Jonathan Lethem - Gun, with Occasional Music

His jabbing must have loosened the anti-grav pen in my shirt pocket, because now it drifted out and floated up into the space between us. The kangaroo looked confused for a moment, then reached up and batted it down to the floor at his feet.

“So you and Danny are real cozy, right?”

“That’s right.” He shifted in his seat, adjusting his big tail, keeping the muzzle of the gun pressed against my solar plexus. It must have been uncomfortable for him.

“So you can get a message back to him?”

“Yeah.”

“Tell him next time he wants to talk to me, don’t send a marsupial.”

He lifted the gun from my gut, and in the darkness I didn’t see where he was going with it. Then it hit my mouth hard enough to knock me back against the headrest. I tasted blood right away, but the high level of make in my system kept me from feeling much pain.

There was a moment of unnatural quiet. He was probably as surprised as I was by the actuality of the violence. Violence isn’t part of the Ping-Pong game of wisecrack and snappy comeback; it puts an awkward end to all that and leaves you wishing you’d stayed in or under the bed that morning.

“Okay,” I said through the spit and blood welling in my mouth. “You’re a tough boy.”

“You think you can bluff your way through, flathead, but you’re wrong. Not this one. You gotta call it quits.”

I put my hands on the wheel so I wouldn’t try to put them around his thick neck. “Message received. Hop along, Cassidy.”

He opened the door and the overhead light came back on. His kangaroo mouth twisted into a ragged black smile, and above it his shiny nose twitched. “You got it right the first time, flathead. The name is Joey Castle.”

“I’ll keep it in mind.”

He backed out of his seat, keeping the gun leveled at my craw, then slammed the door shut and disappeared into the darkness. I took the keys out of my pocket and started the engine, thinking of trailing him, but I was still in too much of a daze to drive.

So I sat in the car with the motor running and the lights off. I didn’t rub my mouth because I didn’t feel like getting blood on my hand. When I heard a motor kick into action, I turned around, just in time to see the reflective plates of a motorcycle vanish down the ramp of the parking lot.

I sat there for another five or ten or twenty minutes, in a dark mood. I fingered the ripped hundred in my pocket, but I couldn’t bring myself to get back out of the car and face Shand with blood on my mouth.

I thought about the kangaroo, about what a punk he was. So green he couldn’t help boasting, telling me his and Phoneblum’s names, and admitting to the connection between them. I’d gotten a return on my mouthful of gun.

Fair enough. I started the car and drove back down to the highway along the bay. It was the long way, but there was something about the water at night that I needed to have a look at.

I ONLY SET MY ALARM WHEN I’M ON A CASE. THAT MORNing I’d been dreaming a pleasant dream of normal, genitally reoriented sex with an idealized composite blonde—no resemblance to Celeste Stanhunt—when the alarm went off and it projected the wake-up dream into my head instead. The image this morning was of a series of cartoon sheep jumping over a cartoon wooden fence against a background of ambient white. The last sheep caught its back legs against the top of the fence and came tumbling down in a clatter of splintered wood and bleating. Then a giant hand reached out of the clouds and picked up the sheep, dusted it off, and patted it on the rump to send it scurrying along after the rest of the flock. The hand turned to reveal a watch face on its wrist, and the watch face grew closer and closer and the ticking grew louder and louder until I finally woke up.

I sat with a pad and pencil over coffee and tried to piece together my next move, but the coffee stung the fresh cuts in my gums and I ended up having to concentrate instead on drinking through only one side of my mouth. After wrestling down a second cup, I went back to the pad and wrote the name Danny Phoneblum just to have a look at it. Underneath it I wrote Pansy Greenleaf, then Grover Testafer and Celeste Stanhunt. I drew a few circles and triangles on the pad, then tore the sheet off and threw it into the wastebasket.

After breakfast I made a call and requested an address and phone number for Testafer, which I got, and the phone number for the house on Cranberry Street, which wasn’t available, even after I offered up my privilege access code. Either my code had been suspended or Celeste Stanhunt’s privacy rated higher than my privilege.

Either way, the result was the same: I’d have to drop in on the house if I wanted a word with Celeste, or with Pansy Greenleaf. And I did want a word—hell, maybe even a whole bunch of them strung together. But the day was young, for once. I had plenty of time. First I’d take a drive up into the El Cerrito hills and have a look at Dr. Testafer’s fancy address. I was in the mood for scenery.

The doctor’s house was on Daymont Court, which was a public road but just barely. It terminated in a pair of drive-. ways, each barred with a gate to stop traffic. The mailbox on the left said TESTAFER. I parked to one side of the clearing and set out on foot past the barrier, walking with loud crunching steps in the gravel so I wouldn’t be mistaken for surreptitious.

The house was a botched American replica of a French country cottage, marred by aluminum storm windows and a satellite dish mounted on the shingles of the low roof. There wasn’t any car in front of the house, but I went up to the front door and pushed the buzzer anyway.

A meekly feminine voice emanated from an unseen intercom: “Dr. Testafer isn’t here right now.”

“My name is Conrad Metcalf,” I said, not knowing if there was a microphone to pick it up. “I’m a private inquisitor. I was hoping to have a word with you.” Whoever you are, I didn’t add.

There was an interval of silence. I examined the doorway and failed to find the intercom.

“I—I’ll be right there,” said the voice.

I waited on the doorstep, but the sound, when it came, was on my right, and I turned to see a smaller door opening in the lower wing of the house. The voice turned out to belong to a black-eared ewe wearing a housecoat and slippers. She stood in the doorway with one hand on the sash of her robe, blinking her big watery eyes in the sunlight.

I went over to her little door. “I’m Conrad Metcalf,” I said again. The ewe came up to about the middle of my chest, and I took a step back again so I wouldn’t seem to tower over hen.

“My name is Dulcie.” The margin between her lip and her black nose trembled as she spoke. “Please—come inside.”

I nodded.

“It’s a little low,” she said. “I don’t have the keys to the main house.” She turned and tiptoed inside, leaving the door open. I stooped to enter.

The apartment was as wide and deep as it should have been, but about half as tall. I stood just inside the doorway, bent over uncomfortably, until my eyes adjusted to the dimness; then I made my way to the couch by the farthest wall of the room and sat down. I could almost have reached up and touched the ceiling from a sitting position. Testafer had had the entire wing remodeled to fit the ewe or someone else her size. The colors in the apartment were all childish pinks and blues, and pretty much everything short of the doorknobs and faucets was carpeted. The curtains were drawn against the morning sun; the room was lit instead by a pair of big floor lamps which had to crook their necks to fit. I felt a kinship with them, real-life visitors in the dollhouse.