David Wallace - Broom of the System

So a head the shape of a skull. And tiny little lifeless brown eyes, eyes like little anuses.

I have nothing to fear from an anus-eyed skull-head.

He and Lang are apparently lunching. He and Lang enjoy some sort of connection through Industrial Desert Design. Lang came close to insinuating that he had had congress with Mandible last night, this morning. I must approach him carefully on the subject of the reversal. My ears still hurt me, from the flight, and there are sounds when I swallow.

For once Fieldbinder was actually looking forward to seeing his pathetic psychologist, Dr. J____, with his ridiculous moving chairs, the next day. Fieldbinder had been having a dream that was troubling him a lot. that was troubling him no end.

My father was a large, soft estate attorney who dressed exclusively in flannel in his off-hours. Broad and pale. With boots. And a small boy’s persistent love for throwing stones into deep, empty places, and listening. He spanked. He was one of those parents who spanked. I never once laid an angry hand to Vance Vigorous’s bottom. Maybe that is part of the trouble.

It is a windy day. Clouds scud. The wind whips at Lake Erie, the shaggy lake. My office window is sliced neatly in black. Half. In the lit half, the wind makes Lake Erie shaggy. In the shadow-half it all looks like rotten mayonnaise, there in the distance, squelching brown and white between the pudgy fingers of the wind. What a hideous view.

And where on earth does Norman Bombardini get off putting a sign through the eye of the founder of Cleveland?

Ten minutes, at the outside. I’ll simply keep time on the wall of my office. When the shadow reaches the diploma, she will be here.

/d/

“Is this place great or what?” Neil Obstat, Jr. was saying to Wang-Dang Lang. “Just wait. The bartender sticks his thumb in his eye once an hour. It’s in his contract.”

“And look at the gazongas on that Ginger,” Lang said, tilting his beer bottle. “Never seen any shit like this.”

“We can come back here tonight,” said Obstat. “They’ve got even wilder shit at night. Cleveland at night can get pretty wild.” He sucked at his Twizzler. “Cleveland gets underrated. You guys in the East forget that significant cultural stuff goes on in the Midwest.”

“Nothing insignificant about those gazongas, I’ll tell you that right now.”

Lang and Obstat were in Gilligan’s Isle. It was almost lunchtime. This was lunch. Lang had spent the morning with Rick Vigorous, determining that he would be able to do all his translation work in a week, if he worked at all hard. Lang was looking forward to the next three months. He’d been given the rest of the day off. He’d called Neil Obstat the minute he’d happened to see Rick Vigorous staring at Obstat’s picture in some of the material from Stonecipheco.

“I can’t get over seeing you again, and here in Cleveland,” Obstat was saying. They were at the Professor’s thumb. “And you say you’re not in deserts anymore.”

“Temporarily.”

“Temporarily. You’ve been doing accounting? Just can’t see you as an accountant, big guy.”

“The story behind that has to do with this girl who was just such hot shit that I let her run the show, for a bit of time,” Lang said, crossing and uncrossing his legs on the plastic bench.

“Not Lenore Beadsman.”

“No, course not Lenore Beadsman.” Lang signalled for another beer, and the bartender over there in his white hat gave him a thumbs-up. “My wife,” Lang said to Obstat. “The girl who’s my wife.”

“Really hot, huh?”

“Don’t want to talk about it.”

“Sure.” Obstat sipped his Twizzler. “But you mentioned something about Lenore Beadsman, when you called.”

“Did I?”

“Positive.”

“Huh. Well she works at the place I’m workin’ at, translating your wild shit for you.”

“Stuff is wild, isn’t it?” Obstat squirmed on his seat. “Boy I’m excited, is all I can say. This is the sort of thing a corporate chemist just dreams of. I thought I’d be spending all my time testing pH levels in creamed fruit.”

“I just can’t believe the shit works. Does it really work at all like y‘all are havin’ us say in this ad?”

“Really looks like it does, guy. The Chief has been ga-ga for months. Kids are talking months, maybe years before they would have, in limited tests. We’re talking not only eventual market domination, but a potentially really significant insight into the relation between nutrition and mental development, between what the body needs and the mind can do.”

The bartender, coming over with Lang’s fourth beer, slipped on a strategically placed maraschino cherry and pitched headlong into Ginger’s chest. He missed his eye with his thumb, but did manage to crack his head nastily on the plastic table. Beer flew everywhere.

Obstat laughed and clapped with everyone else, “Aww, Gilligan.” He bent and quickly tied the bartender’s shoelaces together.

“What about my beer?” Lang was saying.

“Coming right up,” the bartender murmured. He was on his feet and moving when the shoelaces got him. He somersaulted into and off of Mrs. Howell’s hair, ending up draped over her pince-nez.

Obstat giggled.

“Immature fucker,” Lang grinned.

“Got to get into the spirit of the place.”

Lang sucked off the last bit of beer in his bottle. “But you say you do know this Beadsman girl, then,” he said to Obstat.

Obstat got serious. “Do I ever,” he said. “I went to high school with her, when we were kids. I’ve had a crush since I was this high. She’s maybe even a reason why I went to work for Stonecipheco. Unconscious or something. Except I had no idea she didn’t like her Dad and didn’t want to go into the Company. I’m pissed. I only got to see her in person again the other day, when we were all in the Chief’s office. The Chief is her Dad. And one of their relatives got us going on the whole pineal project, and now she’s trying to rip us off. But I can still pull it off. Except I think Lenore’s frigid. I made a bit of a dick of myself over her in school, and I was going for heavy eye contact, in the Chiefs office. But she always just looked right through me. I think she’s frigid.”

Lang accepted another beer without looking up. “But hot, though, too.”

Obstat fingered his tie. “Don’t know what it is about her, Wanger. The girl’s just always slayed me. The way she dresses, the not incidental gazonga factor. And her legs. The single most out-of-this. world pair of legs I’ve ever laid eyes on.”

“I was noticin’ those legs,” Lang said, nodding.

“I’ve had this wild fantasy, for who knows how long, about doing her out in the G.O.D.,” Obstat said, looking faraway. He looked back at Lang and blushed a bit. “You been back out there, lately, at all? I’ve been dying to go. I still remember when we planted cacti.”

“We can go any time you want,” said Lang. “I’m gonna buy some sort of car for out here tomorrow, I decided. Lenore’s little boyfriend’s paying me like the money hurt his hand.”

“Boyfriend?”

“This guy named Vigorous, owns the firm we’re at, or at least part of it.” Lang looked off over Obstat’s shoulder, at the Skipper.

“I remember the Chief saying something to her about a Vigorous, in his office,” Obstat said, narrowing his little brown eyes. He dug at his Twizzler’s plastic pineapple jug with a straw.

“He’s a interesting little dung beetle. Doublest chin I ever did see on a human being.” Lang drank deeply. “How’d he get hold of Lenore, I wonder, if she’s so all-fired hot as you say.”

“There is no God in the universe, Wang-Dang,” Obstat said, shaking his big head.