John Domini - Talking Heads - 77

Kit could see it from the apartment doorway, a full sheet of print squared against the edge of the table. From the doorway, he knew she was leaving him. His wife was leaving. The believer had lost what he believed in most. Silly fumblethumbs believer. All that remained to him was nothing but one echoey room after another, worm-eaten rooms with walls of peeling dreams like the decaying fiber of his moan as he crossed the kitchen on long rancher’s legs.

No. No, this was another sort of letter. An ordinary see-you-soon letter, ticking off the evening schedule.

Bette wouldn’t even have written the thing, or she wouldn’t have written so much, except that she’d wanted to see what a computer printout looked like. “I tell you frankly,” Kit’s wife had written, “there are moments when I believe that I’ll never pull anything from this Apple except worms.” Aw, Betts. Kit recalled her smile, its intricate works, and then, lifting the fanfold sheet from the table, he discovered she’d clipped a second message to the back. A message that required no reading — a wrinkly blue Trojan. She’d been careful about the paper clip, making sure it wouldn’t poke through the packaging.

He hadn’t yet come entirely out of his wooze. As he unclipped the condom, Kit lost his bearings again, tumbling back to yesterday’s before-breakfast uproar. To exhale meeting exhale in the half-light while he and Bette snuggled and he lingered inside her. The wrinkles succulent, UnTrojan’d.

“That next issue,” said Attaputz, shooting up, “that’s got to be a motherfucker.”

Really, one wonders what Miss Marryme sees in this person. Why, he’s hardly a person at all — just a voice on the air.

“It’s got to come from the basement,”the “deejay” was saying. “A lot of pressure on that next issue.”

Even after Kit cleared his head — a couple fingers of Johnny Walker helped — Bette’s printout still read to him like something in another language. The dot matrix suggested Braille.

His wife explained that she’d taken her latest editing over to Professor Glenza at the Medical School. She had no appointment, no deadline, but she wanted to know what he thought of what she’d done so far. “I suspect that Glenza is to me rather what you are to your Ms. Mirini,” she’d written. “(Yes Mzzzzzzz: she’s a bee in my bonnet).” Aw, Betts. “I suspect, you’ve now got two women who need mentors, saviors, knights on white chargers.”

What language was this? Kit knew most of his wife’s stage business, but tonight’s printout careened from pose to pose in free-fall. Bette hadn’t entered another word about Zia. Instead, she’d started a fresh paragraph, saying that after the Med School she was “heading to Rowley to give Hepburn a good lunging.” Hepburn was Bette’s Morgan, a stallion, three years old. One of those odd accoutrements of family wealth that exist outside the month-by-month cash flow. Kit’s wife kept her mount stabled at a farm belonging to one of her aunts. “Tuesday’s a good day for it,” Kit read. “Aunt Georgie goes into Haymarket Tuesdays.” And after that, Bette planned to visit a psychic.

A psychic. “She speaks with ghosts, this woman.”

Just a voice on the air, that’s your precious hero of prank-rake radio. The way he comes in one ear and goes out the other. Why, a person can’t tell if he’s ahead of the times or behind. And so far as your humble Society reporter could see, Mr. Bitterid was no better. Saturday night I journeyed out of my bodybriefly, in order to get a fuller view of the proceedings. I floated up by the rafters, in the dimension of the spirit. And Boston’s newest newspaper editor why, I’ve never seen an aura so dangerously in flux.

“Well yeah see it’s important, ” declared tatty young Miss Mindyourmind — or rather her tatty young essence, afloat beside me.

“It’s like I said,” her shade went on. “How can punk be a success?”

Bette had gotten the psychic’s name from a man she’d known years ago. A man Kit wouldn’t have met, a holdover from a time in her life she called “The Rampage.” “Ivan,” Kit read. “One of a very few I’ve kept in touch with from out of that, well. Out of that era.” And if she was reaching back to The Rampage, Bette concluded, well. Then she must need whatever she was reaching for. She must need it badly, this seance. “Of course I’ve already told you so in words,” Bette had written. “Words, words, words. But I believe I also let you know by means of, what shall we call it, symbolic language. See attached. ”

Bette had used underlining too: “God knows I hope to avoid living Aunt Georgie, but I’d love to hear from dead Aunt Winnie.”

Kit finished his reading, his rereading, in their bedroom. He sat on the crumpled covers, his heart once more a soaked beehive. He had a notion of finding the psychic’s address and running over there. Darling , he’d begin, I’ve been chasing some ghosts myself . He’d ask if there’d been more crank calls. And he’d say something about Zia, something to put both his and Bette’s minds to rest.

Eventually his eyes shifted to the photo of his father.

The photo stood on Kit’s bureau in a formal wooden frame, a Midwestern, mid-century frame. It had come with one of the last letters from Korea. Chris Viddich Senior, Nordic and full of bones, stood on the wing of his Marine Corps Sabre jet. The baggy flight suit couldn’t conceal his fitness, his muscularity. The helmet was off. His grin seemed like the fleshy outermost spill of an eruption (was this just because the photo’s black and white recalled ‘40s war flicks?), like some all-natural prehistoric sureness had proved too powerful for the suit and helmet.

“It’s the question of the ‘70s,”Miss Marines went on — still asking her question. “This is all about the ‘70s.”

Her own aura had an astonishing sureness, I must say, some all-natural prehistoric sureness too powerful for her longjohns and leather. And though she claimed to be of the moment, riding the ether of this decade only, she spoke in terms that were timeless.

“It’s culture vs. counterculture,”she said. “It’s that basic. As basic as keeping up a good front when, behind the front, you’re riddled with doubt.”

*

Did he sleep? Did he wake and touch his wife, take coffee and the MTA? Midnight and morning seemed to carry Kit down the same shadowy tubes. By ten-thirty Wednesday, Corinna was getting exasperated. She began waving at him with each new call, showing off her nails, trying to light a fire under the boss.

For one call, her high-gloss lips got into the act as well. Eagerly they shaped a word Kit couldn’t read. A, B, A, B?

Then he recognized the connection, the static. He thought again of Bette’s psychic, talking to the dead.

“Mrs. Rebes?” Kit bent close to the machine.

Getting the Monsod story had required no pull, no Parker House. The first of the Five W’s was Who, sure, and so Kit had chased down the names of the men serving sentences longer than three years. Then he chased down their families. Finally Kit found a convict in the right place — down in solitary — with a contact on the outside he could trust. The prisoner was Junior Rebes, doing thirty-five years to life. Rape, murder, narcotics. Junior seemed to spend a lot of time in solitary, in the penitentiary basement. Down there, according to what Kit could put together, the rot was worst.

The contact on the outside was Junior’s mother. “You got a minute for me, Missah Viddich?”

“All the time you want.”

It still jarred him, a woman ten or twelve years his senior calling him “Mister.” But she didn’t like using first names. She never let him visit her apartment either. She claimed she had to keep Kit away from her other son. According to her this second son, Louie-Louie, was a better boy than Junior. But Louie-Louie would expect too much from Kit. The younger boy would expect Kit to turn the whole system around for them, get them on the TV or something.