David Wallace - Broom of the System

“Let me just get my big old carcass out of the way, here…”

/b/

By the time Rick dropped Lenore and Wang-Dang Lang off near the Tissaws’ it was almost four, and beginning to mist a little, so that even though it wasn’t very cold Lenore could see her breath, and Lang’s. Rick dashed off to attend to some affairs at Frequent and Vigorous, but promised, as he dropped them a few hundred yards from the oral surgeon’s big gray house, to be back as soon as possible to take them both to dinner.

“Super,” said Lenore.

“Straight up,” said Lang.

The reason Rick had to drop Lenore and Lang off near, rather than at, the Tissaws’ was that the street all around the house was totally clogged with cars, and especially vans. A lot of the vans were white, with the ornate letters P.W.G. on the sides, in red. Lenore had never seen the street so crowded.

“I’ve just never seen the street so crowded,” Lenore said.

“Don’t suppose all these folks are here to try to sublet Misty Schwartz’s room, do you?” said Lang.

“Not a chance.”

“Must be a really bitching party going on around here, then,” said Lang.

“On a Tuesday afternoon?”

“My kind of neighborhood.”

As they went up the walk, Lenore saw that the Tissaws’ front door was propped partly open by a network of thick black cables that led out from the backs of two of the white P.W.G. vans — vans parked halfway onto the grass of the Tissaws’ lawn — and disappeared into the house. Lenore all of a sudden heard what was unmistakably Candy Mandible shout something from her third-story window, a window that looked strangely lit up, right now, and actually had a bit of a tiny rainbow-doughnut around it in the cool wet air, and then from the front porch Lenore heard Candy running down the stairs of the house to meet them at the door.

“Lenore I swear to God you will just not believe it,” said Candy.

“What the heck is going on here?” Lenore said, looking around. “Are we having sewer trouble?”

“Not exactly, come on, it’s Vlad the Impaler,” Candy said, starting to try to pull Lenore toward the stairs, up which the black cables from the vans ran and disappeared from sight. Candy was wearing that violet dress.

“Hey, ho, and hello,” Lang said to Candy. He hefted the suitcases.

“Hi,” said Candy, barely looking at Lang. “Lenore, come on. You’ll flip and die!”

“What can Vlad the Impaler have to do with vans and letters and cables?”

“Mrs. Tissaw heard him say things, God knows what, really, and she just freaked out.” One of the shoulder straps of the violet dress had slipped off Candy’s shoulder. Lang hefted the suitcases again. “She’s getting him on television. Well, religious television, on cable. But still, television.”

“Television?”

“Vlad the Impaler?” said Wang-Dang Lang.

“My bird,” Lenore said. “Who is now troublingly and also obscenely able to talk.” She turned to Candy. “Who gave permission for him to get put on television?”

“Mrs. Tissaw says it’s in lieu of the bill for the chewed wall and the guano-damage to the floor, which she knows you can’t pay because she talked to Prietht at the board and Prietht very helpfully told her you’re broke…” Candy stopped and looked up the staircase. There was noise from the third floor. Lots of it. “But look,” she said, “come on, they’re going to make him a star, they say. They say literally. ”

“Literally? A star? Of what?”

“Come on. ”

Lenore let herself be pulled. Lang followed her and Candy up the stairs with the suitcases, watching their bottoms.

/c/

“Friends, as subscribing members of the Reverend Hart Lee Syke’s Partners With God Club you can expect the entry of the Almighty into your own personal life in twenty-four hours or less,” Vlad the Impaler was saying, staring blankly into a lavishly unfamiliar little unsmeared mirror perimetered with tiny light bulbs. Lenore’s own personal room was full of television cameras and towering metal lamps, and bright-white light. The room was cruising at about a hundred degrees. Thick black cables, and panels with colored lights winking on and off, and sunglasses were everywhere. The brown velvet chair, the uneven-legged desk chair, the bed, and all the black corduroy cushions on the windowsills were occupied by people holding various sorts of electronic equipment, or thick sheaves of paper, and all smoking, and all tapping cigarette ashes onto the floor. Vlad the Impaler was in his cage, his enormous feet hooked over the arms of a tiny director’s chair, licking tentatively at the hot surface of his lit-up mirror. A truly enormous gray box of a television camera, with a little red light on top, was trained on him. Pushed back onto Vlad’s spiky pink mohawk Lenore thought she could see a tiny pair of sunglasses. Vlad the Impaler’s old smeared mirror, on its chain of Frequent and Vigorous paper clips, was gone.

“Holy shit,” said Lenore.

“You wouldn’t believe what’s been happening,” said Candy.

“One hell of a dress, there, ma‘am,” Lang said to Candy. “A. S. Lang, here.”

“Perfect! Perfect!” came shouts from a huge man with a white leather body suit, and an enormous beehive of sculptured black hair, and several chins. Red sequins on the chest of his body suit formed the letters P.W.G.

“Love it! Love that bird!” the man was yelling.

“Cut!” yelled somebody else, from the middle of the mob near the windows. The windows were smeared with steam, from breath.

“Twist my major limbs if that’s not Hart Lee Sykes himself,” Wang-Dang Lang said, staring at the man in white leather.

“Who?” said Lenore.

“It is, that’s Hart Lee Sykes,” said Candy. She got close to Lenore’s ear to make herself heard. “He’s this truly enormous wheel at CBN, the Christian Broadcasting Network? He used to host this show called ‘Real People and Animals of Profound Religious Significance,’ a sort of religious spin-off of ‘Real People.’ But now he hosts this incredibly successful show on cable called ‘The Partners With God Club.’ ”

“He’s A-OK,” Lang said to Lenore, setting down the suitcases amid a litter of Styrofoam cups and candy wrappers and butts. “My Daddy watches his show all the time. My Daddy thinks Hart Lee’s the spiritual balls.”

“Who are you?” Candy said to Lang.

“This is Andrew Sealander Lang,” said Lenore, “a friend of Rick’s and now a very temporary F and V employee. I’m supposed to get Mrs. Tissaw to rent him Misty’s room while she’s in the hospital.”

“And a friend of you fine ladies, now, too, I hope,” said Lang. “I—”

“Inside out! A camel! The bird has been touched by Auden!” shrieked Vlad the Impaler. A sound-man yelped and tore off his headphones.

“No, no, no!” screamed Hart Lee Sykes, stamping a pointy-toed cowboy boot on the wooden floor. “The next line is ‘All contributing subscriptions are tax-deductible.’ Cindy honey… where’s Cindy?” Hart Lee Sykes spotted Candy by the door with Lenore and Lang and made his way over as all heads turned toward them. Lenore began to edge toward the door. Sykes towered over all of them, even Lang. To Candy he said, “Cindy honey, you’ve simply got to make the miraculous little incarnation behave. Now if you‘ll—”

“Reverend Sykes, this is finally Lenore Beadsman, who owns Vlad,” Candy said, preempting Lenore’s flight with an iron hand at the small of her back.

The Reverend stopped, turned to Lenore, seemed almost to be getting ready to bow. “Miss Beadsman, at ever so long last. The owner, to the extent that any single man can be called the owner, of this animal — dare I say animal? — touched by the Lord and guided by His hand to His humble servant, me.” Sykes’s voice had risen from whisper to shout. A murmer went through the room from the people looking through scripts and checking equipment.