Andy Abramowitz - Thank You, Goodnight

I headed off toward the hotel. By the time I’d reached my room, Metcalf had tracked down the string bean percussionist, and I immediately dialed the son of a bitch without any thought of the early hour. There was no answer.

By the next morning, I’d gradually realized that I didn’t really have anything to say to Warren anyway. I’d found what he sent me here for. Had we actually connected, I probably would’ve just cussed up a storm and threatened to kill him. Which is what I was sure to do when we finally did catch up.

In the meantime, I had arrangements to make. I studied the geography of Switzerland on Google maps. There was someone in Unterseen I needed to have a word with.

When Warren finally returned my call, I didn’t even hear the phone ring. In the fluid jumble of the Zurich train station, I was tearing a bite out of a baguette stuffed with tomato and mozzarella. It was just as well. His voice mail was a half minute of unbroken laughter, full throttle, like he was finding the whole thing freshly hilarious. “How about that picture? Right?” he finally managed to say.

How about it.

There was an irony here. I was setting out to confront an artist about his art, to register my disapproval of someone else’s creative expression, and in that act, I was changing sides. Maybe my songs had never inflamed violent passions in anyone or been sufficiently outrageous as to provoke a government ban somewhere, and maybe that rendered me an artistic failure. Perhaps it was the mark of a robust vision to piss a few people off along the way, and perhaps that made Heinz-Peter Zoot a superior artist. He could explain that to me while I was choking the life out of him.

I followed the river through the town and out past a row of gingerbread houses, soon arriving at a stone road that curved up a hill and through a light patch of trees. The road ended at a small, solitary triangle of a home set squarely in a clearing. The silence was smothering, as not a single voice echoed up from the town, not a single car hummed by. I couldn’t even hear the river’s peaceful babble. I was completely alone in Unterseen’s pastoral innocence. Just me and my blistering anger.

There’d been ample time to let my rancor rise. Back in London, I was sure that every face that met mine was in on the joke, that every smirk was a masked sneer from someone who had seen the exhibit. The journey into a world of unmolested Swiss beauty did little to douse my bitterness. The train had weaved past cozy clusters of houses on green hills, around idyllic ice waters, all of which fueled the illusion that this country was a timeless fairy tale, a place of magnificent terrain toothed with fierce jagged mountains. It seemed a land accessible only by plane crash. And yet when I gazed out at a stream, I saw only the rush of mango salsa. A shrub on a mountain face was but a wedge of cilantro besmirching an incisor.

Finally, I stood facing a house that may or may not have belonged to my nemesis. If this was, in fact, Zoot’s home, the seclusion could well work against me if things got out of hand. Fuck it. I once had Bret Michaels in a headlock. I could certainly handle some Swiss photographer. What was he going to do, yodel at me?

Slinging my Morris & Roberts travel bag over my shoulder like the tough guy that I was, I walked toward the house.

Five feet from the front step I stopped dead at the sound of a voice inside. It was a deep baritone calling out in German or maybe French or perhaps Dutch, some language I for sure didn’t speak. Before I could decide whether I recognized the voice as belonging to the lug nut I’d met a few years ago in the Amsterdam cantina, a large man pushed open the screen door. He saw me and froze.

It was him all right. Burly, bald, cutoff jean shorts and the same decaying white tank top from the exhibit bio photo. He stood there searching my face, looming over me from the raised porch, looking puzzled. Seeing him up close forced the image of that goddamn photo right back into my head, and I instantly understood why my scuffed saddle-tan loafers had carried me all this way.

“Heinz-Peter,” I said, dropping my bag onto the front walk.

His eyes lit with pleasant recognition.

I moved swiftly up the front steps. “Congratulations on the Tate, fuckbag!”

As I reached the top step, I swung hard and landed my fist on his chin. The punch knocked him into the screen door, which slapped against the side of the house under his crushing weight. Stunned, he touched his face, glared at me, and howled something foreign. He took one step in my direction—Christ, he was a bear of a man—and soon my field of vision was consumed by a meaty set of knuckles headed for the bridge of my nose. The blow sent me clear off the porch, and the next thing I knew, I was flat on my back looking up at the cloudless sky. It’s pretty, I thought. They do nice skies here, wherever this is.

My nerve endings got up to speed on recent developments, and raw sensation kicked in. A warm liquid trickled down my throat and my mouth flooded with a screaming pain. No, make that my whole head. Just as I began to process my wounds, that lovely view of the sky was eclipsed by a hulking figure. Like some kind of giant, Heinz-Peter straddled me with his massive legs, and I believed with great certitude that my life would end there. I die in Switzerland, I thought. That’s my deal.

He leaned down, his nose to mine, and with a roar that shook the sleepy countryside, bellowed, “Why you do dis?”

You started it, you fucking idiot , I wanted to shout, but I couldn’t seem to form words.

I lifted my head off the ground. My skull weighed a ton and the liquid sliding down the back of my throat was now gurgling in a puddle around my tongue and dripping down my chin, not unlike the mango salsa in that infamous photo. Once again, life imitates art, I thought, as my head thumped back onto the cool grass like a dropped bowling ball.

Heinz-Peter was massaging his jaw. He seemed to be awaiting my response to a question I hadn’t understood. An extraordinary wave of nausea washed over me, but I was too woozy even to sit up and puke. I got off one garbled “Fuck you, fucking mutant,” before everything went dark.

When I came to, the hazy blur cleared onto a pair of Cadillac-blue eyes. They belonged to a pretty, blond teenager. I was stretched out on a sofa, the girl perched in a chair next to me, holding something cold to my lip and studying my battered face. My mouth throbbed and an ice pick of a headache seared through my skull.

“Don’t worry,” the girl chirped. “I stopped the bleeding and the ice should keep you from getting too much of a bump.” She let out a giggle. Her English was crystal clear with perhaps a dollop of Germanic Eurospeak. She had pristinely smooth cheeks and eager eyes, a hint of a teen pout in the curve of her lips.

“I’m Tereza,” she said.

“Teddy,” I croaked.

She adjusted the ice pack. “I know who you are.”

Heavy footsteps suddenly began to hammer up a flight of stairs, and it dawned on me for the first time that I was in the photographer’s home. I righted myself and took in my surroundings. We were in a living room of sorts, rustically decorated, photographs of all sizes crowding the walls.

“I can’t believe you tried to beat up my father,” the girl said, amused. She nodded at the lower hemisphere of my face. “You lost a tooth, you know.”

“What?” I dispatched my tongue to explore my dental landscape and met an unfamiliar gap just right of center. “Jesus Christ.”

The thick bootsteps came to a stop and my enemy overtook the doorframe. He stood there with his arms folded, perfectly still and perfectly huge.