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He bounds around, jumping from the top of one see-through plastic coffin to another, gazing at the garish suits within and shrieking with laughter.

I cannot blame him. Compared to the modestly jeweled jumpsuit he is wearing, these laid-out ones are over the top and around your block. They shine under the artificial dome light, a shifting sky of white clouds that take on the faces of the principal players in the Elvis Presley saga … Mama Gladys, Daddy Vernon. Baby brother Jesse Garon is a cute little unformed fluffy cloud attached to Mama and Daddy, I guess. There’s a big blue thunderhead that is either Colonel Parker or the three Memphis Mafia members who wrote the first tell-all book, Red and Sonny West and Dave Hebler, all melded together to look like Colonel Parker, another villain of the piece. There is a Priscilla cloud, an all-white thunderhead that must be all hair, and a whole bunch of babe clouds who are pretty fluffy in all the right places.

Of course, this is a subtle effect, and I do not spy LisaMarie’s cats among the heavenly cavorters, although I spot a few horses.

Chatter has been silent for a while now, so I get my head out of the heavens and back down to earth. And I do mean earth.

In the two minutes I have let my attention wander, my chattering charge has been up to major mischief. I gaze aghast at the ground.

This is the damage the unfettered opposable thumb can do.

Chatter has worried at the ground opposite the tasteful Elvis funeral suit display, tossing foul herbal plants aside like weeds (I cannot blame him for that) and uncovering something buried just deep enough to need a demented chimpanzee to unearth it.

It is a pale limb. It is soft and limp. As I stare, bemused, for I have never witnessed the de-burying of a body before, I see that it is not bone, but the flared sleeve of a white jumpsuit, encrusted with faux gemstones embedded in genuine dirt.

Speaking of dirt, Chatter has got it all over his own white jumpsuit.

And I think he has become a little too excited at the discovery. My sniffer tells me someone should change his diaper.

I will leave the disposition of that to the proper authorities.

As for the jumpsuit in the herb garden, is it Elvis or is it Memorex?

Chapter 44

Also Sprach Zarathustra

(The Richard Strauss piece whose thundering drum overture was so effective in 1968’s futuristic film, 2001:A Space Odyssey; Elvis used it to open his live concerts beginning in 1972, and on many albums)

“Two nights running, no Elvis.” Leticia’s mellow voice sharpened with disappointment.

She had just finished her five-hour on-air shift as Delilah and now was switching her performer’s beret for a producer’s hard hat. “I don’t get it,” she added.

“We play the passive part in this charade,” Matt pointed out. “We sit here and wait. People choose to call in. Or not.”

Leticia’s frown carved no parallel tracks between her brows, merely a fleeting ripple in her mocha skin. “What’s not to call in for? We’re a feel-good station. You’re a feel-good radio shrink. That Elvis guy was getting a lot of reaction, not to mention ink.”

“He was getting us a lot of reaction and ink. Maybe`Elvis’ is tired of notoriety. Or maybe … maybe he can’t call.”

“What do you mean? Someone is holding him prisoner?”

“Leticia! You’re buying into all those Extreme Elvis scenarios. As if he’s really still alive and out there, and no theory is too wild about what might have happened to him or what he might be doing now. This caller was just a guy with an Elvis fetish, indulging his mania and getting lots of the attention he craves.”

“So why’d he give it up then?”

Matt sat at the desk and took up the headphones she had abandoned. The schoolhouse clock said he had less than a minute to contemplate the absence of Elvis. Then he’d have to get on with what he was here for: talking to real people. “Maybe he died.”

“Funnee man.”

“No, really. A guy in an Elvis suit was found floating in the Kingdome pool the day before yesterday.” “I haven’t heard anything; how did you?”

“I know the two women who found him. And there was an obscure article in the paper. Oh, and for the weird set, a huge anaconda was floating in the pool with him.”

“It was dead too?”

“No, quite alive. In fact, it’s a suspect.”

“What the hell’s an anaconda doing in a Kingdome pool?”

“There’s an exhibit of animals associated with Elvis. Apparently an anaconda was one of them. Don’t ask me why.”

“An anaconda …” Leticia’s dark eyes glittered with possibilities.

“Don’t tell me: if a snake calls tonight, I’m to keep it on the line as long as possible. Even if it lisps.”

The first three callers wanted to know the same thing Leticia did: Where was Elvis?

“He doesn’t give me his touring schedule, you know,”

Matt answered wryly. “And it’s a bad idea to believe everything you hear.”

“You call him ‘Elvis.’ “

“I call him what he implies he is. We’re strangers. I owe him at least that courtesy.”

“Howard Stern would be calling him a sicko ghoul who needs to ride on a corpse’s reputation, and a lot worse.”

“Maybe that’s why he didn’t call Howard Stern.” The next caller was less accusing. “Just tell him that we miss him and would like to hear from him again.” A third caller wanted to get into the Existential Elvis. “You know, everybody is either ready to believe it has to be Elvis, or angry that it can’t possibly be Elvis,”

she said. “What if it’s something in between?” “Semi-Elvis?” Matt asked.

“How about semisolid Elvis? He was a recording artist, after all. Maybe the airwaves were always the best way to deal with Elvis. It doesn’t matter what he wears or how much he weighs, it just matters how he sings.”

“That’s the beauty of radio. Image is nothing.”

“It’s the perfect medium for Elvis: voice is all. And that’s what he really cared about—the music and how he sang it. The rest was just distraction.”

“The rest was destructive. But even today a rock star has to tour to keep the fan base. We want our performers live and in person.”

“They say by the year twenty-twenty we’ll have Virtual communication. Like the holodeck of Star Trek’s starship Enterprise.”

“Maybe by then you can visit with Virtual Elvis at Graceland.”

“Are you sure this whole ‘Elvis calling’ thing isn’t a promotional gimmick for the Kingdome opening?”

“No,” Matt said, “I’m not. But who ever is sure about anything connected with Elvis?”

“That’s some achievement,” the woman mused, “when you think about it. To have made such an impactthat even after your death endless scenarios seem possible. At least to some people.”

“Elvis struck me as both pretentious and unpretentious, and the ways he was pretentious were the ways we all might go overboard if we had the opportunities he did. That’s what’s wrong with some people making him into a god. He had such predictably human failings. The same ones teenage sports stars show today. It’s more instructive to regard him as a man gone wrong, not a god betrayed.”

“ ‘Instructive.’ Gee whiz, Mr. Midnight, do you know how odd it is to hear that word on talk radio?” “Sorry.”

“Don’t be. Elvis would like that word. That’s what his spiritual quest was, to find some way he could inspire people beyond moving them with his music. Some way to use that remarkable power.”

“I have to say that the Rolling Stones don’t seem too concerned about using their remarkable drawing power for anything other than what was the darker side of Elvis: sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll.”