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paintings of bent neon tubing and fluorescent designs. They looked expensive. Roger wondered why
his dollar was necessary.
Seven people were seated at the feet of a moon-faced woman perched on a three-legged
aluminum stool. The entire left side of her face was blotched with a huge strawberry birthmark. She
had a coatimundi on her shoulder; it was nibbling leaves of lettuce she had safety-pinned to her
dress like epaulets.
A man who bore a startling resemblance to a plucked carrion bird snagged Roger’s arm as he
moved toward the front door. He stammered hideously. “Uh...uh...uh...” he babbled, till something
snapped in his right cheek and he launched into a convoluted diatribe that began with a confession
of his having been defrocked as a molecular biologist, veered insanely through a recitation of the
man’s affection for Bermuda shorts, and reached a far horizon at which he said, with eyes rolling:
“Now everybody doesn’t know this,” and he pulled Roger closer, “but the universe, the entire
frigging universe is going to collapse around everyone’s ears in just seventy-two billion years. I
smoke a lot.”
Roger skinned loose, and turning, thumped against a dwarf who had been surreptitiously
trying to look up the skirt of a young woman with a harelip. “Excuse me,” Roger said, assisting the
dwarf to his feet. He brushed him off and started to move, but the dwarf had thrown both arms
around Roger’s leg. “They remaindered me,” the dwarf said, rather pathetically. “Before, I swear
before the damned book had a chance, they remaindered me. Can you perceive the pain, the
exquisite pain of being carried into Marboro’s on Third and seeing a stack, a virtual, a veritable, I
mean motherGod a phallic Annapuroa mountain of copies of the finest, what I mean the sincerest
study of the anopheles mosquito ever written. That book was a work of love, excuse me for using
the word but I mean to say ardor; and those butchers at Doubleday, those mau-maus, my God.
they’re vivisectionists, for Pete’s sake...if he were alive today, Ferdinand de Lesseps would
absolutely whirl in his grave.”
“I have to go to the bathroom,” Roger said, trying to pry his leg loose. The dwarf unwound
and sat there looking frayed. Roger smiled self-consciously and moved away. He started back for
the door.
Everything dropped into the ultraviolet.
The little finger of his left hand began to resonate with the tinny voice of Times Square
Caruso hashing out “I’m Called Little Buttercup” as the neon spiral in his chest gave him a shock
and began flickering in gradually bloodier shades of crimson. Caruso segued into Kurt Weill’s
“Pirate Jenny,” a tune Roger was certain the papaya juice stand attendant had never heard.
The ultraviolet smelled purple; it sounded like the nine-pound hammers of Chinese laborers
striking the rails of the Union Pacific Railroad; it sprang out as auras and halos and nimbuses around
everyone in the room; Roger clutched his chest.
His eyes rolled up in his head and the images bummed there like the braziers of
Torquemada’s dungeons. He blinked and his eyes rolled down again bringing with them images as
bumming bright as the crosses of Ku Klux Klansmen in Selma, Alabama: it was all in his right eye.
He feared what lay ahead in the infrared. But that never happened; it was all in the ultraviolet.
The room bummed around the edges, deep purple and a kind of red that he realized--with
some embarrassment--matched up only with the red just inside the slit in the head of his penis
during his recurring bouts with prostatitis. Every neon sculpture and fluorescent painting in the room
was jangling at him. A half a hundred roadsigns from someone who was trying to talk to him. I
believe I’m a closet psychotic. he thought, but nothing stopped.
The neon tubes on the walls writhed with the burning edges of the soft-boiled sun as it
bubbled down into the black horizon. They re-formed and slopped color words of pink and
vermilion across the airy walls.
ROGER, YOU’RE MAKING IT MURDER TO GET THROUGH TO YOU.
