a porn shop door. Posing as a walking cardboard cutout with a xenophobic force field that could have stopped King Kong, he would browse through the magazines until they started to tremble. Then, turning sideways, his body slicing air, he would disappear into one of the cabins equipped to show films. Yes, he knew all about those sperm rinks, where sporules of protein, like well-cooked tapioca, rolled around underfoot. With the exact number of quarters neatly piled next to the coin slot (experience had taught him to avoid the frustration of trying to find the climaxing coin in a rumpled pants pocket whose opening defied detection), he would sit back and coax his cock to enjoy the finest quality sex a poor man's money could buy. And did her shops provide such entertainments, he queried? The blowzy voice on the other end wheezed assurance that hers were the best in town. "New films every week," it said. Well-l-l, now ... A quick pre-play (brought on by one of those massive releases of vasopressin that help rerun life's salient moments while hurtling over a cliff in the old Maserati) reveals our boy coming to work every morning and throwing a few har-hars around with the clerk. Before getting down to business there's always time to share moments of camaraderie over the latest printed-card jokes--the kind so popular with bristleheads at the Legion, the folks who usually finish off an afternoon by spilling everyone's beer on their way to the floor for a patriotic snore. What members of the pornshop workforce have in common may not be an overpowering obsession for sex, but it's no allegiance to the Eightfold Noble Path either. If under forty, the clerk will likely be male (young ladies in jump suits and pumps usually quit within a week, their nightly dream worlds disturbed by the sinister stares of the object-viewing shoppers). Chances are he's just been released from prison, has a hidden disposition and a prostate with a view. He'll likely favor the gene pool lyriced out of Bakersfield and enjoy a menacing suspicion of everything that moves. If much older, the female gender might try its hand too, but for either sex beyond fifty the joy of differentiation will have been lost, their bodies resembling a patchwork of unkempt tissue in the act of embarrassing its cells to death. There would be: missing teeth or dentures fitted by rejects from barber college; serrated voices; mauve noses; phlebitic cheeks; small, infected eyes; dry, lifeless hair; disordered nervous systems; vagueness; decrease ... Having hee-hawed over line drawings about the naughty things that happen on toilets to veterans and their wives, or what the coon said to the kike, or fondly joined hearts over that nostalgic new song by Lug Nuts Luke, about the recidivist who's on the streets again and hankering after those steely-green reflections off a punk's asshole, Olney would grab mop and bucket, pass through the greasy curtain-warp and into the seething darkness where the fantasy caskets waited. Turning on the overhead lights no one ever thought were there, he'd dump gallons of hot water, generously spiked with generic bleach, all over the sticky floor. He'd whistle as he mopped, working with haste through the 8 mm. bone yard of convivial bunch-punches: in this cabin, a bent-over-barbecue proctophile; in that cabin, a glistening double-headed dildo up to its hilt, clits grinding overhead; over there, a stubble-faced cocksucker with sideburns wincing mumpishly as his fellatee rams home; and in here, a divan of frumps in pubescent get-up greeting two Bulgarian sailors. Soon the first furtive shadows will invade with fistfuls of sweaty coin and--look!--here comes one now. Olney dives through the exit curtain not a moment too soon, as in walks Specimen A, on coffee break from a morning spent shuffling bills of lading while ogling the secretary's cream of lust knees. He steps into booth nine, where his favorite film has been showing for months. A little blue bulb lights above the door to inhibit intruders. The unzip of Spec. A's fly goes unheard below the whirring of a hidden projector cranking grainy and over-exposed on the little screen backside of the door (upon which is scrawled: "Show it hard. Make date."). Two women lie together beside a swimming pool, naked, embracing, licking each other's lips and teeth. Trembling fingers strum lightly where legs spread in heat waves. The women smile, one laughs ... now she's on hands and knees, the graceful ripples of her glisten-skinned spine celloing up to a rear heart of milky rondure. The other girl lies on her back. The pool beyond her prominent hipbones is sunwhite and blue. Now the lover bends over the loved, nibbling and sucking little thimble-like nipples, teasing and biting, squeezing and tasting their bodies perfect. Her tongue skips like a schoolgirl from rib hollow to rib hollow, down the softly mounded belly, caressing with sun-warmed hair, intaglio pressure from the dome of her head sending silken shivers through them both. She leaves the deep brown crinkly navel drooling with hot spit ("Oh, God," mumbles Spec. A, "oh, Jesus...") Her tongue is hard now, a humming meaty probe entering the steamy atmosphere of a nectarous, pulpy world. Coming down, it blazes over mons into moss. The tip, grazing clefted estuary, is deflected by clitoral outcrop, hits heavy gravity, loses control, plunges down sheer walls of quivering slish and crashes, splashing in billowing hot gorge-froth ... ("Oh ... mah ... Gawd...") Moments later, the door of number nine opens quietly. Out steps Specimen A, who, having already disappeared a little, disappears even more, out the front door. So would begin the day. For this Olney could count on a few cents over minimum wage, a discount on magazines, and free access to the upturned coffins where he could, if so he wished, add his own shadowy spurtings to the feverishly anointed floor. He filled the telephone booth with a humid and deadly scent--the soul migration of last night's chick peas finally begun--as he declined the job. §§§ The second ad found him snaking his way through the upper intestines of various office buildings in search of employment in the opal trade. It didn't take long. He had beseeched one after another of the apparently Albanian employers therein to give him a go at whatever it was they required: opal polishing, rival kneecappings? What do people in the opal trade do? Mild epithets bade him farewell in each office as he was smartly buzzed out the multiple security doors. Moving the day's declination toward the nadir of another night's clench-larynxed Daisy Hent declaring, "Still no job?" was the third ad, from the clammy sanctum of the post-spurted. It read: Mature Driver Needed. Must Have Clean Driving Record. Apply Far Elect Mortuary After 10 A.M. Won't be many har-har's on that job, thought Olney, catching a bus. No Cream-oil Charlies and Sultry Petunias stroking their parts in magazines and movie booths. Nope, heh-heh, just the odd dead girl lying around, is all. His groin twitched in its pelvic pit. Did Olney Garkle have the average American male's interest in unconscious if not altogether dead females? The question compelled him to search his soul with fierce honesty. Whilst peering hither and thither, he managed to intrude upon suddenly alert members of that normally dormant constituency--his village-razers within. Hee-hee-hee, laughed he nervously, shutting the door on their rude awakenings. After a few more seconds of careful reflection, Olney decided he might as well spade the possible soils of becoming chauffeur to the city's erstwhile living. In his favor was a spotless driving record; he'd been too poor to own a car for years. He arrived at the designated hour, hesitating a moment before entering the sprawling acres of the Far Elect. Job consciousness nagged him into overcoming an irrational case of the jitters as he strode down the long, pebble-strewn, winding driveway lined with palm trees and white-painted boulders; past the courtyard with its fountain of concrete heaven-leavened angels squirting streams of water through pouty pee-hole lips; beyond the marble pillared portal and through a massive oaken door; down an echoing corridor grave with portraits of the city's long gone and through another somber door, this one marked "Reception." Behind a large metal desk sat--or was she crouching?--a woman whose aura lent a sudden and chilling unfamiliarity to all that Olney loved and cherished. She seemed to discharge a flickering light reminiscent of Gothic laboratories, here updated to the age of clones and bytes. He wondered where on her "body" did they slip in the software. The woman's indelicate bone structure was wrapped in ashen skin, which, in turn, was draped with a fabric dyed to match a frog's throat at full croak. Her hair was blonde; bleached, Olney supposed, because her eyebrows were two dark hedges. The coral lipstick on her full lips--or were they thick? or were they thickening?--clashed crudely with everything, including the blood clot decor of the office. As they faced each other, a marginal air, filtering in from some fog-shrouded graveyard, strummed cilial threnodies over Olney's goblet cell drones on its way up the bicameral sniff-'n'-snot locker so dear to his face (and central, moreover, to his conception of Time). His lungs sought purchase against the foul intrusion, but what could they do? They were just a couple of sacs on loan from Dust, with no minds of their own. Olney shivered, the plague fast-acting. From overhead speakers, a narcoleptic EEG of manufactured music attempted to sanitize his soul. The Pastelized Yuppies (orchestra and chorus) were burying a Beatles song. Olney started to speak, but his voice suddenly bolted and sank in a gurgle of the sub-maxillary heebie-jeebies. He tried again. This time, like the secretary's fashion consultant when called upon for new ideas, he could only croak. With glottal fury he sent in a high-powered dredge, complete with a mighty one centimeter crane whose dangling bucket went to work on the unwanted croupal mucous. His voice bobbed to the surface in a daze, but, panel room awry in the swells and lingering willies, sincerity became unctuousness; he was powerless to stem the treason. "Hello there," he finally managed, "how do you do. I thought that I would drop by and, well, inquire, that is, explore the possibility that, perhaps, the position of chauffeur, of driver, that is, might still be available." He added a few Senate floor coughs for punctuation and further channel clearance. The secretary's rubbery lips parted to reveal stained, well shaped teeth. A space between the frontal incisors suddenly, inexplicably, evoked in Olney some racial memory of a village in flames. A what? Was that Olney Garkle (and his happy Huns) clutching a conical box of buttercorn, adjusting his eyes to the darkness inside some annex of his brain's storehouse of Rosebuds? You betcha. Down the aisle, past the loges and gum-upholstered seats of general admission, was an immense hologram of carnage. Terrified women, olive and torn, their screams merging with the crackle and collapse of incinerating timber, were being flung from one tumescent bludgeon to the next. Steel muscles convulsed, throwing off sweat and desert grit, as the invading killers ripped, growling, into the dying flesh. One of the women, peering through the horror to her next life, happened to notice a parallel world in passing. In it, she saw Olney Garkle lobbing a handful of popcorn into his mouth. Her scream was to follow her through several lifetimes of madness. While her eyes burned with hate into Olney's, the barbarian upon whom she was impaled grabbed her long thick hair and yanked it back and down, snapping her neck. He roared with satisfaction at the death spasms her body gave to his orgasm. Olney, riveted to the spot, shuddered with revulsion and desire. A howl of recognition was just beginning to rise from the abyss of his soul when the secretary calmly lowered the curtain on this dental deja-vu by closing her mouth. The smell of hot buttered popcorn and burning blood lingered in the air. She lit a long, slim cigarette and gazed at Olney. Her eyes regarded him from a world of blank malevolence. His own eyes, as blind now as a beaded glass movie screen staring at a theatre of the marble-eyed, stared back. Poor haggard throat wanted to cough up matted pubic curls he just knew were there. What does a guy have to do for a lousy job? he demanded, arms metaphorically outstretched, of yet another band of malingering inner idiomorphs, the ones comprising his pupal humanity. Though mildly interested, they weren't exactly leaping out of bed with hasty replies. No, they were just hanging out, bored, flippant, snot-nosed, bratty and dumb; selves, like neutrino's, without end or mass. The representative for the Autonomic Nervous System, Sympathetic Corps, however, did step forward, tripping over his shoelaces forthwith. "It's like this," he declared, "if you're going to j-jack up the adrenalin, then stop p-pussyfooting around. Either we go in for the kill or we go out the d-door, ok?" Check, said O., mopping secretions off the rep's harried brow. "Er ... maybe I could fill out an application?" Olney's vocal cords, still shaken, broke over the syllables like pubescent boys in tones of geese. He desperately hoped the secretary would acknowledge that apparently incongruous something which happened to be his height, width and depth, instead of simply disappearing it. And indeed, as she opened a desk drawer and removed, not a tiny stenosaurus meant to devour him, but a quire of printed sheets stapled together, he felt a great relief. Now we're getting down to business, he prayed. But wait ... was that a quire? Oh. It's actually several dozen two-page applications stuck together at the staples. Oh. And she can't get them apart. And it's making her mad. ("Just look at her, folks!" foams veteran TV sports announcer, Ken O'Scope, from high atop the grandstands of Olney's yielding mind. "Ev-ery muscle in her body is on the move, but try as she may, she cannot get them apart! Now she's starting to snarl and oh-h-h, what a vicious snarl, a real crowd pleaser ... now she's ripping at the pages, yes, she's trying to rip the quire apart but oh, dear, it's not working. A truly exciting breakdown we've got here, ladies and gentlemen; she's tearing and ripping, ripping and tearing ... oh-h-h, look at that, she's starting to slobber ... now she's growling, and OH, SHE'S BROKEN A FINGERNAIL!" Olney's flibbertigibs, still in their pyjamas, have turned up the volume on the TV, an old Garklevision round-screen. They're actually cheering, amazed their bird-witted boss could be the one referred to by the announcer, who yells, " ... and he scores!") In shameful defeat, the secretary handed an unmolested application to one-up Olney, and spoke at last. "Here," she said. That's not the voice of a human being, he thought, a chill licking his spine. Not a trace of her in the Akashic Records, I'll bet. He cast about for the words to describe the voice. Did it have the unmistakable sound a cold, flying corn cob makes when it enters, at great velocity, the flatusphere between the warm and sighing cheeks of a comfortable buttocks? Or did it sound like boiling water instantly turning to ice in a vacuum jar! From the inside of a gourd, she asked Olney to take a seat, fill out the form and wait for an interview with Mr. Plought, whom, she stressed, was at that moment, and, she might add, uncustomarily, in his office. Spavined and commatose, Olney sank into the nearest chair. From above, the Neutered Gaiety Dance Band was playing the life out of a medley of anything. §§§ The employment application snooped into the usual things: job history, military service, criminal record. It also contained the request (optional) for information concerning the whereabouts (if any) of parental burial plots and/or the burial plot (if purchased) of the applicant. Indeed, it appeared that not only could Olney draw sustenance from the coffers of the Far Elect, but the esteemed mortuary would cheerfully include a cut rate interment for both his parents (if not already deceased) and himself should he expire while in service. Wait just a moment, thought Olney, looking up from the application. Die on the job? For the minimum wage? Should I, Garkle, Olney, while in command of the headlit hearse, all shiny and black with chromed F-hole hand holds, suddenly ... Hey! I'm having a heart attack! He can see it all now. That night, the night of his demise, they would have laid him out in the prep room on a long white slab, his cold, lifeless body offering it little contrast. Unaware of anything without time as a reference, the remnants of Olney's consciousness float nearby. Nothing, of course, is happening when ... Wha-what's that sound? Everyone went home long ago. Whoa, some part of me is aware. A key turns in the front door upstairs. The door swings open slowly, hinges creaking. Someone enters. Footsteps to the head of the staircase. Surely it can't be, but ... yes it is ... it's that secretary come back! The stairs sag and moan under her weight as she slowly descends. Boy oh boy, that really sounds creepy. Must be she's building up to the right mood, heh-heh, or so reasons Olney's loitering etheric, able now to see as well as hear. Grounded once again in the old reality, it takes a look around. Heck, it says, I'm the only body on tap tonight, the other slabs are clean as a whistle! Cripes, what's she gonna do? Removing an overcoat and slipping out of a black latex teddie, she stands naked, her skin in life more dead than his in death. Not a sound breaks through the stillness. The sconces throw off ghastly bouquets of 25 watt gloom. In the crypt's pervasive murk, the only color is on the secretary's lips. Incarnadine, pulsing, succubus lips that grow larger and larger. As they have never ceased to do, realizes Olney's phantasm, simultaneously glancing over its incorporeal shoulder to see a good looking spirit trying to juggle her ectoplasm into focus. Why, isn't that Katie King, the Netherworld's most famous glamour girl? Hey, Katie, over here. Scopulate, the sec'ty's lips fan out, take on the shape of some demon trumpet, harsh grooves and ridges more horrifying than a hundred clones of Michael Meyers pounding at the doors and windows of your Halloween night. Scurf of skin and lipstick fall through the hellish air as her head lolls forward. She nuzzles and flutters over the inelastic surface of Olney's body ... Katie! How do I get out of this? Hey, Katie ... Katie? O MY GOD, YOU'RE NOT KATIE AT ALL. YOU'RE ... oh, noooo, it's the bardos againnnnn... §§§ Before hieing to foreign climes, Olney had been a crack job hunter. Even now, application forms did not intimidate him. Consulting his pocket notebook, which listed all the relevant true and false data of his life, he finished the task in no time. A bit too soon, it seemed, for the secretary was only midway through her second tubular spell. His irritating shuffle of paper and dumb "um's," "er's," and "uh's" earned him a brainstem-butchering glance as she took his submission and returned to her cigarette, eyes glazing introrsely. At length, she spoke to the founding mortician over the intercom. With a long and steady finger, she motioned our hero through the opening door and into the chambers of the impeccably dressed Mr. Plought. Does he do it to dead girls? Would I? The answer, swiftly communicated to his loins, caused an involuntary inverbal Yikes! He introduced himself, blurting, "Gee, it's great to be alive ... uh, I mean, I meant..." Plought returned his greeting warily as they took ritual seats and the interview began. In silence. The undertaker took several minutes to look over the application. Like his source of revenue, the man's face was expressionless and he made no sound. He sat rigidly, except for the spider-like movement of his fingers as they wove saccadic runes of entrapment over the pages of Olney's application. More time passed. Olney was stiff, his motor cortex clutched to the floorboards, eyes fastened on the retiary invitation. Dimly, he sensed a peculiar flavor under his tongue, mushroom-like: that melting taste of LSD. About as welcome here as finding himself in the afternoon of a hazy Sunday, struck dumb before a wax museum display of his own neighborhood circa the years of preternatural pre-puberty when he discovered Sunday afternoons were unnatural, were in fact man-made attempts to bummer the Christian Universe. Or maybe it's the taste of formaldehyde, or worse! Somehow, when shaking Olney's hand, Plought had transferred an odorless, colorless, substanceless, paralyzing and deadly germsbane that he, Plought, was by now immune to. Olney could feel his organs one by one calling it a day; gory machinalia seizing from shock after the first shutdown ever. What a way to go, his voice wailed soundlessly in that increasingly familiar bardotonic scale. And I always thought it'd be hallelulial ... Plought looked up, unaware of the scene not being acted before his eyes. He folded his hands. Staring intently at the imploding applicant's fixed visage, he further attempted to fold his hands into thirds. Silly Plought. He'd forgotten that he wasn't hardwired for mid-metacarpal articulation. Like an arrivals/departures display, his face shifted through a series of expressions. Pausing for an expectant moment on fastidiousness, his lips wriggled to a mimp. Beginning at center, they rippled slowly to the corners of his mouth. As the pucker modulated outward, his eyes began crossing in a counterpoint common to Snerds and Doodys everywhere. Olney was just skipping to a titter (the mirth experience so often leading to hysteria), when the flushing undertaker quickly keyed Avuncular Concern and settled back in his massive fauteuil. Olney breathed deeply. Totally. In fact, his inhale was so deep the exhale blew out ten years of stale air and his lungs were to ache for a week. Yes, he'd like to settle back too. But his chair, rigid and inquisitional, permitted only tension and defeat. Still, a good Richard Haydn routine was cause for relief. Olney's muscles unlocked. His death was forwarded to its proper moment and he relaxed for the first time since entering the Gates of the Far Elect. Embalmer Plought breezed through a routine interrogation: Did Mr. Garkle truly love God and America? "Yes sir, I do." Had he been working continuously and zealously since completion of military service and/or college and/or high school, except, of course, for the allotted two week vacations per annum? "Yes sir, I have, and I never take vacations, sir." Was Mr. Garkle married and raising a brood of useful future dead? "Yes sir, I've got six." Did he, as an American who felt good about his country and himself, spend sufficient weekly man hours before the television set, and--no "if so's" about it--what programs did he deem representative of that warm feeling. "Um ... I watch ... er ... I watch 'The Super Suds Execution Hour,' an' I watch the ... uh ... 'Oh, My God, I Love You' show,' an' I watch lotsa docu-dramas, y'know, about the blacks being kept down 'n' all, an' I really liked that sad 'n' poignant mini-series about family life after the Bomb, an'--" "Well and good," Plought cut in. "But do you really rote a lot?" "Oh, yes, I really rote a lot." "Sincerely, do you rote a lot?" "I swear, I really rote a lot." "I see." Plought was unconvinced, but how could he be sure? Lost in thought, Plought again sank back in his fauteuil, this time with a forceful whoosh. Air rushed for its life from behind the great custodian buttons of the leather fortress, densely splaying for all exits. In short, was Applicant Garkle competent to transport the company's clients their last mile? Once again, Olney's mind forced him to watch a sneak preview. The heart attack would come on one of those trips. Down the Boulevard of Knickknack Dreams, the procession culminating at the Woolco of Paradise, with its spanking new shopping carts in neat formation, handles gleaming and safe from the greasy finger prints of nasty minorities, wheels oiled and fitted properly--"no more carts with minds of their own, folks!"--with music by the Old Infarcts at Home wafting from Everywhere, and in just a few minutes, the Gala Opening of the Biggest Bargain Basement you ever saw. "Oh, boy," says a former member of the Mall Majority, "I can see a big display of pinking shears. Ethel, you're zigzag blues are over. And look, there. A whole island of electronic organs. Golly, Ethel, we're in heav ... Ethel? Oh, darn ..." Olney leaned forward, his white-knuckled fingers grasping a pair of knock-prone knees. "See here," he began, but tripped over the B-grade rebuke he had in mind and the rest was reduced to schwas. Ill-defined aims and aspirations in the Mortuary Sciences and its quirky perks were unhinging petitioner Garkle, and Plought was on him like a blow fly, feeding zestfully on the flavid bug's blood of human larva. Helpless dependence on authority were the foundations of might for community leaders like Plought; eating the wretched was the ultimate perk. Summoning the strength of a hundred cult-movie heroes, Olney swatted the noisome blue-bottle from his presence, instantly re-programming Plought to a stunned humanoid. Olney could see him as a young Rotarian, practicing S-R interrogations over bulk-process champagne and marbled steaks and at the country club, his tutor an aged real estate tycoon whose muscle tones whined against his bones. "John," the youthful dead might have said, "when it's all over, I'll embalm you personally." Foiled by the pluck of Olney-the-would-be-mensch, funeral director Plought leaned back wearily in his chair, causing a timorous wheesh barely noticed by dozing button-screws. With a deadly scrutiny of Olney's precipitant departure from a once strapping prime, Plought posed the inevitable question. "Why is a man of your age looking for a job that only pays minimum wage?" Answers flew through Olney's mind like giant butterflies in vast jungle monasteries: Because I can't afford cancer on welfare; because even if I'll never be a homeowner, at least I can own my own hole; because I like the smell of this place, and like you and your secretary, I want to have sex with the dead; because I've fucked off my whole life and if you don't give me a job, I'm going to commit hara-kiri right here, on your desk! "Don't honestly know," he grunted, head slumping forward, picadored. Reflexively, he stood up, and in so doing realized he was still free. "Yes, well," said the undertaker briskly, himself rising with no doubts at all. "As soon as I've spoken to a few more applicants ..." His words faded from Olney's earshot and memory at once as he escorted the saved man from his office. Olney felt like the fighter pilot who begged his commanding officer for "just one more mission, sir," and actually came back. Unlike the pilot, Olney never volunteered for death unless he was forced to correct some intolerable injustice at hand, or more usually, unless he was trying to get laid. Except for the time wasted in its arduous upkeep, he truly loved life and the often weird places it had led him, places where predicaments of quick-goosing rarity were presented routinely, and only because he wasn't afraid of the unknown. To him, "security" had always been a joke. And a sick one, at that: "Daddy, daddy, I wanna live in our cozy house forever." "Gee, that's too bad, darling daughter, because it's built on buried nuclear waste smack dab in the middle of our nation's most earthquake prone hurricane zone." And the joke was on the paycheck people who spent their lives digging in against change and pain. Olney chose freedom instead. To him, freedom meant the absence of being at odds with himself, the world, and everybody in it. It meant the end of a negative mind that only saw (and sought) self-interest, cynicism and despair. It meant the flourishing of intelligence in a life without end, for what was the sense in gaining wisdom only to have the aged body retaliate by giving up the ghost? Olney was impatient with "positive" theories about negative death. Especially the one that brought the between-lives spirit before a benign panel of judges who suggested certain horrible events be endured in the next life in order to help the subject learn this or that lesson. Then they sent the poor sap into his or her next incarnation with only a memory of the big conference. And where did that memory reside? In the unconscious, a place as accessible to the average incarnatee as a summer house on Mars. Indeed, only by remembering the unrememberable could the trend of misery and helpless defeat be reversed. And it didn't matter whether the subject was born a victim of apartheid or a millionaire in Texas. Without access to the inner archives, the life would be less than fulfilled, if not empty and meaningless. It simply wasn't fair, and Olney hated the idea. Especially when he wasn't up to the hero's role of right action and compassion he dimly remembered was the only way out of life's mess on this planet of spiritual backsliders. Manic denial aside, Olney knew the most he could expect of "freedom" at the moment was no job and the prospect of a coffee at the Moon Food Cafe. Things could sure be worse. He was still alive, still unemployed, and, latent percolations of lipofuscin be damned, still downside of that age where crystallization stuck to your future like fried eggs to worn Teflon. The exhilaration of narrow escapes! Seemed downright divine at times. To hell with jobs and death, he gloated, remembering Tibetan tulkus scratching their shaven-heads in bafflement over Americans and their throwaway lives. Lives spent, not in search of ultimate truths, but in search of useless, soul-clenching employment. "Give me life, liberty and the pursuit of immortality," proclaimed Olney at the gathering of tribes representing his mind's essential radiance, "but spare me the work ethic!" The Swindle Strings defiled their instruments from somewhere near a line of ceiling sprinklers as Olney entered the outer office. The secretary for the Far Elect was still transfixed by some thrill decoding from deep within her; another long, slim cigarette burned knowingly between her fingers. Death is a con game, Olney continued to rant in camera. A religious goal worshipped by people who regard life as one long groan of defeat, who want nothing from it, and so, give nothing back. Death is longed for by the enslaved and the bored; by people programmed to be gods, who instead are scared witless. Death is the ultimate consequence of ignorance. Somehow, it's all gotten scrambled ... The telephone rang as Olney opened the door to the world outside, the world wherein "God" proclaimed not life to Adam's outstretched hand, but judgment. "Far Elect Mortuary," he heard the secretary say. "Your pit bull has passed away? I am sorry. Yes, we can prepare it to look like Richard Nixon ..." §§§ Chapter 11: Spoortsmen's Paradise |