T. Boyle - A Friend of the Earth

That freezes me up, all right. My legs feel as if they've been sawed off and put on backward, my fingers are rigid, I think I'm having a heart attack. And the gun-suddenly the gun weighs as much as a howitzer. "The chair," I whisper, jerking my chin first at Chuy and then at some priceless antique from the nineties, all molded black plastic and chrome, until Chuy catches my meaning and inches the chair away from the wall and into my purview. Now I'm resting the gun on the back of the chair, finger on the trigger, the barrel trained on the open door at optimal hyena height, and now Chuy — the most tentative man in the world, an acrobat on a wire stretched high over a pit of snakes-is inching toward the door.

I've had a lot of bad moments in my life, bad moments like little missives from the Fates, whole truckloads of them, but this is one of the worst. I am ready for anything — or as ready as a mostly broken-down young-old man with deteriorating reflexes and a serious loss of faith can expect to be — but it's not Lily that comes sailing through the door, it's Mac. Mac. He's wearing the usual getup, half drum major, half hood from a forties B-movie, his legs gliding on silk strings, a stack of gift-wrapped boxes in his arms, and he's whistling-actually whistling-some Motown tune of the sixties. It takes me a minute, and then I've got it-The Supremes, "Stop in the Name of Love."

I can't seem to find my voice. But Chuy, who doesn't seem capable of construing things with the same degree of complexity as I do, has no trouble finding his. "Mr. Mac; 'he says, waving his rope-walker's arms for balance," I think you better maybe look out. Cuidado, you know?"

As I've said, my hearing could be better, the vestigial buzz of Hendrix's "Voodoo Child" forever vibrating in the cochlea of my left ear, and I can't make out Mac's gauze-muffled response. "Muffins on marmalade," he seems to be saying, or maybe it's the other way around. He's arrested there in the doorway, not ten feet from the barrel of the gun, and I can see that his lips are moving behind the gauze film of the mask. Meanwhile, my hands are trembling so hard I'm afraid I'm going to squeeze the trigger in some sort of involuntary reflex, so I let go of it, rise up to my full height (which is two full inches less than it was when I was middle-aged, another of the humiliations of longevity), and tear my own mask off. "Mac, for Christ's sake, will you get out of the way!"

No response.

"It's Lily!" I shout. "Lily!"

In pantomime now, the spilling legs, floating packages, eyes bugging behind the silver lenses of his shades: a glance over his shoulder, a glance for me, and then the packages are left to the mercy of gravity and Mac is at the door, flinging it shut like the lone defender at the gates. He's so stunned, so consternated, so much at a loss, he forgets all about cool and contagion and strips off both his shades and the gauze mask in one frantic motion. "Holy-," he says, searching for the expression, because Mac doesn't curse, "I mean holy crap! What was I thinking? I wasn't, Ty, that's just it, I wasn't thinking. It's just like I mean it was Christmas and I — she didn't get out, did she? Is she loose?"

I shrug. "How would I know? But my guess is yeah, sure, she's loose. Long gone, in fact."

The three of us take a minute to look both ways up and down the long corridor, as if we expect to see her scrag of a tail poking out from beneath one of the memorabilia cases that line the walls on either side. (No suits of armor or crossed halberds here-this is nothing less than a shrine to the genius of Maclovio Pulchris, and I don't mean that sarcastically. He is a genius. Or was. Maybe he's gone a little bit overboard with the self-deifying aspect of it, I won't deny that. It's a question of proportion, I suppose, because it's all here, Pulchrisized for the ages. Not only has he got photos and oil portraits of himself staring out from the walls wherever you look, but every record and CD he's ever recorded is on permanent display, not to mention tour souvenirs, ticket stubs, T-shirts, yellowing press releases and fanzine articles, even the outfits he's worn onstage, all of it meticulously arranged according to release dates, artistic period and hairstyle.) "I don't know," Mac says, "it was only a minute. Maybe she was asleep or something."

I'm shaken. I'm angry. And though he's my employer, though he's my lifeline in the dark churning Social Security — less waters of the perilous young-old life, I let him know it. "What do you think, you can just leave the door wide open and she's going to curl up like some fat lapdog?"

Mac wants to answer — I can see a response gathering itself in his naked, faintly yellowish eyes — but the opportunity dissolves into the sudden ringing of the doorbell. Or it doesn't ring exactly, but chimes the opening bars of Mac's biggest hit, "Chariots of Love," from the Chariots of Love album. It's a curious thing, the ringing of that bell-because no one rings the bell, ever. No one, even in normal (or less abnormal) times, can get through the big gates out front and past the surveillance cameras and Al and Al and even me and Chuy and the day-workers and gardeners and all the rest to arrive at the door and find the button to depress in the first place. And as if that isn't enough of a feat under ordinary conditions, now we're even further isolated by the flooding. So who's ringing the bell? Lily? God? The Ghost of Christmas Past?

Down the stairs we go, judiciously of course, the Nitro Express and I shielding Mac from the front, Chuy and his Dursban-saturated hide screening him from the rear, and then we creep cautiously down the first-floor hallway and out into the vestibule even as the bell chimes again and the two Als materialize grimly from the surveillance-control room to the left of the main entrance. The taller Al, after giving his employer a warning glance, pulls open the door.

There, in the strange subaqueous glow of the storm, stands Delbert Sakapathian, the cat-lover, he of the cueball head and overinflated gut. He's lost his slicker and his rain hat, his clothes cling wetly and what hair he has left is painted to his skull. But that's not all: beside him, wrapped so tightly in a black slicker he looks as if he's been extruded from a tube, is an old man — or maybe an old woman. It's hard to tell, because this person is one of the old-old, the ancient old, the antediluvian, artifactual, older-than-knowledge old, so old that he/she has been rendered utterly sexless. We see the tube of the slicker, the monkey hands, the face like a peeled grape, toothless, chinless, cheekless, a scraped and blasted black hole of humanity. Neither of them is wearing a gauze mask.

"Mr. Pulchris," Delbert Sakapathian says, addressing Mac with all the awe and humility of a communicant in the church of celebrity, "we need help. I — this is Old Man Foley, from the Lupine Hill Retirement Home? — and there's nothing left over there but wreckage, and he needs shelter, I mean, if you can spare it, just till they can get the emergency crews in there to rebuild or take people to a gymnasium somewhere or something. He's been wet through to the skin for days now."

The rain keeps up its steady sizzling. And the smell is there, so sharp it makes me wince — the smell of the underside of things, of decay, of death.

"Look, I'm not asking for myself-Lurleen and me are okay, I've got my canoe out there tied to the railing and they can condemn the condos all they want but they're going to have to shoot me to get me out of there, at least till the rain stops…" He looks at me now, at the two Als and Chuy, making a mute appeal.

Finally, Mac, in his sweetest voice, says no. Shakes his head wearily, the eel whips slipping across the slick surface of his restored shades. "I'd like to help," he says, "I really would, but I just can't-we can't-risk it. It's the 'mucosa. You understand, don't you? I want to help. I do. Money's no problem. You want money?"