Chapter 7: A Jigsaw Puzzle of The Void

Helga, with a few minutes to kill, is busying herself by staring into space when Olney asks, "Got today's paper'r somethin'?" His words bounce off the sound of knives and forks clinking against plates, and the creak and snap of jawbones in action.

"You bet, bub!" says Helga, rushing back from nowhere with joy. "It somewhere. I look faw you."

Helga's hilarity may be a tad medicated, but after all she's American now and Americans just love their tablets, capsules and spansules. Olney himself had once considered a vitamin program. His friends impressed him as they rushed and flushed their way to self-actualization, refrigerator doors plush with little bottles of dark amber glass containing the ingredients American bodies needed to offset fast food deficiency. But it cost a fortune to properly cleanse one's vehicle. He figured it was cheaper and more exciting to live in countries where people still ate real food, which just about meant the rest of the world. Short of living abroad, one alternative was to shop at conscientious food co-ops, where he could buy expensive stunted and mottled organic vegetables and many varieties of whole grain. He'd gotten used to brown rice in the '60's, when Oshawa's macrobiotic diets had, if nothing else, saved him money on toilet paper. Like certain farm animals, he'd had an albino asshole throughout most of the hallucinotic, protein-craving era.

The most pressing problem with adhering to a diet of organic and nutritious whole foods was not simple indigence, as he had found in the '70's while travelling, but the difficulty in packing the stuff around the world, once obtained. Going to India had been an exercise in reducing the baggage so attached to glutinous life. Many of his tribe, however, had arrived with backpacks large enough to accommodate the possessions of entire Asian families fleeing famine or flood. Into these rip-stop nylon and water repellent shoulder-supporting trailers went everything but the Seeker's backyard. In Bodhgaya, home of Buddha's enlightenment 'neath the Bo Tree, Olney was treated one evening, 'neath the very same tree, to a one hundred percent natural and saltless peanut butter sandwich with rose petal jam. The caterer, a bearded believer from Berkeley, was carrying a six month supply of organic comestibles to help protect his American innards from the mean microbes of Mother India. The jam he'd picked up in Istanbul on the way, in a mood, he confided to Olney, of wild abandon. He hadn't dared to open it all the weeks since then, but the dark petalled confection had played a leading role in his dreams. The bottle was ceremoniously opened in Olney's presence as several hundred Tibetan Rinpoches began arriving to take over the holy spot for their annual Buddha Puja. While the monk elite lit eerie butter lamps and mumbled and rumbled, the munching Umeruhcans watched with awe from the sidelines.

No one else ate like Americans. In fact, no other people had ever developed a cuisine so uninteresting that it needed to fool itself into believing the same old stuff would be somehow better by regularly placing the words "New!" and "Improved!" on the label. On the other hand, Americans who rebelled against the rise of butylation became prisoners to purity. After months and years of organic whole foods they couldn't just cold turkey into a Pan Am boeuf bourgignon, now, could they? Especially when the next meal might well be a fly-ridden bazaar kabob. The Afghans, makers of the tastiest bread on Earth, tended to regard brown rice as untouchably dirty. But what did they know? Those remote primitives were unaware that the white stuff they ate (along with grossly savorous mutton, which enabled them to withstand vicious high-altitude winters, the musth of Soviet Dumbos and their own trigger-happy interpretations of the Koran) had been de-branned and de-germed, thus robbing them of the vital nutrients that allowed their peevish American brothers and sisters to withstand eternal queues at food co-ops as they waited for the catatonic checkout person to move on, finally, to the next item. Olney gave up on such places after his second visit. His fist kept itching to reorganize the sluggish, carbuncled faces that poked out of spotless overalls. But Olney knew he was no match for a species that would kill with ashen efficacy for a Styrofoam tub of tofu or that last bunch of withered organic carrots.

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Helga is still looking for the afternoon edition. She rummages behind the counter, under the Arborite that keeps Olney's elbows from crashing through to the fossil-infested undercity. A question strokes the five o'clock shadow of his mind: What if she reached further, dropped the little flap that surely faces each stool, reached out and grabbed his cock? Would a Chinese waitress in a greasy spoon ever do that? If asked, oddsmakers around the world, programmed to action by such shots of lineal magnitude, would respond swiftly by reaching deftly into handy digit barrels for any several figures to one, adorning tote boards with celerity and bar-trick sobriety. For they know that from Chula Vista, California to Kittery, Maine, no one has ever heard of a Chinese waitress grabbing whang.

Yet, this very night, in a truck stop not far from your home (and surely somewhere in Southern Ohio), is a Caucasian who would. If you but knew that now, just now, she is leaning over the counter at three a.m. in an empty house, filing her nails under dim watts that pale even further the rose-beige uniform she wears, you would throw off the covers of your sleepless solitude and join her for 40 cups of coffee, a couple, maybe five or even eight dollars worth of Patsy Cline on the jukebox, and the not altogether ecstatic prospect of waiting until six, when she gets off and the liquor stores open.

But you didn't make it. And the emery board's soft rasp over a dozen humming appliances dies within the cafe's tired walls, while outside, two U.S. highways, like nearly identical pieces in a jigsaw puzzle of The Void, cross in silence.

Other waitresses who would can be found pert and caustic at any time along the hoppin' bennies 'n' beer Interstates. Here's one now, with arms full of plateloads brimming with sizzled pig meat, fried eggs, hash browns, sliced toast, butter pats 'n' jam flats, orange slices, parsley, "and no substitutions, pleez! Every authorized combination is on the menu, sir." Y'fuckin' jerk.

She drops off plates one and two to the two turkeys from Tulare who aren't too busy talking torque torsions to tip their toques before turning trancelike over T-bones 'n' taters. Number three goes to an out-of-stater who might have everything he owns in that '73 Cutlass he keeps eyeballing out the window, afraid someone, in broad daylight, will open the door and just drive it away, facing him with suicide much earlier than he'd hoped. Every few seconds he pats his pocket to make sure the keys are still there. "Hey honey," he implores brashly, "don't forget the ketchup 'n' A1 while yr at it." Meanwhile, his insecurity and paranoia thumb madly through the emergency leaflet: Correct Responses To Anything Anyone Might Say Or Do. But the waitress merely nods, bowling the two sauce bottles down the counter, away from the recipient of plate number four, emptying her arms for the coffee run. She's dropped off the last dish without eye contact to the local All-State salesman, whose own eyes are running after the fleeing condiments. "Hey honey," he calls in tones richly strident, but too late, she's disappeared into the kitchen.

Never mind, he's a changed man these days. A new wrinkle in the business--given unintentional succor from an influx of colporteurs and their families--has been his own personal discovery of Jesus Christ in his own personal heart. One morning, around the time of the bible salesmen's advent, he was having breakfast in his Airstream out at Lester's Trailer Park. Propped against the toaster was The Japanese Method to Easy Personal Gain, a book highly recommended by local rice growers who, after all, represented a sizeable percentage of his accounts. This spiritual discipline suggested a small shrine be constructed to house photos of Cadillacs, yachts, beautiful women, hundred dollar bills, in short: anything the supplicant might covet. A mini-syllabled mantra in Japanese was then chanted before these items of worship, or whenever the petitioner had a break from his busy schedule of finagling and hornswoggling.

What happened next nearly knocked the salesman off his tubular steel-framed chair. Just as he was turning a page and reaching for another piece of toast, something moved on his plate. He looked down and screamed. Smiling up at him from an egg-over-easy was the face of Jesus Christ! Horror changed to mortification when our man from All-State thought he was turning queer. "What's that simperin' face doin' in muh eggs?" Suddenly, he realized who it was. "Is that really You, Lord?"

"You bet," answered the Nazarene, inadvertently spraying our hero with a mouthful of egg yolk.

"Hey, watch it," blurted the salesman, instantly biting his tongue.

"Sorry," said The Christ, vocalizing on inspiration to avoid splattering the potential born again Christian. Unfortunately, in so doing, He swallowed the yolk, the albumen and any further chances for dialogue.

"Hey, where'd muh egg go?" cried the salesman, taking off another tip of tongue. "I mean, Jeez, I mean, heck ... aw, hell." He gaped at the plate, empty save for a rasher of bacon. "Hey, Lord, I got an idea. Try appearing on the bacon." He picked up the crisp sliver; it crumbled in his fingers. "Naw, guess that won't work."

The salesman sat back, stunned, unable to comprehend the aborted vision. The Savior had appeared on a medium sized fried egg (for the salesman's fat white flesh had begged him to stop eating jumbos) and spoken the words, "you bet," and "sorry." A baby-brained smile slowly spread across his face as he began to understand. "I know what He meant. He meant, 'You bet I'm Jesus Christ and I'm sorry as hell to take yr egg, but everyone is suffering, so don't be selfish, for Christ's sake!'" But the salesman didn't stop there. "And He also meant that I should go out and spread His word and relieve the folks of their burdens. Just think, thanks to me and the Fried Lord, people can be at peace now, with all their sorrows born up and placed upon mah broad shoulders. Yippee!" He threw the Japanese Method in the trash and lit out for town, his international religious dilemma solved and the future paved with riches.

Since then, he's hustled everyone in three counties, promising to bring Jesus into their hearts if only they'd sign on the dotted line. Being a go-getter though, he's maybe gone a little too far. "The boy's over-amping, dag-nab-it," said one old duffer in conversation with his cronies in a local grain elevator lunch room. "Gets on a man's nerves," said another. "You c'n say that again," said a third duffer. "Feller's got a grin'd scare off the whole gook army," pronounced the fourth. But the folks all know those crazed-Christian eyes only mean he's scared to death, just like them, and "anaway," quoth the fifth, "them little gray homes he holds in his hands look so comfortin' I'd like t'insure 'em against ev'r'thang."

"Now then ..." the salesman ponders aloud, back at the truck stop. A nostalgic gout of methedrine-fed egg yolk drips off his lower lip as a truck driver sitting next to him looks over, thinking he's been spoken to. "... if the Good Lord'd just reveal the way to get these folks t'insure their own homes, too."

The truck driver quickly looks away as Our Waitress of Highway Medians roars back with a metallic burnt-sienna coffee pot, on the hunt for Tepcoware cups. She's everywhere, that Dream Waitress invoked in so many rear-view mirrors under the endless overpasses of the wildly migrating night, where speed is rated in stimulants per hour (deviating brains while teenying weanies in a mean kind of sociopath-thwarting counterpoise). The car trunks are full of six packs, there's plenty of smokes, someone's been left behind or about to be found, and Oklahoma City broadcasts rock 'n' roll clear across the Midwest.

She's pouring, carrying, clearing, setting, ordering, chatting, blowing through the corners of her mouth at wisps of hair tickling nose, searching for checks either sub-totaled too late--"Hey lady, I gotta get going!"--or too early, Oh, damn. Now I've gotta add on the blueberry pie ala mode. "Hey Wanda! Can you get that gen'lman's BLT off the shelf while I finish this? And make sure the bacon's crisp!" Fr chrissakes. Oh, shit, here comes beady-eyes again. What's he doin' in here all the time, he live around here now? Bet he's a rape-artist, stalkin' us waitresses. "Thanks, Wanda." Crimanently, he's comin' t'my section, too. "Yes sir, here's your bill and come again."

Alas, in the American scheme of things, it is not for Chinese waitresses to be either deified or raped, condemned as they are to exile in the bum dives of daylight, like the Moon Food Cafe, where flaps are superfluous and pricks are subordinate to booze, food and shelter: "Let's go sit against th' wall, have a drink. Who's got time fr gash, haw, haw."

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The newspaper, a many soy-splotched thing, is finally found and slapped cheerfully on the counter by just such a waitress, (or is she? Who is) our Helga from Hong Kong. It's the city's other newspaper, a late morning tabloid. Before Olney can tear back to the scant want ads section, page one leaps at him with thick, black headlines, announcing the assassination of yet another world leader. They're being dropped like ducks at a target shoot, he cocks, looking around for any crowing anarchists. There aren't any of course, because only the good guys ever get killed. How is it, Olney wonders furiously, that the great and duly elected leaders whose crimes against humanity are almost endless, manage to stay in power no matter what? Why do they always live to a ripe old age, when even the most flawed sense of justice cries out for them to be hanged in the public square? The answer? Because the peasants they oppress are too stupid and weak to fight back, and because they are protected by taxpayer-funded professional killers and dissemblers. Simple, concludes O., looking around this time for any crowing secret service agents. But the only movement is mastication. Olney himself bites, chews and gulps down the urge to shout some terrifying slogan, if only to evoke the memory of Nicolas Stavrogin, who, like himself, despised the vermin in power as well as most of the vermin without power, but could never get up a commitment to do anything about it. Olney supposed that neither he nor S. identified overmuch with their planet. Unlike the less fortunate suicide, Olney did not live in a time and place where he was forced to. Indeed, if he lived long enough, Olney might even move to a Space Colony, where it seemed only the truly sane wanted to go.

With the same shout, Olney wants to remind the cafe's usuals that beyond their slices of aerated bread zealously soaking up the ketchup-stained meat juice, other things are cooking in the universe, that life is something more than feed and a test pattern. Instead, he announces to his inner band of lounging deadbeats: The world leaders are eating lead for a place in history, while the rest of us weaklings are dying of cancer. Anything you say, boss, comes an apathetic reply.

"Y'know, looking for work causes cancer," Olney says, turning hopefully to the nearest slop-mopper, a recent arrival. The man's eyes dart in Olney's direction then back to his plate. His jaw, never breaking stride, works diligently to further purée the overcooked food. Olney succumbs to another fit of micro-observation, his own eyes zooming in to profile closeup, like the old TV spot where half the head is jiffied away, the rest in silhouette except for the Spotlight of God bathing time-released caps of cut scopolamine as they drift down to gradually clearing tracts of concentric, angel-ringed: Oh, my ... that's relief. But here, in "real life," where no God takes no baths, the Absorption Artist's mash is contracted assiduously in gobs lubricated by sputum, pushed downward by muscles and gulps of air, down the esophageal hose and into a churning brume of Doréan sludge.

Cycle completed, the man peers at Olney over the top of his flesh-toned, Eisenhower glasses. "Howdy," he says, "the name's Stern, Ernie Stern. Glad t'make yr acquaintance."

"Fine," sez O.

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Chapter 8: The Planet of Spiritual Criminals

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