Jitterbug Perfume

CALENDAR OF EVENTS

Monday evening, November 26: Priscilla contacted police, who informed her that they could not interfere without a warrant. The judge on duty refused to issue a warrant directing authorities to search for an old perfume bottle for which there was no proof of ownership, which, by the complainant's admission, contained only a few drops of perfume, and which had been concealed, prior to alleged disappearance, in a Kotex box.

Monday night, November 26: Priscilla resisted the impulse to call Wiggs Dannyboy, for fear that he might doubt her story.

Tuesday morning, November 27: Priscilla met with an attorney. The lawyer telephoned Ricki, who assured him that she had no perfume bottle, never wore the stuff, was unaware of the existence of the antique bottle in question (having, in numerous visits to the client's apartment, neither seen nor heard mention of such a bottle), and invited the attorney to personally search her duplex, her car, and her locker at the Ballard Athletic Club. The attorney was convinced.

Tuesday evening, November 27: Ricki the bartender and Priscilla the waitress got into a shouting match in the cocktail lounge at El Papa Muerta, the waitress calling the bartender “a thieving, vindictive dyke” and the bartender characterizing the waitress as “a liar, a two-timer, and a clumsy slut.” They were separated by fellow employees and reprimanded by management.

Midnight, Tuesday/Wednesday, November 27/28: Priscilla found a note under her door inviting her to Thanksgiving dinner at the Last Laugh Foundation, where the celebrated French perfumer Marcel LeFever was to be feted along with Dr. Wolfgang Morgenstern. The note was typed and quite formal, but was signed, in an eccentric scrawl resembling the markings made by the muddy tail of a water buffalo, “Love and Kisses, Wiggs.”

Wednesday evening, November 28: A second heated exchange at El Papa Muerta, during which the waitress Priscilla repeatedly demanded that the bartender Ricki relinquish a purloined perfume bottle, resulted in the waitress Priscilla being fired. She was escorted from the premises and informed that she was to return her sailor dress within twenty-four hours or face prosecution. The waitress Priscilla offered to doff the uniform on the spot, but the manager, despite a twitch of prurient interest, insisted that it be laundered first, as it was badly dappled with salsa suprema. “That's ketchup and you know it,” said Priscilla.

Wednesday night, November 28: Priscilla stopped off at Ernie Steele's Bar & Grill, where she proceeded to get intoxicated enough to forget where she had parked her bicycle (which she then abandoned), but not so intoxicated as to give in to the burning desire to call Dr. Dannyboy.

Midnight, Wednesday/Thursday, November 28/29: Priscilla, on foot — and wobbling — returned home to find another note, this one imparting the information that Marcel LeFever, upon arrival in New York, had learned of the death of his uncle, Luc, head of LeFever Odeurs, and rushed back to Paris. Thanksgiving dinner was canceled. Wiggs added that he, nevertheless, hoped to see Pris soon. Accompanying the note was a beet. Accompanying the beet was a raunchy aroma. Priscilla hurled the beet the length of the hall. It rattled some innocent tenant's door, probably interrupting a Johnny Carson monologue.

Thursday morning, November 29: Priscilla flopped on the sofa, flopping, further, into a drift of sooty snow; sinking into the placid nightlife of a city of wool, a subterranean Venice flooded by ink, where a language of bubbles was spoken, and misfortunes, like furniture in storage, were draped with heavy blue coverlets.

Thursday afternoon, November 29: The dying gobble of a hundred million Thanksgiving sacrifices could not awaken her.

Friday morning, November 30: Still sleeping.

Friday afternoon, November 30: Ditto.

Friday night, November 30: Priscilla was pulled to the surface by a banging at the door. She stood, stretched, and admitted Wiggs Dannyboy. She greeted him with a kiss. The inside of her mouth was as white as a swamp snake's. He didn't seem to mind, but, rather, prodded her coated, sluggish tongue with his fresh, lively one. He slipped off her panties and fucked her on the floor in her sailor dress. Refreshed now by forty hours of slumber and a spine-shuddering orgasm, she could scarcely believe how well she felt. She lay in his arms, purring like a Rolls-Royce that has learned it isn't going to be sold to an Arab, after all. “Tell me a story,” she said. “Sure and one time in the jungles o' Costa Rica, me voice was stolen by a parrot. For six months, durin' which time I could utter not a syllable, I beat the bushes for that bird. .” “No,” said Priscilla, sweetly. “Tell me a story about beets.” “Very well then,” said he.

Upon his release from Concord State Prison, Dr. Dannyboy had moved to Seattle, where eventually he leased the proper mansion and established his longevity clinic. Some eighteen months later, he traveled to New Orleans, where a perfumer's convention was about to commence. His motives were vague. “I had vowed to devote me life to immortality work,” he said, “and me conversations with Alobar had led me to believe, for some peculiar reason, that perfumery was somehow connected to the mystery o' mysteries. I mean, I knew that the sense o' smell played a role in the evolution o' consciousness, and thought perhaps. . I'm not sure what I thought. 'Twas just a hunch. I was searchin' for clues. 'Twas intuition led me there. Intuition being the most reliable instrument in science.”

Discouraged initially by the focus on merchandising, Wiggs was about to give up on the convention when he heard a speech delivered by Marcel LeFever.

“Yes, that was some speech,” interrupted Priscilla. “Up until that point, I'd always hated perfumery. I'd gotten involved with it again because I had a little understanding of it, and for reasons I won't go into now, I believed I had a chance to make a lot of money from it. But I was contemptuous of it, due to childhood experiences and all. It was simply a means to an end. But LeFever's speech. . boy, he gave me a whole new attitude about perfumery. He made it sound so magical, so special, so important. .”

“Your man did that, all right,” said Wiggs.

After the speech, Wiggs had caught up with Marcel in the corridor adjacent to the auditorium. He had bombarded him with praise and expressions of his own interests. Marcel responded enthusiastically, especially when Wiggs pointed out that the dolphin has no sense of smell. Dolphins have larger brains than humans, and their rudimentary fingers suggest that at one point in prehistory, they might have been the equal of men in more physical ways. Yet, while humanity has gone on to ever more complex achievements in philosophy, athletics, art, and technology, the nonproductive dolphin has apparently swum into an evolutionary cul-de-sac. Could it be, asked Dannyboy of LeFever, that the dolphin failed (in an evolutionary sense) because it neglected to develop an olfactory capability?

“'Twas obvious I was on your man's wavelength, and he was invitin' me to dine with him at Galatoire's, when you approached. Yes, darlin', that was me standin' there, but you didn't notice me. And after you showed up, LeFever didn't notice me, either. Your man has an eye for fine flesh, or, rather he has a nose for it, because all the time you and him were speakin', I could see him sniffin' you up and down, smellin' you out, as it were. Well, bless you, you mustn't o' been his type. He listened politely, wrinklin' his nose all the while, as you told him that you lived in Seattle and were developin' a great jasmine-theme perfume with a citrus top note, but was lookin' for somethin' a wee unusual in the way of a base, and did he have a suggestion o' bases to explore, bases that might o' been used long ago and forgotten. Yes, and he was tellin' you that 'twas a complicated matter, and some base notes had as many as eighty-five separate ingredients in 'em; not bein' very helpful, I'd have to say, when this lovely young black woman walks up.

“Well, 'twas apparent you and your black woman were on familiar terms, familiar but not especially friendly.” (Priscilla nodded, vigorously.) “But your man ignores your frosty exchange, and he begins to sniff her up and down, only this time the deeply scalloped wings o' his snout are beatin' like a fat swan trapped in a wind tunnel, flappin' like an archangel on Methedrine, she is gettin' through to him on the olfactory level. The comic thing is that she is givin' him almost the same exact story as you. She's speakin' French, and me French is a wee rusty, but I hear her say she lives there in New Orleans and has got a wonderful jasmine-theme perfume brewin', only she's havin' difficulty with locatin' somethin' special and unusual to bottom it out, and the sly devil tells her that he's gettin' interested in jasmines again himself, and maybe he can lend a hand. Lend a prick is more like it. Next thing I know, your man is invitin' your woman to dine with him at Galatoire's, only there's no mention o' me, in French or English.”

Thereupon, Dr. Dannyboy was on the verge of asking Priscilla to dinner at Galatoire's: “complicate the scene a bit, if you can't get any enlightenment out of a situation, you might as well get some fun.” At that moment, however, the handle on a nearby emergency-exit door began to jiggle, as if someone in the alley outside wanted to be let in, so Wiggs opened the door. There was nobody there. But, with the opening of the door, a rank odor rushed in, an odor embarrassing in its suggestion of unwashed genitals and bestial glands. Wiggs recognized the smell.

“One morning in Concord, I woke before me accustomed hour. I came into consciousness holding me nose. There was a bloody rotten smell in our cell, as if the warden had put a herd o' goats in with us. I asked Alobar what was goin' on, and your man said, 'It was Pan. Pan came to visit me during the night.'

“'No joke? What did he say?' I asked. 'Why, he didn't say anything,' said Alobar. 'Pan can no longer speak. He just dropped by. I suppose to show me that he wasn't finished yet.' Can ye imagine? The smell hung around for nearly an hour. And 'twas the very same smell that blew through the door in New Orleans that day. I turned to remark on it, but you had gone. And a minute later, LeFever was escortin' the black girl toward the main entrance and the street.

“I went out in the alley and looked around, but there wasn't a sign o' anythin'. So I got me hands on a list o' convention attenders — it listed Marcel's address and yours and V'lu Jackson's, too — and took a night flight back to Seattle. There was a lot o' funny business goin' on in this blarney-stone head o' mine.”

I know the feeling, thought Priscilla. Her relaxed state was giving way to a video arcade of blinking wonderments and beeping forebodings. A chill, like current from a nuclear icicle, vibrated her sex-softened spine.

“Wiggs,” she asked, after a while — she was clearly afraid to phrase the question—"Wiggs" — her brain stem was quivering as if it were being prodded by a jewel—"Wiggs, is it. . Pan. . who's leaving the beets?”

“No,” he answered, without hesitation.

Somewhat relieved, Priscilla raised herself on one elbow. In the process, she accidentally struck her worktable, causing lab ware to tinkle and slosh. It was a miracle, she thought, that they hadn't dumped the whole enterprise in the throes of their passion.

“But the smell. .”

“The smell is Pan's, all right.”

“It is?”

“Indeed. Though it isn't old Pan who's deliverin' the beets. As a matter o' fact, Pan is tryin' to prevent the delivery o' the beets. Pan is tryin' to interfere with the delivery o' the beets. Only your god is weak and limited, nowadays, and there's little he can do but leave a reminder o' himself — and the powers that he represents — to discourage the recipient and him that is leavin' beets.”

“And that is. .?” She sounded calm enough, but she was quaking inside.

“Me.”

“You?”

“'Tis me left all the homely little vegetables at your door. 'Tis me leavin' 'em with V'lu Jackson. I've spent a small fortune flyin' to New Orleans and back. Fortunately, I have me royalties. And 'tis a friend o' mine from the acid days been droppin' 'em off for Marcel LeFever. He's a professor in Paris and his son works in the mailroom at the LeFever Building. Were ye aware that Marcel and V'lu have been gettin' beets, as well?”

“Well, no. Hell no, I wasn't aware—”

“I'm sorry, but ye didn't have an exclusive contract, ye know.”

“Why, Wiggs? Why the goddamn beets?”

“I can't tell ye, darlin'. I'd dearly love to tell ye, but I can't. I gave Alobar me word. The fairies would cause me terrible sufferin' if I broke me vow.”

“But—”

“Listen. Don't fret. Ye can figure it out for yourself. If you think about it real hard and be puttin' two and two together, it will come to ye. Clear as the tap water that spoils your man's whiskey. Just give it some thought.”

Priscilla agreed and set into thinking, but Wiggs suggested they chew up some geoduck first. Since she hadn't eaten in a couple of days, she agreed to that, also.

After tidying themselves a bit, they set out by taxi for Never Cry Tuna, the new restaurant on Lake Union. Sure enough, Trixie Melodian was working there.

“Amaryllis Tidroe got the grant,” Trixie said.

Priscilla wasn't surprised. “Oh, goody! I can't wait to see eight-by-ten glossies of Mrs. Masked Marvel.”

“You're taking it awfully well,” said Trixie.

“Not to mention Mrs. Garp—”

“I thought he wrote books.”

“—and the various loving helpmates of the midget tag team.”

“I could eat the midget tag team,” said Wiggs.

“One order of shrimp with mussels,” said Priscilla.

“Jesus,” moaned Trixie. “If I'd gotten that grant, I wouldn't be here listening to this.”

Priscilla wanted Wiggs to spend the night at her place, but he claimed that Huxley Anne would be needing him bright and early. “But tomorrow's Saturday,” said Pris.

“We watch cartoons together,” said Wiggs.

Since no invitation to join them appeared forthcoming, she kissed him good night in the lobby and climbed the lonely stairs, stumbling often enough in her ascent to insure exclusion from all future Everest expeditions.

As she lay on the sofa digesting the geoduck, she figured out that beets must be the secret ingredient, the elusive base note, in K23. Why else would Wiggs be bombarding perfumers with them? Yet, how could that be? A beet had no memorable aroma, and it would turn a perfume the color of Dracula's mouthwash.

It was puzzling. And it might be academic, as well, if she couldn't recover the bottle. The loss of the bottle was one of those “harsh realities” with which she was not unfamiliar. If she was relatively equanimious about it, it was because Wiggs was teaching her that “harsh realities” were not the only realities: that there were many different realities, and to a certain extent, with the proper focus of energy, one could choose which reality one wished to live. One might even outwit the harshest reality of all.

For the third night in a row, Pris fell asleep in El Papa Muerta's sailor dress, its wine-dark ketchup stains now counterbalanced by scrumbles of chalky semen. As she drifted into sleep, she had the feeling that she was waking up.Out of the frying pan and into the hot tub, she thought.

In the week that followed, Priscilla fiddled with her lab equipment, meditated upon the beet, spent the funds that she'd been saving to purchase jasmine oil on a private detective ("I'm positive Ricki Sinatra has my bottle"), and worried, progressively as each day passed, that she'd not hear from Wiggs again. On Saturday, however, her presence was requested at the Last Laugh Foundation to participate in “the Alobar-Kudra bath ritual.”

The line outside the Foundation walls seemed slightly longer and considerably more agitated than usual. People hollered rude things at her when she was let through the gate.

“'Tis the news background,” explained Wiggs. “The Middle East is smokin' cigars in the fireworks stand again, and that shallow jackass in the White House is waggin' his nuclear-headed peepee at the Russians. People are nervous.”

“I don't get it, Wiggs. I mean, if there's such a universal longing for immortality, if the human race is going bananas because it can't accept any more that it has to die, why do we still have wars? All this military violence seems to contradict your theory.”

“Not in the least,” he replied, loosening, like an iguana butcher, the spinal column of one of his beloved zippers. “Your common man is willin' to go to war only because he hates death so much.”

Having successfully filleted his own trousers, he seized the triangular viper-head of Priscilla's fly and rib by rib, pulled it apart. “Don't you see? The enemy represents Death to 'em. The government propaganda mills paint the enemy as an unfeelin', devourin' monster. So, when we go to war we go on a noble mission, a life-affirming mission, whose object is the destruction o' death. And 'tis precisely because we hate death so much that we're too crazed and irrational to see the irony in it. We hate death so bloody much that we will kill — and die — in order to try to halt its march.”

In unison, they stepped out of their pants. Their gap-toothed zippers, split like the vertebrae of a temple sacrifice, made a tiny clink when they hit the tiles of the tub-room floor.

“As a grandiose self-deception, war is o' the same magnitude as religion. We embrace war or religion — usually both at the same time — as a means o' defeatin' death, but neither o' them do a blinkin' thing but sanction dyin'. Throughout history, Death's best friend has been a priest with a knife.”

At their feet, the zippers shuddered.

They lowered themselves into the steaming water, tensing at first from the shock of the heat, then relaxing until they were as buoyant as sausages.

“Ahhh. How many can you get in this tub?”

“Ahhh. Six, as a rule. You can fit eight, but 'tis rather crowded.”

“If it wasn't for death, the world would be eight in a tub.”

“Uh?”

“Overpopulation. If nobody died, pretty soon it would be standing room only.”

“That's one o' the standard arguments in favor o' death, but it doesn't hold water. Or whiskey, either. We don't have an overpopulation problem, we have a land-use problem. We're sprawlin' out all over the place, like hogs in a rose garden, takin' up a thousand times more space than we need. If we were to stress vertical growth instead o' horizontal, if we were to build tall apartment complexes instead of acres o' one-story ticky-tackies, there'd be more than enough room. If we built tall enough, and we have the technological capability, we could double the world's population and still fit every single one of us into the state o' Texas. Comfortably, I might add. The rest o' the planet could be given over to agriculture and recreation. And wilderness. We could have elephant herds again. Buffalo on Main Street.”

“That would be nice,” she said. “Speaking of vertical development, I thought hot water was supposed to take the starch out of this.” She slipped her fingers around his half-hard penis. It immediately grew taller. Were it an apartment building, they could have moved another hundred families in.

“Love, little darlin', defies the laws o' physics. Or, rather, it breaks the habits.”

As she stroked him, he tapped his moisture-studded eye patch and, with some difficulty, continued to hold forth on his favorite theme.

“Besides, not everybody is goin' to give up death. The death wish is very strong, and a lot o' people prefer to die. You'd be surprised at the number who say their lives are so miserable they couldn't bear the thought o' lengthenin' 'em.”

“Speaking of lengthening. .”

“Alobar says you aren't supposed to do this until after the soak.”

“Sorry. You know, my daddy used to say, 'Life is rough, and then you die.'”

“Bad attitude,” said Wiggs.

“Then he'd wink and say, 'But, meanwhile, there's Mardi Gras.'”

“Your father was willin' to enjoy some crumbs, but not the whole cake.”

“But his life was short and rough. Maybe most lives are. I read once that it takes a chicken-plucking machine barely forty seconds to complete the job.”

“Indeed. But remember, at that point the chicken is only naked, not dead.”

“Speaking of which. .”

“Okay, darlin'. Okay.”

Wiggs placed his palms beneath her reddening buttocks and, assisted by the water, lifted her up, centered her, then lowered her slowly onto the length of his shaft. When she struck bottom, she emitted a primitive cry, coming almost immediately. He lifted her off again. The entire procedure occurred in the span of time it would have taken a chicken-plucking machine to defeather a drumstick.

When she could speak, she said, “If we did die — you and me, I mean — you could come back as a lily pad, and I'd be a very happy frog.”

“A pleasant arrangement, but let's not be countin' on it.”

“I'm surprised you don't believe in reincarnation.”

“Why? 'Tis probably just another rationalization. Reincarnation — or the transmigration o' souls — was an idea spawned in one o' the most rigid social systems humanity has ever devised. Your ancient Hindu was stuck like a gnat in amber. Durin' his lifetime, he was obliged to live in a prescribed place with a prescribed family and practice a prescribed occupation. The possibility o' mobility did not exist. The hand you were dealt at birth was the hand you played. Everythin' was predestined, and you couldn't change a bleedin' dot o' it. Since they had no chance o' change in life, 'tis only natural they fantasized about change in the afterlife. Reincarnation was simply a fantasy your Hindu perpetuated to keep his rigid reality model from drivin' him mad.

“That's why Kudra, by the way, was such a remarkable figure. Can you imagine the odds against a tenth-century Hindu, especially a woman, breakin' out o' those fetters? When it comes to liberatin' the Indians, Kudra's example is worth a barrel o' Gandhis.”

“I can appreciate that. But how can you be positive we don't reincarnate?”

“Oh, I can't. You can't be positive about anything regardin' an afterlife. There's not a dot o' proof anywhere.”

“Well, now, what about those people who die temporarily on the operating table? They seem to have very similar experiences. Leaving their bodies behind with relief, feelings of great tranquillity and love, reuniting with deceased friends and relatives. And most of them describe an encounter with some kind of light. .”

“Who knows? Maybe it signifies that the best is yet to come, which suits me, I guarantee. On the other hand, we know that the brain remains electrically alive for up to thirty minutes after the heart and other vital organs have ceased to function. So these 'heavenly' experiences o' the temporarily dead may be merely an archetypal drama unfolding upon the stage o' departin' consciousness, a farewell performance of a powerful mythological allegory. And when the brain turns the juice off a half-hour later, boom, the curtain falls once and for all; the show is over, and there's no waitin' up for the reviews. Ultimate solitude. As for the light, well, all o' matter is condensed light. We came from light, each of us, so where's the wonder that we return to it in death?”

“So, you're saying any way we slice it we're doomed.”

“Not at all, Pris. I'm sayin' that we don't know what the afterlife is like, we absolutely do not know. Therefore, until we do know, we ought to do our best to go on livin'.”

“But how will we ever know?”

“Should your man Alobar make contact with Kudra, we'd learn a lot, we would. 'Tis a long shot, but I believe it might still be done. Part o' the secret lies in the perfume.”

They climbed from the tub to allow their blood to cool. The tiles pressed like frozen petals against their flesh. Their bodies gave off a painterly glow. An Old Master glow. Still Life With Boiled Beets.

“Amazing, Wiggs.”

“What's that?”

“Amazing. After all that talking, your pole is still up.”

“I'm not Gerry Ford, ye know. I can do more than one thing at a time.”

Grinning, she hovered over him. Then, like a fist closing around a doorknob, her grin closed around him. With her lips, she turned the knob first one way and then the other: left, right, open, shut; left, right, open, shut. The knob did not squeak. In fact, Wiggs was unusually quiet.

Now, falling into rhythm, she sucked the knob from its axle, sucked the axle from its door, the door from its hinges. Out onto the lawn, tempo increasing, she sucked up the flagstone walk, the rosebushes, the petunia bed, the sprinkler, the driveway, and the small Japanese car parked in the driveway: Oh, what a feeling! Toyota! Wiggs moaned as the neighborhood disappeared.

The towers of the city began to sway, and soon, the planet itself fell victim to the force, swelling at its equator, throbbing at its poles. It wobbled violently on its axis, once, twice, then exploded. The Big Bang theory, proven at last. Continuing to impersonate a black hole, she pulled in every drop and particle — she'd never had a man in such entirety — and it wasn't until the final spasm had subsided and the cosmos was at peace that she loosened her grip and, lips glistening like the Milky Way, looked up to see — the legs of a third party standing there.

“Ach! I am fery sorry.”

Wolfgang Morgenstern, nude except for a towel about his hips, turned stiffly and strode, with steps of Prussian exactitude, from the tub room. Dr. Morgenstern was red-faced, sweaty, and breathless. Presumably, his condition was due to his jumping — his immortalist dance, his solo jitterbug — and not to the effects of the cosmic spectacle that he had stumbled upon.

“God! I'm mortified. I'm so embarrassed I could die.” Priscilla covered her face with her hands, surreptitiously wiping the corners of her mouth.

“Did you hear what you just said? 'Mortified. I could die.' Pris, ye must never use such expressions. They are unconscious manifestations o' the death wish. You're signalin' the universe that death is not only acceptable but deserved.”

“Oh, Wiggs!”

“And as for your Nobel laureate, 'tis high time he had a taste o' quality entertainment. He does seem to be gettin' younger, to tell the truth, but I don't know what good 'tis doin' him, cooped up in his room.”

Wiggs pulled her hands away from her face and kissed her. “Darlin', ye were magnificent.”

“I was?”

“Truly. Ye must promise me now, no more expressions such as, 'I'm so embarrassed I could die' or 'The suspense is killin' me.'”

“I'll try. But how will I ever face him?”

“With pride,” said Wiggs. “With pride.”

They slid back into the Jacuzzi.

Minus the extra heat of desire, the water seemed cooler now. They submerged to their chins in the tropical broth, the pot of doldrums, the horse latitudes that modern landlubbers had domesticated and miniaturized, wrapping themselves willingly in its enervating ripples.

“You know, Wiggs,” she said, her voice softened to near inaudibility by the sultry climate, “it seems like with you everything leads back to the subject of death.”

“Sure and show me the person's road that does not lead to death. We try to divert our attention, to pretend 'tisn't so, but the very air we breathe is vulture's breath. Please don't be insinuatin' your man is morbid. I dwell on death in order to defeat it.”

“But suppose death is necessary to evolution. What if we have to give up our bodies so that we can evolve off the earth plane, move on to a higher plane? It might be foolish and regressive to cling to our physical bodies.”

“Might be. Although life on the astral plane has always held a minimum o' charm for me. No whiskey, no books, no Frederick's o' Hollywood. And if it should turn out that there is no astral evolution, where does that leave your poor dead self? 'Tis a gamble I'm not willin' to take.”

“After the gambles you've taken with vision root, all those psychological deaths and rebirths, how could you still be afraid of regular old dying.”

“Sure and I'm not afraid o' dying. Never have been. Death can't do anything to us because death is dead. What's dead can't hurt ye. Fear is not the issue. Like your man Alobar, I'm less scared than resentful. We've got ourselves stuck in a cyclic system that makes true freedom, true growth impossible. In the arts, a period o' classicism is followed by a period o' romanticism. Then 'tis back to the classical again. 'Tis as simpleminded as a bloody pendulum, and for me, at least, it robs art of any real meaning. Same thing in society. A conservative cycle, a liberal cycle, then a conservative cycle again. Action and reaction, back and forth, like the tides. As long as we're trapped in these cycles, we can't expect much in the way o' liberation, we can't even expect fundamental change except the awful slow variety where each step takes a million years or more. For most of our history, we were trapped by the seasonal cycles, the weather cycles. Now, however, we can at least move south for the winter, north for the summer. The seasons still operate cyclically, but we don't have to submit to 'em. All I'm askin' is for that kind o' mobility in life as a whole. I'm askin' for the opportunity to break out o' the birth-death cycle. Ye see what I mean? 'Tis far too rigid and predictable to suit me. Cycles take the meaning out o' life, just as they do in art. Me hope is this: certain individuals have always managed to break out o' the artistic and social cycles — that's why I love and respect your individual more than I love and respect humanity at large. Maybe, maybe, the time is ripe for certain individuals to escape the birth-death cycle, as well. And I don't mean by vaporizin' into the void o' Buddhist Nirvana, either. Maybe Alobar has done just that. Maybe I can do it, as well. And maybe — as long as I'm into the maybes — some cycle-buster will come along to rescue mankind from the hollow tides o' mortality.”

“We deserve a break today?”

“We do.”

“Dying is a bad habit?”

“Yes, and must be broken.”

“Good luck, Wiggs.”

“Thanks. You know, there is one condition under which I might willingly die. Might even take me own life.”

“You're joking?”

He shook his head as somberly as an elephant. “If anything ever happened to Huxley Anne, I think I would choose to die, too, just on the chance that we could be together.”

“Oh.”

Wiggs was quiet for a while. A tear bubbled up, like a syllable from a flounder, in his single eye. It hung upside down from his lower lid, like a transparent sloth from a ledge, until gravity finally pried it loose, sending it plunging, silently, headlong, salt and all, into the anonymity of the steaming tub.

“One last thing about death,” said Wiggs.

“What's that?” Pris asked rather morosely. She was still staring at the spot where his teardrop had hit the water.

“After you die, your hair and your nails continue to grow.”

“I've heard that.”

“Yes. But your phone calls taper off.”

Once more, they climbed out onto the tiles to cool. Then, another hot soak and a final cooling. They toweled and slipped into their underpants, his as crisp and green as a shamrock, hers a faded, indeterminable color ringed with sagging elastic. They donned their pants, his of tweed, hers of denim, and, with the hands of miracle workers, restored to wholeness the golden salamanders that held the pant fronts together.

He'd made it clear she was not to stay the night. Seemed he and Huxley Anne had plans for early morning. So she embraced him at the door, feeling a trifle, well, vulnerable, insecure, and was steeling herself for the walk home when he asked, “Well, how's it comin' with the perfume?”

She hadn't wanted to speak of perfume for fear she might blurt out something about the bottle. She dare not tell him of the bottle, but, rather, must show it to him, must hold it up to that gleaming orb of his and watch the silver hairs stand on his head like the bristles of a robot's toothbrush. How she looked forward to that moment!

“I've come to the conclusion,” she said, “that beet is the bottom note in K23. Am I right?”

Hesitant to respond, he eventually nodded in the affirmative, trusting that the fairies, that the Salmon That Fed on the Nine Hazel Nuts of Poetic Art, that his ex-wife's knickers would not regard a nod a breach of promise.

“I thought so. But how in the world is it used? I really can't figure out. .”

“You're the perfumer.”

It was Priscilla's turn to nod in agreement, but to herself she said, “Ha! I'm an unemployed waitress without an ounce of first-rate jasmine to my name. And if I don't get lucky, and fast, this time next week I'll be hustling nachos at someplace like Gourmet de Tijuana.”

The way she backed through the door, waving good-bye, sort of burdened and flustered, you'd have thought that she had suddenly and inadvertently cornered the world market in refried beans.

In truth, Priscilla felt a twinge of resentment that she had to return to her little studio apartment. Certainly there was plenty of room for her at the Last Laugh Foundation. Why, Christ and all twelve disciples could have dwelt in the Last Laugh Foundation, although Judas would have had to sleep on the sun porch.

She walked down the path feeling like three-fourths of two pieces of slug bait. As she passed the letter box at the guard gate, she had an urge to stick a stamp on her forehead and mail herself to the Abominable Snowman.

On the street, it was worse. The crowd of aspiring immortalists was restless and surly. They glared at her as if she were a piece of modern art at a county fair. A hostile sneer here, a puzzled laugh there, and not a blue ribbon in sight.

Apparently, there recently had been a provision run, because many in line were munching on fast-food hamburgers. They were old enough to know better. Some of them were old enough to remember when old McDonald had a farm.

People used to die from germs. Now they died from bad habits. That was what Dr. Dannyboy said. Heart disease was caused by bad personal habits, cancer was caused by bad industrial habits, war was caused by bad political habits. Dannyboy believed that even old age was a habit. And habits could be broken. Priscilla felt like lecturing the crowd on its habits and sending it home, but, of course, she did not.

Toward the end of the line, she thought she heard a white-haired guy on crutches remark that it was December 7, “the thirty-fifth anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Bailey.” He was wrong. It was then December 8.

Five days later, on December 13, Pris gave Wiggs Dannyboy a call. She was in a funk about their “relationship,” a snit compounded by the detective's lack of progress, and was desperate enough to try to force a talk.

“Pris, me darlin', 'tis happy I am that ye called!”

“Really?”

“Sure and I couldn't be happier was I to learn that God and the Devil had settled out o' court, endin' once and for all the ridiculous notion of a struggle between good and evil that has provided the religious o' the world with a pious excuse to kill and plunder and has spoiled the plot o' many a novel. I couldn't be happier was I to grow another eye, one that shines in the night like a wolf's eye and can twist on its stalk to look up a lassie's skirt. I couldn't be happier was Alobar to be released from the nick, which, indeed, he may be next month, if it's not too late. As fortunate as I am to be born an Irishman and thus possess a license to broadcast this brand o' pseudolyrical bullshit, that's how fortunate I am that you — I mean, ye — called. I would have called ye but ye haven't a phone.”

“Don't mock the afflicted.”

“Or I would've dropped by, except I've been to New Orleans to deliver a certain vegetable. Ye know what I mean?”

“All too well.”

“I do have good news. Marcel 'Bunny' LeFever has successfully buried his Uncle Luc and has aimed his wondrous nose again in our direction. Dr. Morgenstern and I — he sends his regards, by the way — are planning another dinner party, if we can coax the university scientists away from their research for the CIA. A week from tonight, I think, and ye must come. Only this time ye must sit next to me; to me left, would be proper, so's I can rest me left hand on your tender thigh while I am liftin' a sociable glass with me right.”

“Wiggs?”

“Yes, love?”

“You've had me to dinner, and now Marcel LeFever is coming. I'm curious why you haven't had my stepmother or V'lu.”

“Oh, I invited them. As a matter of fact, I just learned on this trip to New Orleans that V'lu actually flew to Seattle to attend the last dinner. I have no idea why she didn't show up.”

“Wait a minute. V'lu was in town the night of that party?”

“Yes. Stayed overnight and returned home the next day.”

Adrenaline welled in Priscilla with such pressure it was practically shooting out of her major orifices.

“Wiggs,” she said, “I have to make a trip to New Orleans myself.”

“When?”

“Right away.”

“Will ye be back in time for the party?”

“I hope so. If I am, I'll have a surprise for you.”

“Goody. I love surprises.”

“Good-bye then.”

“Bye-bye, Pris. Have a lovely trip and watch out for the bees.”

After she hung up, she thought, Watch out for the bees? Whatever did he mean?

She would find out soon enough.

The Chinese discovered gunpowder by accident while trying to invent a potion that would alchemically lengthen life.

It is unclear what the Chinese were trying to invent when they discovered spaghetti. Perhaps the spaghetti noodle, too, was a byproduct of longevity research, of an effort to live a won, won ton; a futile attempt to avoid facing the question, “Who's going to chop your suey when I'm gone?”

No matter. It may be prudent, however, for would-be immortals to bear in mind the Chinese experience. Seeking prolonged existence, they ended up with gunpowder, the elixir of death, not life; the propellant of history's innumerable tragic bullets, including the ones that felled Gandhi, John Lennon, and Bambi's mother — and the one that left Bingo Pajama facedown on Royal Street.

Figuratively and literally, New Orleans was buzzing. It was an angry black buzz in counterpoint with a terrified white buzz: historically typical of that city where slaves liberated themselves long before Lincoln, where a black aristocracy flowered to rival the only true white aristocracy in America, where a black voodoo queen once ruled as completely (if covertly) as any Catherine of Russia; where African mystery, large, organic, and powerful, has provided a soundtrack of primeval rhythm against which all metropolitan life — stodgy white commerce as well as fierce black pleasure — has had to unfold.

Even in slavery, the blacks called the tune. Proud and virtually fearless, they danced in Congo Square in such a graceful abandon, in such harmony with unseen forces, that their owners acted to outlaw African dancing lest it escalate into rebellion. And all the while, even as the owners drafted proclamation after proclamation of wiggle prohibition, their white toes tapped in their shoes. White folks have controlled New Orleans with money and guns, black folks have controlled it with magic and music, and although there has been a steady undercurrent of mutual admiration, an intermingling of cultures unheard of in any other American city, South or North; although there has prevailed a most joyous and fascinating interface, black anger and white fear has persisted, providing the ongoing, ostensibly integrated fête champêtre with volatile and sometimes violent idiosyncrasies.

Due to their poverty, anger, and moral imperatives, some New Orleans blacks were disposed to create a jazz of robbery. Due to their insecurity, fear, and religious philosophy, some New Orleans whites were disposed to compose hymns of brutality. The thieves tooted out of the federal housing projects — they were young, spirited, and pessimistic. The cops lumbered out of the bayous — they were paunchy, insensitive, and easily manipulated by authoritarian dogmas. On the one side, playground slam-dunkers, jive-talkers and second-line parade dancers with an easy propensity for redistributing wealth; on the other, good ol' boys who, up until getting their badges and patrol cars, went slender-pole fishing by day and slammed each other around by night. Clashes were inevitable, but the white boys had the law on their side.

Umm, but the air here is getting thick with sociology. We are discussing New Orleans, after all, the city Louis Armstrong said “has got that thing.” (As for the identity of “that thing,” Louis said, in the most Zen statement ever made by a westerner, “If you have to ask, you'll never know.") Perhaps it is time for a riff.

"New Orleans"

She went to the school of Miss Crocodile

Where she learned to walk backwards

And skin black cats with her teeth.

Soon she could wear the loot of dead pirates

Cook zee perfect gumbo

And telephone the moon collect.

But it took sixty-six doctors to fix her

After she kissed that snake.

New Orleans was buzzing. A Jamaican flower peddler and street singer named Bingo Pajama had been shot and killed by two off-duty policemen who claimed they were trying to make an arrest. Pajama, a suspect in the bizarre death of a fellow officer, made a threatening move, according to the cops. They pulled down on him with their.38 Specials.

The black community was not swallowing that trash. Too often, in Louisiana, blacks suspected of having killed policemen were themselves slain by their arresting officers. It smacked of revenge by execution, and it had become routine. Also routine were the hearings in which the cops were cleared of any wrongdoing. It was the sort of situation that turned a second-liner's bile a dangerous hue, the sort that could build into a “race riot.”

Although Bingo Pajama was from out of town, a foreigner with a funny accent, a bum who kept bees but had no hive; a mysterious, clownish figure known well by none, the blacks of the city adopted him posthumously. They went so far as to send him off with a jazz funeral.

Mourners poured out of the projects, out of the shotgun houses below Canal Street, out of barrooms and gumbo parlors, out of the Baptist church at Liberty and First and the Hoodoo church on Rampart, and with a mighty brass band leading the way (horns wailing in the modes of both Satchmo and Bird, drums re-creating the phantom energies of the Congo), with umbrellas twirling (although the day was dry), feathers flashing, joints smoldering, bottles gurgling, and fingers snapping, they strutted and stomped, rambled and hooted, all the way to the French Quarter, through the Quarter, and back to the Central City again. A horse-drawn hearse bore the coffin, but there was no corpse in it. The police had the corpse and wouldn't release it. Inside the coffin was a bouquet of jasmine branches, crushed and faded but so potently sweet it perfumed the length of the parade.

Although the funeral was typically merry, a wild, winding party ("In yo' face, Mr. Death") enjoyed by all, it was fueled by an ill-concealed cache of anger. Dark curses were shouted at police cars, and placards of somber protest appeared along the way. That night, an ancient work began behind locked shutters. Black candles were burned, bitter powders were sprinkled, crude objects were fashioned of wood or wax, pythons were addressed, and chickens were put to uses that would have shocked the pants off Colonel Sanders, not to mention Julia Child.

There were formal protests, as well. A steady stream of black community leaders visited the police department and city hall, demanding justice. So great was the outcry that the mayor wasted little time in scheduling a hearing. At the insistence of blacks, and of white liberals, a special commission was appointed to conduct the investigation. To the dismay of “law-and-order” factions, only one policeman was named to the panel.

According to reports, several people had witnessed the shooting of the Jamaican. Two had viewed it at close range. Two women, the story went, one white, one black. And the white woman was said to be tight with blacks. Why, it was ol' Madame Devalier, the French Quarter perfumer, a one-time supplier of Special Delivery Oil, she who was rumored to possess the secret of hurricane drops!

So New Orleans buzzed. Black folks buzzed. White folks buzzed. Bingo Pajama's bees buzzed. And the bee buzz was the most disturbing of all.

It was a tiny swarm: fifty bees at the outside, maybe only forty. Their number was to their advantage. A swarm of many thousands, as is customary in a honey colony, would have been easily tracked and cornered, but a fist of forty, flying in excess of a dozen miles per hour and climbing to altitudes loftier than New Orleans' tallest building, could be elusive, evading entomological patrols and escaping DDT barrage or apiarian capture.

With his life, the bees left Bingo Pajama. Nobody saw them go. They flew away in the night with his soul. Only the pollen grains that the coroner found in the slain man's hair indicated that they had ever existed.

Ah, but the next morning! When the streetlamps went out, the bees lighted up. Wearing the dawn like silver on their wings, they returned in a glassy phalanx to the scene of the crime. Like a glass spearhead come suddenly to life, like an animated dagger with an angry voice, like an electrified pineapple spike; like a darting fish made of noisy sparks, half full of fire and half full of cold, the swarm circled the death scene, diving and looping, again and again, a crazed cactus loose in the air, humming defiance, forty little spines dripping poison and pain.

For most of the day, reporters, photographers, police investigators, sympathizers, and curiosity-seekers were held at bay. Those who challenged the swarm's territorial claim retreated quickly with burning welts about the neck and face. From time to time, the swarm would settle on the map of dried blood where their master had lain. It was as if they were feeding there. A newsman or a cop would grow brave, but at his approach—banzai! — the missile would launch itself, screaming toward target.

In late afternoon, beekeepers were brought in. Like brides behind their protective veils, they wooed the golden phallus, but it would not surrender to them. It scorned their traps of honey, its forty tongues preferring to lick crusty blood.

Curses and consternation abounded. From a nearby telephone booth, calls were made to universities and the Department of Agriculture. “This is not your common North American honeybee,” said an entomologist gazing through binoculars. He was probably correct. According to an official handbook, “Stinging requires a bee to use twenty-two different muscles.” These bees used twenty-three.

At nightfall, the swarm departed, but it returned the next day. So did the media and the crowds. Barricades were set up. Traffic was snarled. The proud pragmatism of civilized intelligence was being insulted again by goofy nature. It was time for might to make things right.

Spray teams were dispatched. Foggers from the swamplands. Experts at gassing mosquitos. Their Jeeps pulled trailers with compressors and hoses and metal tanks full of gaseous insecticides. They wiped out every cricket in the neighborhood and mutated countless future generations of mockingbirds. But the swarm took to the sky, disappearing through a trapdoor in a low-flying, and ominously dark, cumulus cloud.

Thirty minutes later, it flew through an open window at city hall, where the chief of police was explaining to the district attorney that that very swarm had been used as a murder weapon by Bingo Pajama and would be useful as an exhibit during the hearing for the courageous officers who, in self-defense, had eliminated the mad Jamaican. “Here's your exhibit, Chief,” yelled a mayoral aide, diving for cover. Exhibit B.

Faces swollen and painted pink with calamine lotion, the city fathers looked like buffoons that evening on the six-o'clock news.

The bees were not seen again until the next afternoon, when they followed Bingo Pajama's funeral parade along its entire route. None of the marchers was stung, and it was reported by a trombonist and a couple of second-liners that the swarm kept time with the band.

After that, the bees played hide-and-seek. They were observed all over the city. They appeared in the Garden District, in the Irish Channel, uptown, downtown, in Audubon Park, along the lakefront, the riverfront, on Metairie Ridge, and in the forgotten voodoo groves of Bayou St. John. Nobody could guess where they would strike next. They harassed cops on the beat, dive-bombed adulterous judges on the patios of Lake Pontchartrain love nests, interrupted work on the Mafia wharfs, and sent tourists running from Jackson Square, portraits half-painted, Sno-Kones half-eaten and spilled on the bricks. The press began to speak of the swarm as if it were a terrorist band.

Like a necklace of gouged-out crocodile eyes — yellow-green and menacing, shiny and ancient — the renegade bees encircled New Orleans, a mosaic albatross that wouldn't lie still.

Such was the situation in New Orleans when Priscilla arrived: a buzz of black anger, a buzz of white fear; a buzz of multicolored rumor, panic, and superstition; a buzz of bees.

Initially, she scarcely noticed. After two days and three nights on a Greyhound bus (the detective had refused to refund her retainer, and she was functioning far below the summit of her economic potential), her homecoming was rather numb.

She headed directly to the Quarter, to Royal Street, to the Parfumerie Devalier, only to find the shop dark. It was shuttered and locked. After a night's rest on a lumpy mattress at a YWCA, she returned to the shop, truly expecting it to be open for business. Still it was closed. Moreover, with Christmas hardly a week away, the quaint little perfume-bottle nativity scene that had graced Madame Devalier's show window every December for as long as Priscilla could remember was nowhere in sight.

Lingering over a café au lait at Morning Call, she speculated that the shop's closure was connected to the bottle of K23. It was not. It was connected to the buzz.

I'll bet they're in Paris or New York, making some kind of deal, thought Priscilla.

In fact, Lily Devalier and V'lu Jackson were nowhere near Paris. They were in Baton Rouge.

A few hours after Bingo's shooting, threatening phone calls began to jangle into the shop. Rough voices warned Madame and her assistant not to testify against the policemen who had blown the Jamaican down. “Whatever are we to do, cher?” asked Madame. “It could be the cops threatening us, or it could be the Klan.”

“Whut's de difference?” asked V'lu.

As the public furor increased, so did the threats. Madame grew woozy and could no longer answer the phone. She would have her nose parked on the rim of Kudra's bottle, saying something such as, “You know, cher, I believe this to be a deceptively simple boof. A fine jasmine middle, a citrus top, and a single bottom. Oui, single. Three ingredients only. But, ooh-la-la, what could that bottom. .” And the phone would ring, and she'd turn woozy. V'lu would lift the receiver, and clear across the room Madame would hear the man. He had a voice like a biceps.

“Who dat say dat?” V'lu would inquire.

“The man who's gonna love lynching your black ass.” Click.

When Wiggs Dannyboy's most recent beet hit the floor upstairs, V'lu nearly fainted alongside Madame. Both were so convinced it was a firebomb that they actually smelled gasoline.

Madame was conditioned not to complain to the police. Eventually, however, she complained to the press. The press told everybody in Louisiana. And when it was through telling them, it told them again.

Meanwhile, the governor suggested to the mayor that it might be wise to move the hearing out of New Orleans, move it, say, to Baton Rouge. The mayor suspected the governor of wanting to bale a bit of political hay, but he didn't care. The mayor was scared of that hearing. He admitted to the governor that he was scared of demonstrations, scared of protests and violence. The governor could tell that the mayor was also scared of the bees.

Although the hearing was not scheduled to commence until after the holidays, the governor had Madame Devalier and V'lu Jackson moved to a motel near the capital. They had separate rooms and were guarded by state patrolmen around the clock. V'lu spent the days reading Edgar Allan Poe in French. Madame sniffed at the bottle and addressed Christmas cards. She addressed no less than three to Priscilla in Seattle, for as the holiday approached, she felt increasingly guilty about the bottle. “It is Pris's boof, too,” she said. Quoth, V'lu, “Nevermore.”

Priscilla, living close to the bone at the New Orleans Y, had her own guilt going. She wrote a long letter to Ricki, apologizing for having accused her falsely. She didn't post it, however. She decided she'd better first make sure Madame and V'lu had the bottle.

Once she took notice of the buzz about her, the contentious whirr, the apprehensive whisper, the unpredictable golden hum, the vibrating mantras of panic and revenge, once her ear focused on the buzz, and her brain examined its origins, variations, and ramifications, Priscilla quickly learned that Madame and V'lu were in Baton Rouge. The address of their motel was a secret, however. Incoming calls were forbidden, and inquiries were curtly discouraged. Resigned to a wait of several weeks, she settled in at the Y and began to look for part-time work as a waitress.

Naturally, she missed the dinner party at the Last Laugh Foundation. The party went on without her. A fresh group of scientists were introduced to Wolfgang Morgenstern, in the hope that this meeting would elevate the prestige of the foundation.

Dr. Morgenstern showed up at table so breathless from jumping that he could barely chew his lettuce.

Huxley Anne told everyone who'd listen about how she'd cleaned out the old greenhouse behind the mansion and was planning to cultivate flowers there: “My daddy's going to smuggle in rare jasmine plants from Jamaica, and I'm gonna be in charge of making them grow.” The biologists on either side of her raised their eyebrows. “Jasmine, all right,” whispered one to his wife. They'd heard the stories about Jamaican marijuana.

Dr. Dannyboy presided, consuming impressive quantities of wine and issuing periodic pronouncements, usually preceded by a knock on his eye patch with whatever inanimate object lay handy. “The most glarin' failure o' the intelligentsia in modern times has been its inability to take comedy seriously.” Things such as that.

At one point, Dannyboy announced, “Paris is yet another contribution o' the Irish. Look it up in your history books, gentlemen. A Celtic tribe called the Parisii founded the place some centuries before the birth of our Lord and Savior. 'Twas a gift from the Micks to the froggies to give them something to justify their arrogance.” Several guests were offended by this, but Marcel LeFever was amused, and fully intended to get a lot of mileage out of it when he returned to France.

In fact, Marcel and Wiggs hit it off famously. When a lonely (and horny) Priscilla telephoned Wiggs on Christmas Eve, Marcel was still there. “Your man is goin' to remain until after New Year's,” Wiggs informed her. “He's infected with perfume, he's its master and its slave. Perfume is beauty to Marcel, 'tis his glory, his opiate, his samadhi, his breakfast sausage as well as his midnight champagne. Oh, to feel about something as passionately yet coherently as your man feels about perfume! That, darlin', is the key to the piggybank o' life. How I wish I could speak to him directly about beets.”

Priscilla felt a pinch of jealousy. “But what about me?” she very nearly whined. Then she recalled the bottle, the ace she might yet play.

“Merry Xmas, Pris. If only I was there to put a little somethin' in your sock.”

“A big something,” corrected Priscilla, feeling sweaty and weak. “And 'tis in me pants you'd be puttin' it.” Her vulnerability to Wiggs was opening her up (as voluntary vulnerability often can) in unexpected ways.

“Ha ha. Indeed. And, say, have ye had a glimpse o' the bees?”

“Well, no, not personally. .”

But just then the swarm rounded the corner, flying in wedge formation, silhouetted against the sunset, screaming like a cutting tool, and a few paces ahead of it, running for his life, his beard and cap flapping wildly, his belly spilling feathers and his tin cup spilling coins, dashed Santa Claus.

The old pagan festival came and went. Neither Seattle nor New Orleans would consent to strike a seasonal pose. Seattle was mild and rainy and as green as Bing Crosby's royalties. New Orleans was mild and sunny and quite accustomed to stringing lights in banana trees.

Snows and ices decorated Concord, Massachusetts, you may be certain, but Alobar could spy no acre of greeting card tableau from his cell. He could see the famous Star of the East, however, and its gelid twinkle reminded him of his first Christmas, that commoner's winter in Aelfric when he learned, with some astonishment, that the face of an executed Eastern rabble-rouser had been carved in the pagan pumpkin.

Marcel and Wiggs sat before a yule log, in a room in which there was scant necessity for blaze, and night after night, in conversation after conversation, rebuilt “reality” from the ruins they'd left it in the night before. They slept late. Afternoons, they assisted Huxley Anne in the greenhouse, where the child was tending, with precocious expertise, an enlarging accumulation of exotic plants. Dr. Morgenstern jumped for something approximating joy.

Priscilla made the rounds of Mexican restaurants, but while there was no shortage in New Orleans of imperfect tacos, she failed to land a job. On New Year's Eve she got drunk and got laid. Upon that, it would be indiscreet to dwell, except to pass along the advice that before going home with a personage one has met in a French Quarter bar, one should make absolutely certain of their gender. Later, she was to refer to the episode, without bitterness, as “Ricki's revenge.”

Alobar boycotted the cell block Christmas party, preferring to sit alone in his cubicle and breathe, even though, thanks to his escalated aging, the sterile steel cubicle had begun to stink like a mouse nest or a potato bin.

The “season” crab-walked by in its emotional shoes, then it was over, it was January 2, the Western world blew its nose, took two aspirins, packed pagan ornaments and plaster mangers to the attic, and set about finding ways to finance the recent indulgences. Bing! The clock, after its celestial wobble, was back on mechanical time, and precise, or, at any rate, measurable, or at least, normal things could happen. Alobar was paroled from prison, the hearings got underway in Baton Rouge, Wiggs (with some help from Bunny LeFever) figured out Where We Are Going and why it smells the way it does, and Huxley Anne became the youngest member ever of the Puget Sound Orchid Society.

Upon learning of Alobar's release, Wiggs and Marcel jetted to Boston to greet him. Over bowls of borscht that resembled the steaming blood of Beowulf's monster, Alobar consented to accompany them back to the Last Laugh Foundation.

“He almost looks a thousand,” Wiggs said to Priscilla over the wire that night. “He's as wrinkled now as a lemon-suckin' prune, his hair has gone white, his torso has shrunk, and he walks stooped over like a dentist. Ah, but he's got the spirit still, and he claims he can recover his youth if he cares to. I've asked him in private if he won't pass the beet to Marcel, let him in on the K23 and all. He's thinkin' it over.”

Again, Priscilla felt an inflation of the green balloon. Striving to conceal her resentment and insecurity, she said, “Wiggs, remember that I said I was going to have a surprise for you? Well, the surprise is for Alobar, too. It's a great big surprise, and it will mean even more to Alobar than to you. It's not quite ready yet, but I think he should see it before he makes any major decisions.”

“Sure and that sounds swell tome, little darlin'. Maybe I'll be bringin' him to New Orleans in a week or two. Marcel is headin' there himself. To see V'lu. They've stayed in touch, and it would seem your man is bloody moo-eyed over her.”

“Ha ha,” said Pris, thinking all the while, I wish you were bloody moo-eyed over me.

The hearings in Baton Rouge lasted ten days. Hardly a session passed in which the two suspended policemen did not protest that the jasmine bouquet that the late Mr. Pajama pointed in their direction could have concealed a gun.

“Yes, it could,” the panel chairman finally agreed. “And the blind man's cane could hide a sword, and the wife's chicken and dumplings could be laced with razor blades, and the lunch boxes of school children could be ticking with bombs.”

It was the panel's recommendation that the cops stand trial, although as a compromise, they would be charged not with murder but manslaughter. When news of the compromise reached New Orleans, it did not exactly turn the Mississippi River into diet soda.

Roosters were heard to squawk at midnight in Central City storefronts.

A cross was burned in front of Parfumerie Devalier, blackening its show window and charring its door.

The bees, which except for a daily fly-by of the Times-Picayune offices had been little seen of late, attacked in a single afternoon six policemen, five politicians, four whiplash lawyers, three used-car salesmen, and two fast-talking disc jockeys — and put the fear of Beelzebub the Bug God into an agnostic from Dallas.

It was decided by the court that the trial should be conducted in Baton Rouge. The judge scheduled it for the middle of February. Concerned by the cross-burning, he ruled that Madame Devalier and V'lu Jackson be kept in protective custody until after the trial.

With difficulty, Priscilla resigned herself to a wait. Yet she did not stand still. Having exhausted the Mexican restaurants of New Orleans as a potential source of gainful employment, she suddenly spun on her dais of habit and set off in a relatively new direction. Abandoning her long-standing obsession to the same fate as the cottage cheese she'd left in her refrigerator in Seattle, she accepted a job in a coffeehouse near Tulane University, where the clientele played chess, wrote poetry, and debated matters of cosmic import (subjects forbidden to “mature” intellectuals unless they first sign an oath to be dry and dispassionate). Inclined to insert her own opinions, especially when a discussion broached issues of life and death, Priscilla rapidly revived her reputation as a genius waitress. For example, she dazzled a party of students one evening by declaring, “To be or not to be isn't the question. The question is how to prolong being."Next thing you know, I'll be drumming on my eyelid with an espresso spoon, she thought.

And she almost believed it.

Since the spirit of Wiggs Dannyboy was upon her, and since Wiggs contended that longing for the future was as antilife as dwelling in the past ("nostalgia and hope stand equally in the way of authentic experience"), Priscilla decided that she must de-emphasize the role in her life of the perfume bottle and its promise of future financial bliss. She refused, however, to relegate her ambition for wealth to the back of the fridge where she'd shoved the allegedly perfect taco. After all, it was Wiggs who once said, “I love the rich.”

Actually, his statement in its entirety was, “The rich are the most discriminated-against minority in the world. Openly or covertly, everybody hates the rich because, openly or covertly, everybody envies the rich. Me, I love the rich. Somebody has to love them. Sure, a lot o' rich people are assholes, but believe me, a lot o' poor people are assholes, too, and an asshole with money can at least pay for his own drinks.”

Priscilla was forced to admit that she missed such pronouncements. The radium-tongued rascal has contaminated me, she thought.

The radium-tongued rascal who had contaminated her, the windy cyclops who had brought both tornado and calm, fog and clear sky into her life, the defrocked anthropologist whom everybody, including Priscilla, suspected of having a bit too much fun, was on a collision course with death and tragedy.

Disaster struck while he was high above the world and its cares, relaxing aboard a Boeing 747 in the company of Marcel LeFever and King Alobar. Sometime during that flight, as the fields and peaks soaked up sweet darkness beneath them, the crowd outside the Last Laugh Foundation in Seattle went mad.

Somebody had supplied beer, cases of it, and many in the crowd had lost their reason in it. About seven o'clock, as much of Seattle was finishing its dinner, a dense, hot, rustic odor swept through the street, and as if it had one mind, one nose, the crowd spontaneously panicked. Something snapped in it, and it rushed the gate, tearing it from its hinges and throwing the guards aside.

Disturbed and anxious, pursued by the smell, the people ripped loose the fairy door knocker and streamed into the mansion, where they raced from room to room, looking for the divine magic that had been denied them. And when they found nothing — no gurgling test tubes or sparking coils, no vials of purple elixirs or leatherbound books bursting with esoteric information, no files, even, that they might plunder; when they found merely a posh modern residence lacking so much as a hint of scientific activity and occupied only by a red-faced man who'd been skipping and leaping about in a bizarre dance, and a young girl playing with potted plants, then they truly panicked.

They ravaged the furnishings, smashing chairs, coffeetables and lamps, defiling the white immortalist walls, hurling Escher prints through stained-glass windows. As mirrors shattered and food flew, several in the midst passed into further frenzy, went beyond the hot madness of disappointment and longing into the cold madness of fear and loathing, and seizing Papuan war clubs from above the fireplace, they bashed the skulls of Wolfgang Morgenstern and Huxley Anne Dannyboy.

Like a fertilized condor egg, filled with blood and promise, the bald head of Dr. Morgenstern split open. He died instantly.

Huxley Anne was not so heavily damaged, although when police arrived she was exhibiting no vital signs and was believed as dead as the professor. Nevertheless, oxygen and CPR were administered. After twenty discouraging minutes, a tiny birthday-candle flame of pulse began to flicker.

She was taken to Swedish Hospital, a few blocks away, and by the time her father got there, physicians were venturing that she had a twenty-five-percent chance of living, although only a ten-percent chance of having escaped permanent brain damage. Should she survive, which was improbable, she would likely be, in terms most disparaging to the consciousness of beets, “no more than a vegetable.”

Naturally, the news traveled swiftly. It involved a famous scientist and the child of an infamous heretic, it involved the “occult” (for that is the context in which the press placed immortalistic research), it involved murder, a guarded mansion, and, probably, drugs. The media snatched it up and streaked with it, galloping toward tons of pay dirt, and Priscilla knew about it almost as soon as Wiggs did.

She heard about it at work. When it had sunk in, and that took a minute or two, she set down her tray, tables away from its destination, untied her apron, and walked out of the coffeehouse. “Where are you going?” yelled the fellow who operated the espresso machine. “Seattle,” she replied.

Of course, she had practically no money. Within minutes, she was back at the coffeehouse, pleading with the manager for an advance on salary. He refused, but when he saw the tears breaking loose, when he recognized that they were massed in huge numbers and might be expected to march, two abreast, for hours, he allowed her to call Seattle on the office phone.

After hacking through several thousand feet of red tape, she managed to reach Wiggs at Swedish Hospital.

“I'll be there as quick as I can get there,” said Priscilla.

“It isn't necessary,” said Wiggs. He spoke with hardly any accent at all. “I appreciate it, but it isn't necessary.”

“I don't care. You'll need help.”

“Marcel and Alobar are with me. Marcel's left an open bottle of her favorite scent by her bed. To call her back. Alobar has some ideas, too. Bandaloop stuff. I'm confident, Pris.”

“You sound pretty good. But I'm sure I can help you.”

“No. Huxley Anne's mum will be here by morning. She'd probably be uncomfortable if you were around.”

“Screw her comfort! Don't you care about me?” The instant she said it, she regretted it.

“I do care. But right now my energy is totally with my daughter.”

“I'm sorry. I understand. You can call me if you need me. Here, or else they'll take a message at the Y.”

She hung up and after a heroic belt of the manager's bourbon, returned to duty. If Huxley Anne died, however, she'd proceed to Seattle with all possible haste, even if she had to steal the funds, because she and she alone knew that if Huxley Anne went, Wiggs would go, as well.

At birth, we emerge from dream soup.

At death, we sink back into dream soup.

In between soups, there is a crossing of dry land.

Life is a portage.

That was the way Marcel LeFever had always looked at it. After his encounters with Dr. Dannyboy and Alobar, after the experience with little Huxley Anne, Marcel began to suspect that it might be more complex than that. He went so far as to consider that there might be more than one type of afterlife experience, that there might be several, that there could be, in fact, as many different death-styles as there were life-styles, and “dream soup” was merely one of dozens from which the dead person might actually choose.

It was pure conjecture, of course. Moreover, he much preferred to think about fragrance. Yet, wasn't fragrance somehow involved? In the case of Huxley Anne, at least it seemed to have played a part. Alobar and Dr. Dannyboy agreed that it had, although the physicians were equally convinced that it had not.

The physicians had no explanation of their own, however, so Marcel was prepared to attribute the miraculous recovery to fragrance, or, rather, an interaction between the powers of fragrance and the powers of human spirit. Why not?

It was a miraculous recovery, no one would deny that. The child lay comatose for nearly a month, neither advancing nor receding, just sort of standing hip-deep in the dream soup, connected to shore by, as they say, “artificial means,” and then, toward midnight on Saint Agnes's Eve, her eyes popped open, she asked, in a completely normal voice, for SpaghettiOs and chocolate-chip cookies, and demanded to know why there was no television in her room. “Mmm, smells good in here,” she said. Within days she was walking the corridors. Were there damaged parts in her brain, they were well concealed.

When he felt that she was strong enough, Wiggs inquired if she had felt at any time, especially during the minutes immediately following the attack, that her soul had left her body. “Oh, Daddy!” she said, “Don't you know that when you die, your soul stops leaving your body?”

“Uh, no. What do you mean?”

“Our souls are leaving our bodies all the time, silly. That's what all the energy is about.”

“You mean the energy field around our bodies is the soul being broadcast out of the body?”

“Kinda like that.”

“And at death this transmission stops?”

“Yes. Can I have some ice cream?”

“In a minute, darling. When your soul stopped leaving your body, what did it feel like?”

Huxley Anne screwed up her face. “Well, kinda like a TV set that wasn't quite off and wasn't quite on. You know, the TV had cartoons in it, but it couldn't send them out.”

“But your, ah, TV set, it didn't go completely off?”

“No. That would have been something different, being all the way off. I didn't want to go off without you, Daddy. I tried hard to stay on. I knew where you were because I could smell my White Shoulders, but it took a little while to get back on all the way and warmed up and everything. Can I have my ice cream now?”

They say that February is the shortest month, but you know they could be wrong.

Compared, calendar page against calendar page, it looks to be the shortest, all right. Spread between January and March like lard on bread, it fails to reach the crust on either slice. In its galoshes — and you'll never catch February in stocking feet — it's a full head shorter than December, although in leap years, when it has growth spurts, it comes up to April's nose.

However more abbreviated than its cousins it may look, February feels longer than any of them. It is the meanest moon of winter, all the more cruel because it will masquerade as spring, occasionally for hours at a time, only to rip off its mask with a sadistic laugh and spit icicles into every gullible face, behavior that grows quickly old.

February is pitiless, and it is boring. That parade of red numerals on its page adds up to zero: birthdays of politicians, a holiday reserved for rodents, what kind of celebrations are those? The only bubble in the flat champagne of February is Valentine's Day. It was no accident that our ancestors pinned Valentine's Day on February's shirt: he or she lucky enough to have a lover in frigid, antsy February has cause for celebration, indeed.

Except to the extent that it “tints the buds and swells the leaves within,” February is as useless as the extra r in its name. It behaves like an obstacle, a wedge of slush and mud and ennui, holding both progress and contentment at bay.

James Joyce was born in February, as was Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo, which goes to show that writers are poor at beginnings, although worse at knowing when to stop.

If February is the color of lard on rye, its aroma is that of wet wool trousers. As for sound, it is an abstract melody played on a squeaky violin, the petty whine of a shrew with cabin fever. O February, you may be little but you're small! Were you twice your tiresome length, few of us would survive to greet the merry month of May.

Confined to its usual length, February still extracted a toll from Priscilla and New Orleans. On Groundhog Day, a carpetbagger freeze turned banana plants as black as seminary shoes, and night after night, the Mississippi exhaled Yukon breath. The small boys who tap-danced for coins on Bourbon Street were forced to compete with their own chattering teeth. Aside from tap and chatter, the Quarter was so quiet it might as well have been in Salt Lake City. Even the bees took refuge from the chill. Where, was anybody's guess.

As for the frost on Priscilla's personal pumpkin, it was neither thick nor withering, but typically Februarian, it was a long time melting.

Once a week, approximately, she received a letter from Wiggs: one paragraph about Huxley Anne (she appeared to be completely healed, but the doctors, “taking no chances,” were keeping her out of school); one paragraph about the restoration of the Last Laugh Foundation (Marcel made financial contributions, while Alobar, who had acquired carpentry skills over the centuries, helped with the actual work); a couple of paragraphs alluding to his new ideas about evolution; and a phrase or two of sexual innuendo. All in all, it wasn't enough to get a young woman in love through a lingering funk such as February. Nevertheless, she wrote him daily and practiced a fairly strict fidelity.

About the time the trial began in Baton Rouge, she learned the exact whereabouts there of Madame and V'lu, but made no attempt to contact them lest she tip her hand. When they returned to New Orleans, she'd retrieve that bottle. If they had it, that is. February is a month for doubt.

Because she was no longer up until dawn trying to make perfume, she was rested and energetic, and since meeting Wiggs, she mainly looked at life, even when it was studded with failures and misfortunes, with a subdued, irrational cheerfulness. So, though she had to battle impatience on several different fronts, and though February lay about her shoulders like a cloak of lead, Priscilla stayed afloat.

Then came March.

On the very first day of March, Wiggs telephoned to announce that Marcel and Alobar were heading to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. Wiggs himself would be joining them in a week or ten days, whenever the doctors gave Huxley Anne the green light. “Take care of them until I get there, please, Pris. Show them the sights. Once V'lu is back in town, you won't have to worry about Marcel, but in the meantime, he and Alobar will need a place to stay and a good spot to watch the parades. You know the city. Alobar's a touch high-strung. Still holding out on the K23. If you've got that surprise for him, it might do him good.”

“I'll do my best. When you come, will you. . will you stay with me?”

“Huxley Anne and I.”

“Oh. All right. Hurry.”

A contrarian, the owner of the coffeehouse made a practice of leaving town during Mardi Gras. He had a three-bedroom flat in the Garden District, and assuming that Marcel would pay, Priscilla sublet it for the first half of March. The master bedroom she claimed for Wiggs and her. And Huxley, damn it, Anne.

She took a bus to the airport and met the flight from Seattle. Marcel deplaned first. She recognized him from the perfumer's convention. His hair was still slicked back and parted in the middle, his suit was expensive, his cologne turned heads, his Vandyke beard shoveled the air in front of him as if he were digging in it, turning it over, searching for diamonds. Or worms. With an elegant gesture, he kissed Priscilla's hand. Then he wrinkled his sturdy nose as if he didn't quite approve of her smell.

Alobar soon followed. Cocooned in the ill-fitting Robert Hall suit that he'd been issued upon parole from Concord Prison, he was obviously an old man — Priscilla would have guessed seventy-five — yet he revealed not a tremor of the fear or fragility that so often causes us to look with pity, or disgust, upon the old. If he was less arrogant than Marcel, he was no less self-confident. He moved through the world as if he was intimate with it, as if he belonged in it, as if there was not the remotest chance that he would fall down in it and break a hip. His manner was vague, but it was the vagueness of a mind distracted by important issues, not enervated by insufficient oxygen supply. In fact, his breathing was deep and smooth, so rhythmic as to be almost hypnotic, and when introduced to Priscilla, he drew in an especially long breath. And winked.

They collected luggage, rented a car, and drove, bumper to bumper, into the hubbub and jubilee of Carnival.

Technically, Carnival had commenced January 6, with the ball of the Twelfth Night Revelers, and had been underway throughout the downcast days of February, but so far Carnival had been a matter of club parties and society balls, closed to the public and made all the more private, all the more small, by the unusually low temperatures. Now, on the Thursday before Mardi Gras, itself — five days before climactic Fat Tuesday — it was sewing on sequins, dusting off cowbells, and ambling into the streets. On Saturday, ninety-six hours of uninterrupted spectacle and debauchery would begin. The parade of the Knights of Momus would, that very Thursday evening, prepare the way.

Priscilla, Marcel, and Alobar were able to watch the Momus parade from the balcony of the sublet flat, where they sipped champagne and munched Cajun popcorn. For the Friday parade, they had to fight for space on the curbs of Canal Street. Saturday evening, they were back on the balcony for a third parade, and later that night, the three of them, en costume, attended a minor but nonetheless ornate ball to which Pris had wrangled invitations. There was something just a trifle unreal about dancing with a thousand-year-old man, Priscilla thought, particularly when the man was dressed as an astronaut chipmunk.

No less than four major parades were scheduled for Sunday. As they sat around the kitchen table Sunday morning, deciding which one they would attend, Marcel thanked Pris for her hospitality, admitting to her that the festivities in New Orleans were grander in every way than Carnival in Nice. That statement prompted from Alobar an expression of disappointment.

“New Orleans Mardi Gras is a sham,” he said. “So is Mardi Gras in Nice. It's all a sham these days. No, I am not living in the past, but believe me, some things have changed for the worse.”

He unbuttoned his shirt, for he was preparing to soak in a tub of hot water. “In olden times, Carnival had meaning. During the forty days of Lent, the forty days before Easter, almost the entire population would abstain from eating meat and drinking spirits. Many of them gave up sexual intercourse, as well, a most unhealthy expression of self-denial, I can attest, after my recent experience behind bars. Anyway, Carnival was a final fling, it was a last indulgence of rich foods and wine and lust before the severe austerity of Lent. When you're facing a forty-day fast, that last spree can be intense. It has physical significance as well as deep psychological penetration. The old Mardi Gras was charged with real meaning. Today. .” He sighed. “It's entertaining, but it's empty. It's just another big party. An opportunity for some to spend money and others to make money. It isn't connected to anything larger than itself. I've been a foe of Christianity all my life, but Christianity gave meaning to the fun and the rowdiness, made it more fun and more rowdy. You can't raise hell when you don't believe in hell.”

“Pardon, Alobar,” said Marcel, “but Carnival predates Christianity, does it not?”

“Ha ha. I'll say. By fifty centuries. It goes back to ancient Hellas — Greece — to the shepherds who worshipped a certain god named Pan. Pan.” He sighed again. “We don't have Pan in our lives anymore, either.”

“So you say we have kept the form of Mardi Gras but lost the content?”

“Yes. It's a shallow experience nowadays, and inevitably unsatisfying.”

Alobar excused himself and went to his bath.

“He seems sad,” said Priscilla.

“He is not used to being old.”

“Even after a thousand years?”

“During most of that time he was a man in the prime of life. He is amazing. He is stronger than he was a month ago. Younger, also. But, you see, Mademoiselle Pris, he needs a woman if he is to recover his youth. Perhaps every man does.” Marcel closed his eyes. Priscilla could tell that he was thinking of V'lu. “Ah, yes, but Alobar cannot get a woman because he is too old. The double bind, they call it. You are correct, he is sad.”

Feeling even more despondent after his soak-and-cool, Alobar elected to forgo the parade, sending Priscilla and Marcel downtown alone. On Monday, he complained that the continuous beating of drums and frequent drunken whoops had kept him awake all night, and he might have remained in the flat again were it not for two unexpected events.

“The Krewe of Pan is parading today,” said Priscilla. “I'd forgotten there was a Krewe of Pan.”

“With so many krewes, it is only fair,” said Marcel.

“It'll be a sham,” said Alobar. “A desecration, in fact. But I suppose I ought to go.”

While they were studying a map of the parade route, deciding exactly where they should station themselves for the most auspicious view, a United Parcel Service delivery van pulled up outside, and its driver rang their bell. Priscilla signed for the package. It was from Seattle. From Wiggs Dannyboy.

The note inside was handwritten in red ink. It resembled something Noog the necromancer might have scratched into the lungs of a hen. Marcel and Alobar were baffled. “Let me have a peek,” said Priscilla, wondering if an addled land crab had not deposited its string of eggs upon the page.

“Here are your. . Mardi Gras. . costumes,” she read.

They unfolded the three piles of green satin, crimson velvet, and chicken wire and held them at arm's length, looking from one to the other in a manner both a- and be- mused.

Beet suits.

The three beets made their way through the French Quarter, seeking to root themselves at the intersection of Royal and Canal, where the Quarter met the business district. It was slow going. For blocks, they would be swept along by the throng, only to have the tide reverse itself so that they were forced to fight the current and barely moved at all.

Through eyeholes in their stems, the beets were bombarded by garish colors and flashes of light popping from sunlit sequins, rhinestones, and glass. They passed among the swaying and bobbing fronds of a forest of feathers, overshadowed at times by towering headdresses that must, each one, have left a hundred birds shivering in their birthday suits, and at other times were caressed or tickled by wayward ostrich plumes. The muffled echo of an ocean of mythology welled up around them; a surf of Orientalism broke over them, spraying them with sultans and caliphs, prophets and potentates, gladiators and porters, harem girls and dragons, licentious Babylonians and passive Buddhas. This strange Asia shimmered in the sun, and the river of gods and monsters overflowed its banks, knocking the pinnings from under tourists and photographers.

Countless pictures were snapped of the three beets, countless hands waved at them, countless lips smiled. Who among the thousands might have guessed that inside the ambulatory vegetables were a genius waitress, the world's finest perfumer, and a man older than the first mosquito to preen its proboscis in the fever marsh that was once New Orleans? But, then, who could guess the identity of any of the costumed or the masked? And wasn't that — and not the lust and the gluttony — the true beauty of Mardi Gras? A mask has but one expression, frozen and eternal, yet it is always and ever the essential expression, and to hide one's telltale flesh behind the external skeleton of the mask is to display the universal identity of the inner being in place of the outer identity that is transitory and corrupt. The freedom of the masked is not the vulgar political freedom of the successful revolutionary, but the magical freedom of the Divine, beyond politics and beyond success. A mask, any mask, whether horned like a beast or feathered like an angel, is the face of immortality. Meet me in Cognito, baby. In Cognito, we'll have nothing to hide.

There was a definite distance, a gulf, between those in costume and those in daily dress. In the caste system of Carnival, the unmasked were instantly relegated to a position of inferiority. They were peasants, outsiders, mere spectators no matter how energetically they attempted to participate. For example, gangs of college boys, in beer-wet T-shirts and vomit-encrusted jeans raced through the Quarter shouting “Show yer tits! Show yer tits!” and when some woman upon a balcony would oblige, pulling up her front in a gesture of mammary theater, the boys would go berserk, hooting and slobbering, scratching themselves, slapping their thighs, punching one another and rolling on the cement, like a band of baboons shorn of its baboon dignity, but although these raunchy gangs had become increasingly a dominant force in Mardi Gras, there was a sense in which they were not a part of it at all; for all their lewdness, they were unconnected to the true lewd heart of Carnival, which must beat behind a disguise, grand or grotesque, in order to be heard by the gods, for whom Mardi Gras, ultimately, is defiantly and lovingly staged.

As the beets neared Canal Street, the jostle of the multitudes grew turbulent. According to the news, it was the largest attendance in the history of New Orleans Mardi Gras. City fathers had feared that the bees might keep people away, but widespread stories of the swarm had had just the opposite effect. Thousands came to New Orleans with the expressed desire of seeing the bees. And bee costumes were the most popular, by far, that holiday. Human bees, solitary or in swarms, were everywhere. Legion were the pretty girls who were “stung” by insects six feet in height.

As for the real bees. . well, who knew? Numerous sightings were reported throughout the city, but officials were unable to confirm a single one. Madame Theo, a fortune-teller on St. Philip Street, claimed that the swarm had returned to Jamaica, a prospect that relieved many people and disappointed still more.

In the all-black Zulu parade, at least one float had borne a sign, REMEMBER BINGO PAJAMA.

The beets managed to reach Royal and Canal without being pulverized or pollinated. They pushed to curbside, where the espresso brewer from the coffeehouse, with his kid brothers, had staked a narrow claim. As prearranged, the beet named Priscilla gave each of the boys ten dollars of Marcel's money, and they whooped off to buy beer and to yell, “Show yer tits!” to anyone who was suspected of legitimately possessing tits. The beets took their place at the curb.

Since the Pan krewe's parade had not yet begun to pass, the trio waited there, gaping through their stems at the intoxicated fantasy surrounding them. All at once, two vegetable cries penetrated the jazzy din. Not thirty feet from them, also on the curb, stood a beautiful black woman, less than en costume, yet not wholly straight. Apricot and artichoke were the colors of her gown, which clung to her like a child about to be separated from its parents, and cream was her turban, fastened with a glass jewel the size of half a peach. Aside from gown and turban, and spiky, pink, rather vaginal shoes, she wore no adornment, but she appeared as much a creature of Carnival — mysterious, alluring, fanciful — as any befeathered Sheba or she-bee in the multitudes. Perhaps it was because disguise and deception were second nature to her, or it could have been simply that she was one of those persons destined to be exotic even should they never stray from home. It was V'lu.

At the sight of her, there was an immediate and abrupt schism among the beet population of Mardi Gras. One beet peeled off to the left, heading for V'lu. A second beet whirled, if one could be said to whirl in so dense a congregation, and began to fight its way down Royal Street, in the direction of Parfumerie Devalier. The third beet, abandoned, stood its ground to await the passage of Pan.

Parfumerie Devalier was at the opposite end of Royal Street from the Canal intersection. It took the beet more than forty minutes to wade through the baboon boys, Dixieland high-steppers, and glittering transvestites who blocked its route to the shop. When it at last arrived, it found the shop unlocked. Madame Devalier was in the rear, seated upon the lime love seat, filling the space of two lovers, fingering rosary beads and nodding dreamily from the effects of the first hurricane drops she'd ingested in fifteen years.

The cop trial had ended on Friday with a verdict of guilty. Seizing the opportunity, the judge issued sentence on Saturday: two years, suspended. The judge was well aware that there could be no race riot during Mardi Gras. Potential participants would be too distracted, too dispersed, too happy, too drunk. The sentencing barely made news. Without fanfare, Madame and V'lu had returned on Sunday, in time to dust off their hundreds of perfume vials and attend the Bacchus parade.

Now, both under the influence of drops, V'lu had wandered off to view Pan, while Madame rested in the eye of the hurricane, hallucinating about Jesus, Wally Lester, a Mardi Gras baby, gris-gris, zombie butter, and the way things used to be. When the giant beet burst into the shop, she crossed herself and chanted:

"Eh, Yé Yé Conga!

Eh! Eh! Bomba Yé Yé!"

With deliberation, the beet bustled to the rear, snatched the ancient perfume bottle from the table where Madame had been contemplating it, off and on, and before the stout woman could revive enough to shriek in protest, rushed out of the shop and into the masquerade melee.

"Eh! Eh! Bomba Yé!

Hail Mary, Full of Grace!

Help, police! Police!"

Cradling the precious bottle, shielding it from the flailing appendages of dancers and drunks, it took the big beet the better part of an hour to navigate the treacherous human river, but when it reached the Canal Street intersection, its fellow beets were there, one on either side of V'lu.

“Alobar! Alobar!” Priscilla cried. She held the bottle up for him to see.

Alobar blinked inside his beet stem, scarcely comprehending what he saw. More from instinct than reason, he reached out for the bottle, trembling with excitement, fear, and desire as visions of jasmine boughs, goat hooves, and lost love swam past his brain.

At that moment, Priscilla tripped, pitching forward on her velvet-and-wire encircled belly. The bottle slipped out of her stubby fingers and went rolling into the path of the parade.

Later, Priscilla swore that she'd been purposefully shoved, and she clung to that story even though Marcel insisted that no one had touched her, even though V'lu testified, “Her always had butterfingers and two leff feets.”

Alobar was more sympathetic. Just as Pris fell, he imagined that he'd registered a strong goaty odor, and while he automatically attributed it to the nostalgic atmosphere of the float that was passing — a lofty wagon decorated with enormous plaster sheeps' heads and festooned with purple grapes as big as cannonballs, and on whose pinnacle there pranced in pastoral splendor, attended by nymphs in filmy tunics, the living image of old Goat Foot himself — Alobar was to consider, in retrospect, that the smell had been real and had originated at curbside. Was it an invisible arm that shoved her?

The question was probably academic. What mattered was that the bottle rolled beneath the tractor wheel of the heavy float, and as the Great God Pan (to be sure, an insurance adjuster who'd once played linebacker for LSU) looked down upon the prone beet in the gutter with the clownish contempt that the ribald deity has forever held for the puny failures — and accomplishments — of humanity, it was crushed. There was a pop! a gritty crunch, an earthy, mocking laugh from Pan above, and it was over.

Two of the beets tore off their stems and leaves and ran into the street. The third beet quickly followed, pulled by V'lu. The four of them dropped to their knees in the wake of the float, surrounding a tiny pile of ground blue glass as if it were a sacred spoor that they were worshiping.

Kudra's bottle, Pan's bottle, the K23 bottle, the bottle that three hundred years earlier had terrified an order of monks, beckoned to the Other Side, and negotiated the fishy seas, was now no more than a dust of glitter that might have sifted from a Carnival transvestite's cheeks.

But from the sparkling blue powder there wafted a marvelous aroma, an effuvium both sweet and bitter, a fragrance as romantic as the pollen-stained teeth of the floral Earth, the sexual planet; wafted the secret fetish and daring charm that creates a new reality for men and women, transcending and transforming nature, reason, and animal destiny.

In a matter of minutes, policemen forced the quartet back to the curb. Three of them moved reluctantly but with minimal resistance. The bottle had meant much to them, and they were in shock. The fourth, Marcel LeFever, to whom, on the other hand, the bottle had meant nothing, had to be dragged, kicking and screaming.

“That scent, that scent!” he exclaimed, his voice inflamed by passion. “What is that scent? Le parfum suprême! Le parfum magnifique!”

Several hours later, in the rear of Parfumerie Devalier, there occurred something akin to a wake. In turn, Alobar, Priscilla, Madame Devalier, and V'lu eulogized the bottle. And right when everyone was feeling its loss most keenly, Alobar, who, alone, still wore a beet costume — it was the most fulfilling garment he had worn since he was forced to abdicate his kingly ermine — lifted everyone's spirits by spilling the beans. Or, rather, the beets.

“Beet pollen. Yes. Simply beet pollen. Beet pollen and nothing else. The pollen of the beet plant, if you please. Exactly, positively, emphatically beet pollen. Beet pollen, don't you see? The answer is beet pollen.”

"Incroyable!" exclaimed Marcel.

"Sacre merde!" gasped Madame.

“Why didn't I think of that?” asked Priscilla.

“Beets, don't fail me now,” said V'lu.

“The theme was jasmine, of course. A deluxe jasmine, rare and costly. But the top note was merely citron—”

“Would tangerine work as well?” inquired Madame.

“Oh, tangerine is charmant,” put in Marcel. “It might be superior to the citron.”

“—and the bottom was beet pollen. Good old everyday beet pollen.”

“Hardly everyday,” said Priscilla. “I've never seen a speck of beet pollen in my life.”

“Me never.”

“Imagine, cher! Vegetable spore in a fine boof!”

The little group was so amazed by the revelation, and so fascinated by Alobar's subsequent tale of the intertwined roles of beet and fragrance in his life, that it failed to notice V'lu when she slipped out the door, a conspiratorial and purposeful set to her jaw.

That edge of the Quarter at that hour was fairly free of Carnival congestion and noise, and V'lu was detained only by the lump that rose in her throat when she passed the place where Bingo Pajama, prince of blossom and song, had fallen bleeding at her feet. She paused briefly, bit her lower lip, and then proceeded to the telephone booth. It was occupied, but she was next in line.

While she waited for the camera-laden tourist to complete his call, she focused on the sunset and calculated what the time of day must be in Paris, where it was already Fat Tuesday. She knew that Luc LeFever wouldn't have minded a call at an inopportune hour, but she wasn't sure about his successor, Claude. Still, how could Claude complain, once he'd heard the news? This perfume, this K23, could justify, a million times over, every cent they'd ever paid her.

Born at Belle Bayou into a family of ex-slaves who'd elected to remain on the plantation as paid servants, generation after generation, V'lu grew up with the plantation owner's daughters. They were an old Creole clan who refused to speak English. The servants spoke mostly French, as well. When the owner sent his daughters to school in Switzerland, V'lu, age eleven, was sent with them — as companion, schoolmate, and unofficial maid.

Upon graduation, the white girls went on to the Sorbonne, but V'lu, who'd piqued the girls by earning higher academic honors, was returned to Belle Bayou. The owner didn't know quite what to do with her. She was pretty, mannered, had an aptitude for chemistry and French literature, and could speak no English beyond the dialect she'd picked up in the rural ghetto. “Niggertown” English. He and his wife were trying to decide what might be best for her when his second cousin, Lily Devalier, arrived for a weekend visit and confessed she needed an assistant — and heir — in her perfume business. Voilà!

For fear she'd appear overqualified, the Belle Bayou owner hid her accomplishments from Lily, palming her off as a simple plantation girl. Moreover, he advised V'lu to speak only English in New Orleans, so that she'd fit in. V'lu followed that advice (she even changed her name to Jackson from Saint-Jacques), except when she might encounter some interesting visitor from France.

Such a visitor was Luc LeFever, who'd come to Parfumerie Devalier one afternoon while Madame was napping, met V'lu, and swiftly recognized her worth. He took her to dinner that evening, seduced her (she'd had a few sexual encounters in Switzerland and found them to her liking), and put her on the payroll. Luc, after all, had had dealings with Lily Devalier and her fragrances and recognized that she had the potential, at least, to produce something of commercial interest.

As an industrial spy, V'lu earned one hundred dollars a month, with the promise of a fat bonus should she deliver a formula LeFever might profitably market. With some misgiving, Claude saw to it that the arrangement continued after his father's death, and it was to fulfill her obligation and collect her bonus that V'lu now stepped toward the public telephone to dial Paris, collect.

As V'lu reached for the door of the booth, a small yellow cloud materialized between her hand and the door. She drew back her arm. The cloud fragmented into forty or fifty “drops,” spread like oversize dew upon the glass door. For a second, V'lu thought she might be experiencing a flashback hallucination, because the hurricane drops had worn off only an hour before, but just then someone in the street yelled, “The bees! It's the bees!”

A crowd began instantly to form. “The bees!” “Where?” “There!” “Look, it's the bees!” The way the pedestrians were acting, the bees might have been Michael Jackson and Katharine Hepburn. Any minute, someone in the crowd would ask the bees for their autograph.

V'lu swung her pink plastic handbag in the swarm's direction. “Shoo!” she said. “Shoo, bees! Go on now!”

As one, the swarm lifted off the glass and with wings vibrating furiously, fell into their infamous saber saw formation. The flying blade splintered the air around V'lu's head. She yelped and ran for cover.

Through the plate-glass window of a boutique across the street, she waited and watched. For nearly five minutes, the swarm patroled the space between the telephone booth and the boutique, then it flew off into the spreading bruise of dusk.

V'lu was patient. She waited until it was completely dark. She waited a little longer. It was common knowledge that bees ceased to function at sunset. At last, when night lay on the Quarter like a fallen horse, V'lu cautiously opened the boutique door and slowly crossed the street. The coast was clear.

Safely in the booth with the door shut, she reached out with a slender, magenta-nailed finger to dial the overseas operator. A bee lit on her finger.

It appeared to be alone, a sleepy straggler left behind by the swarm. She snapped her wrist and flicked it off. She went to dial again, but there was a bee in the “O” hole. Uh-oh!

Single file, they were invading the booth through the crack between the door and the pavement. Quickly, the booth was full of them. They swarmed over V'lu, squirmed up her nose, into her ears, down her cleavage, and under her armpits. A solitary bee, kamikaze all the way, buzzed up her dress and drilled its toxic stinger through her cotton underpants and into her perineum, that exquisite corridor separating a woman's back door from her front door, that smooth, hidden cusp that may be the most holy spot on the human body.

V'lu screamed, dropped both the receiver and the card with Claude's number on it, and bolted from the booth. Swaying dangerously upon her pink, spiked shoes, she ran all the way back to Parfumerie Devalier, where she found the others in such a state of happy excitement that they neglected to notice that she was out of breath and sobbing.

In V'lu's absence, important decisions had been made.

Alobar had decided to dematerialize. Should he fail, then he would simply permit himself to die. “I have nothing else to prove by remaining alive,” he said, “but a great deal to prove — and gain — by pursuing Kudra. Finally, I'm ready for that adventure. I've seen the bottle again, and I'm ready. I feel that Pan has, for better or for worse, made his parting gesture, and it would be-hoove me to do the same.”

It was his plan to attempt his dematerialization in Paris, on the rue Quelle Blague. He suspected it might be advantageous to leave this plane near where Kudra had left it.

Meanwhile, he was turning over the K23 formula to Marcel.

“That's overwhelmingly generous of you,” said Marcel. “But what if you change your mind about this dematerialization?”

“I won't. Nothing short of Kudra's return could change my mind.”

For his part, Marcel decided that LeFever would distribute the perfume internationally, it was ideally suited for that, but he insisted that Parfumerie Devalier actually produce the fragrance. It would be marketed under the Devalier label. At that, Madame Devalier began to blubber.

Under Marcel's plan, LeFever would claim thirty percent of profits. Lily Devalier would be awarded fifty percent, with Priscilla and V'lu each receiving ten percent, until Madame's death, at which time they'd split her share.

My, did V'lu feel bad. And it wasn't just the throbbing in her perineum.

“How about Wiggs Dannyboy?” asked Priscilla.

“Eh?”

“He's done as much as anybody to get this perfume made — and he's never even smelled it.” Pris described the trouble and expense to which Dr. Dannyboy had gone in delivering his clues — his beets — to those in the best position to duplicate K23.

“Quite right,” said Alobar.

It was agreed that LeFever and Madame would each award Dr. Dannyboy four percent of their share, while Priscilla and V'lu would give him one percent apiece.

“Live by the heart if you would live forever,” said Alobar.

They toasted to that with champagne, after which Madame and Priscilla went into a corner to hug and cry and reconcile; Alobar fell asleep on the love seat, dreaming of his lady; and V'lu took Marcel up to her room, where, in the best French tradition, he sucked the venom from her bee sting.

The next day was Mardi Gras, but in the shop nobody really noticed. They held their private celebration, a celebration of the heart and the nose, which honored neither mindless excess nor neurotic asceticism, and from which neither church nor state would benefit — at least, not in any way that their leaders might have imagined.

Madame introduced Marcel to the Bingo Pajama jasmine. His nostrils opening and closing like the flaps of an airplane in distress, he pronounced it more precious than any in the South of France and swore that he would send a team of botanists to Jamaica to track it down. “So this is what Wiggs and his little girl were wishing to grow in their greenhouse. Ooh-la-la-la-la-la-la-la.”

At noon they uncorked more champagne. They toasted Bingo Pajama. “And to mangel-wurzel,” added Alobar. “Long may it wave,” said Pris. Regarding Alobar in his beet suit, now crumpled (and flat in places) from having been slept in, Marcel said, “I wish I had my whale mask.” Everyone was too polite to ask what he meant. In truth, Marcel no longer owned a whale mask. He had stuffed it into Uncle Luc's coffin just before it was sealed.

The party agreed that it would call the perfume Kudra, a more romantic name than K23. Alobar was touched and pleased, although at one point Priscilla, only half facetiously, suggested christening it The Perfect Taco.

Madame looked at her long and hard.

They drank more champagne and sang breezy songs, mostly in French, for they spoke the language fluently except for Priscilla, who knew only six words in French, and that was counting ménage à trois as three.

They ate jambalaya (protection against the Humping Beast), drank yet more champagne, and waxed sentimental over Alobar, lamenting his proposed departure.

“It's been a huge adventure, an exploration of possibility, the invention of a game and the play of the game — and not merely survival. But I don't mind going now. This is not the best of times, you know.”

“You're referring to the political situation?”

“Oh, no, not that. Our political leaders are unenlightened and corrupt, but with rare exception, political leaders have always been unenlightened and corrupt. I stopped taking politics seriously a long, long time ago, therefore it's had practically no effect on the way I've lived my life. In the end, politics is always a depressant, and I've preferred to be stimulated.

“No, my friends, what bothers me today is the lack of, well, I guess you'd call it authentic experience. So much is a sham. So much is artificial, synthetic, watered-down, and standardized. You know, less than half a century ago there were sixty-three varieties of lettuce in California alone. Today, there are four. And they are not the four best lettuces, either; not the most tasty or nutritious. They are the hybrid lettuces with built-in shelf life, the ones that have a safe, clean, consistent look in the supermarket. It's that way with so many things. We're even standardizing people, their goals, their ideas. The sham is everywhere.

“But wait, now. Don't let me spoil the party. Things will change, eventually, believe me. You can count on change. Even now, I'm curious about what's going to happen next. And I'll be back, if I can get back. The perfume will guide me back, I feel that it will.

“So make our perfume, my friends. Make it well. Breathe properly. Stay curious. And eat your beets.”

“Right,” said Pris, under her breath. “And don't smoke in bed.”

Thus, their Fat Tuesday passed with some sadness, some gaiety, and much optimism. In the garbage-strewn, hungover hush of Ash Wednesday, a letter arrived from Wiggs Dannyboy. It slid through the slot with an appropriately soft sound, like a headachey matron folding her Mardi Gras fan.

Wiggs and Huxley Anne would fly in on Friday, the letter said. It said that it was raining in Seattle and that the greenhouse had been completely repaired. It concluded with a joke, an obscene suggestion, and a pronouncement or two. The pronouncements concerned Dr. Dannyboy's new theory of the evolution of consciousness. Perhaps because she had received the theory in bits and pieces, Priscilla hadn't paid much attention to it. Now, however, she sensed that Wiggs was attempting to make a major, radical statement, and she wondered if she shouldn't put it into focus.

Gathering all the letters that he'd written to her since she came to New Orleans, she snipped out the relevant sections, placed them in her handbag, and left the sublet flat. She walked through the Garden District, stopping finally at a park bench in front of Charity Hospital. There, almost directly beneath the window of the ward where her daddy died, she pieced together the fragments of Wiggs's hypothesis.

She wasn't positive that she accepted it or understood it. She wasn't positive that anyone else would accept it or understand it, or that anyone would care. She only knew that despite the numb torture of a champagne hangover, it made her want to go on living, a feeling she never quite got from the theories of Thomas Aquinas, Freud, and Marx.

DANNYBOY'S THEORY

(Where We Are Going and Why It Smells the Way It Does)

To put it simply, humankind is about to enter the floral stage of its evolutionary development. On the mythological level, which is to say, on the psychic/symbolic level (no less real than the physical level), this event is signaled by the death of Pan.

Pan, of course, represents animal consciousness. Pan embodies mammalian consciousness, although there are aspects of reptilian consciousness in his personality, as well. Reptilian consciousness did not disappear when our brains entered their mammalian stage. Mammalian consciousness was simply laid over the top of reptilian consciousness, and in many unenlightened — underevolved, underdeveloped — individuals, the mammalian layer was thin and porous, and much reptile energy has continued to seep through.

When our remote ancestors crawled out of the sea, they no doubt had the minds of fish. Smarter, more adventurous and curious than their fellows who remained underwater, but fish-minded, nonetheless. On the long swampy road to a primate configuration, however, we developed a reptile mind. After all, in those tens of millions of years, reptile energy dominated the planet. It culminated in the dinosaurs.

As Marcel LeFever suggested in his address to the perfumers' convention, reptile consciousness is cold, aggressive, self-preserving, angry, greedy, and paranoid.

Paul McLean was the first neurophysicist to point out that we still carry a reptilian brain — functional and intact — around in our skulls today. The reptile brain is not an abstract concept, it is anatomically real. It has been carpeted over by the cerebrum, but it is there, deep within the forebrain, and consists of the limbic lobe, the hypothalamus, and, perhaps, other organs of the diencephalon. When we are in a cold sweat, a blind rage, or simply feeling smugly dispassionate, we may be sure that, for the moment, our reptile brain is in control of our consciousness.

As the Age of Reptiles was drawing to a close, the first flowers and mammals appeared. Marcel LeFever believes that the flowers actually eliminated the great reptiles. Mammals also may have contributed to their egress (not “exit"), because for many early mammals there was nothing quite like a couple of dinosaur eggs for breakfast.

At any rate, our ancestors had by then evolved brains that were both mammalian and floral in their formation. For reasons of its own, evolution allowed mammalian energy to hold sway, and the recently developed human midbrain or mesencephalon, which had folded over the old diencephalon, could be accurately labeled a mammal brain.

Characteristics of mammal consciousness are warmth, generosity, loyalty, love (romantic, platonic, and familial), joy, grief, humor, pride, competition, intellectual curiosity, and appreciation of art and music.

In late mammalian times, we evolved a third brain. This was the telencephalon, whose principal part was the neocortex, a dense rind of nerve fibers about an eighth of an inch thick that was simply molded over top of the existing mammal brain. Brain researchers are puzzled by the neocortex. What is its function? Why did it develop in the first place?

LeFever has postulated that the neocortex is an expanded memory bank, and it certainly possesses that capability. Robert Bly thinks that it is connected somehow to light. If the reptile brain equates with cold and the mammal brain with warmth, then the neocortex equates with light. Bly's hunch makes a lot of sense because the third brain is a floral brain and flowers extract energy from light.

Even prior to the mysterious appearance of the neocortex, our brains had strong floral characteristics. The whole brain is described in science as a bulb. The neurons of which it is composed have dendrites: roots and branches. The cerebellum consists of a large mass of closely packed folia, which are bundles of nerve cells described in the literature as leaflike. Not only do the individual neurons closely resemble plants or flowers, the brain itself looks like a botanical specimen. It has a stem, and a crown that unfolds, in embryonic growth, much in the manner of a petaled rose.

In the telencephalon — the new brain — the floral similarity increases. Its nerve fibers divide indefinitely, like the branches of a tree. This process is called, appropriately, arborization. In the proliferation of those twiggy fibers, tiny deposits of neuromelanin are cast off like seeds. The neuromelanin seeds apparently are the major organizing molecules in the brain. They link up with glial cells to regulate the firing of nerve cells. When we think, when we originate creative ideas, a literal blossoming is taking place. A brain entertaining insights is physically similar, say, to a jasmine bush blooming. It's smaller, and faster, that's all.

Moreover, neuromelanin absorbs light and has the capacity to convert light into other forms of energy. So Bly was correct. The neocortex is light-sensitive and can, itself, be lit up by higher forms of mental activity, such as meditation or chanting. The ancients were not being metaphoric when they referred to “illumination.”

With the emergence of the neocortex, the floral properties of the brain, which had, for millions of years, been biding their time, waiting their turn, began to make their move — the gradual move toward a dominant floral consciousness.

When life was a constant struggle between predators, a minute-by-minute battle for survival, reptile consciousness was necessary. When there were seas to be sailed, wild continents to be explored, harsh territory to be settled, agriculture to be mastered, mine shafts to be sunk, civilization to be founded, mammal consciousness was necessary. In its social and familial aspects, it is still necessary, but no longer must it dominate.

The physical frontiers have been conquered. The Industrial Revolution has shot its steely wad. In our age of high technology, the rough and tough manifestations of mammalian sensibility are no longer a help but a hindrance. (And the vestiges of reptilian sensibility, with its emphasis on territory and defense, are dangerous to an insane degree.) We require a less physically aggressive, less rugged human being now. We need a more relaxed, contemplative, gentle, flexible kind of person, for only he or she can survive (and expedite) this very new system that is upon us. Only he or she can participate in the next evolutionary phase. It has definite spiritual overtones, this floral phase of consciousness.

The most intense spiritual experiences all seem to involve the suspension of time. It is the feeling of being outside of time, of being timeless, that is the source of ecstasy in meditation, chanting, hypnosis, and psychedelic drug experiences. Although it is briefer and less lucid, a timeless, egoless state (the ego exists in time, not space) is achieved in sexual orgasm, which is precisely why orgasm feels so good. Even drunks, in their crude, inadequate way, are searching for the timeless time. Alcoholism is an imperfect spiritual longing.

In a hundred different ways, we have mastered the art of space. We know a great deal about space. Yet we know pitifully little about time. It seems that only in the mystic state do we master it. The “smell brain" — the memory area of the brain activated by the olfactory nerve — and the “light brain" — the neocortex — are the keys to the mystic state. With immediacy and intensity, smell activates memory, allowing our minds to travel freely in time. The most profound mystical states are ones in which normal mental activity seems suspended in light. In mystic illumination, as at the speed of light, time ceases to exist.

Flowers do not see, hear, taste, or touch, but they react to light in a crucial manner, and they direct their lives and their environment through an orchestration of aroma.

With an increased floral consciousness, humans will begin to make full use of their “light brain” and to make more refined and sophisticated use of their “smell brain.” The two are portentously linked. In fact, they overlap to such an extent that they may be considered inseparable.

We live now in an information technology. Flowers have always lived in an information technology. Flowers gather information all day. At night, they process it. This is called photosynthesis.

As our neocortex comes into full use, we, too, will practice a kind of photosynthesis. As a matter of fact, we already do, but compared to the flowers, our kind is primitive and limited.

For one thing, information gathered from daily newspapers, soap operas, sales conferences, and coffee klatches is inferior to information gathered from sunlight. (Since all matter is condensed light, light is the source, the cause of life. Therefore, light is divine. The flowers have a direct line to God that an evangelist would kill for.)

Either because our data is insufficient or because our processing equipment is not fully on line, our own nocturnal processing is part-time work. The information our conscious minds receive during waking hours is processed by our unconscious during so-called “deep sleep.” We are in deep sleep only two or three hours a night. For the rest of our sleeping session, the unconscious mind is off duty. It gets bored. It craves recreation. So it plays with the material at hand. In a sense, it plays with itself. It scrambles memories, juggles images, rearranges data, invents scary or titillating stories. This is what we call “dreaming.” Some people believe that we process information during dreams. Quite the contrary. A dream is the mind having fun when there is no processing to keep it busy. In the future, when we become more efficient at gathering quality information and when floral consciousness becomes dominant, we will probably sleep longer hours and dream hardly at all.

Pan, traditionally, presides over dreams, especially the erotic dream and the nightmare. A decline in dreaming will be further evidence of Pan's demise.

Returning to information efficiency, science has learned recently that trees communicate with each other. A tree attacked by insects, for example, will transmit that news to another tree a hundred yards away so that the second tree can commence manufacturing a chemical that will repel that particular variety of bug. Reports from the infested tree allow other trees to protect themselves. The information likely is broadcast in the form of aroma. This would mean that plants collect odors as well as emit them. The rose may be in an olfactory relationship with the lilac. Another possibility is that between the trees a kind of telepathy is involved. There is also the possibility that all of what we call mental telepathy is olfactory. We don't read another's thoughts, we smell them.

We know that schizophrenics can smell antagonism, distrust, desire, etc., on the part of their doctors, visitors, or fellow patients, no matter how well it might be visually or vocally concealed. The human olfactory nerve may be small compared to a rabbit's, but it's our largest cranial receptor, nevertheless. Who can guess what “invisible” odors it might detect?

As floral consciousness matures, telepathy will no doubt become a common medium of communication.

With reptile consciousness, we had hostile confrontation.

With mammal consciousness, we had civilized debate.

With floral consciousness, we'll have empathetic telepathy.

A floral consciousness and a data-based, soft technology are ideally suited for one another. A floral consciousness and a pacifist internationalism are ideally suited for one another. A floral consciousness and easy, colorful sensuality are ideally suited for one another. (Flowers are more openly sexual than animals. The Tantric concept of converting sensual energy to spiritual energy is a floral ploy.) A floral consciousness and an extraterrestrial exploration program are ideally suited for one another. (Earthlings are blown aloft in silver pods to seed distant planets.) A floral consciousness and an immortalist society are ideally suited for one another. (Flowers have superior powers of renewal, and the longevity of trees is celebrated. The floral brain is the organ of eternity.)

Lest we fancy that we shall endlessly and effortlessly be as the flowers that bloom in the spring, tra-la, let us bear in mind that reptilian and mammalian energies are still very much with us. Externally and internally.

Obviously, there are powerful reptilian forces in the Pentagon and the Kremlin; and in the pulpits of churches, mosques, and synagogues, where deathist dogmas of judgment, punishment, self-denial, martyrdom, and afterlife supremacy are preached. But there are also reptilian forces within each individual.

Myth is neither fiction nor history. Myths are acted out in our own psyches, and they are repetitive and ongoing.

Beowulf, Siegfried, and the other dragon slayers are aspects of our own unconscious minds. The significance of their heroics should be apparent. We dispatched them with their symbolic swords and lances to slay reptile consciousness. The reptile brain is the dragon within us.

When, in evolutionary process, it became time to subdue mammalian consciousness, a less violent tactic was called for. Instead of Beowulf with his sword and bow, we manifested Jesus Christ with his message and example. (Jesus Christ, whose commandment “Love thy enemy” has proven to be too strong a floral medicine for reptilian types to swallow; Jesus Christ, who continues to point out to job-obsessed mammalians that the lilies of the field have never punched time clocks.)

At the birth of Christ, the cry resounded through the ancient world, “Great Pan is dead.” The animal mind was about to be subdued. Christ's mission was to prepare the way for floral consciousness.

In the East, Buddha performs an identical function.

It should be emphasized that neither Christ nor Buddha harbored the slightest antipathy toward Pan. They were merely fulfilling their mytho-evolutionary roles.

Christ and Buddha came into our psyches not to deliver us from evil but to deliver us from mammal consciousness. The good versus evil plot has always been bogus. The drama unfolding in the universe — in our psyches — is not good against evil but new against old, or, more precisely, destined against obsolete.

Just as the grand old dragon of our reptilian past had to be pierced by the hero's sword to make way for Pan and his randy minions, so Pan himself has had to be rendered weak and ineffectual, has had to be shoved into the background of our ongoing psychic progression.

Because Pan is closer to our hearts and our genitals, we shall miss him more than we shall miss the dragon. We shall miss his pipes that drew us, trembling, into the dance of lust and confusion. We shall miss his pranksterish overturning of decorum; the way he caused the blood to heat, the cows to bawl, and the wine to flow. Most of all, perhaps, we shall miss the way he mocked us, with his leer and laughter, when we took out blaze of mammal intellect too seriously. But the old playfellow has to go. We've known for two thousand years that Pan must go. There is little place for Pan's great stink amidst the perfumed illumination of the flowers.

Just recently, a chap turned up in New Orleans who may have been the prototype of the floral man. A Jamaican, they say, named Bingo Pajama, he sang songs, dealt in bouquets, laughed a lot, defied convention, and contributed to the production of a wonderful new scent. In some ways, he resembled Pan. Yet, Bingo Pajama smelled good. He smelled sweet. His floral brain was so active that it produced a sort of neocortical honey. It actually attracted bees.

When Western artists wished to demonstrate that a person was holy, they painted a ring of light around the divine one's head. Eastern artists painted a more diffused aura. The message was the same. The aura or the halo signified that the light was on in the subject's brain. The neocortex was fully operative. There is, however, a second interpretation of the halo. It can be read as a symbolized, highly stylized swarm of bees.

On Thursday, Priscilla packed her belongings, including Dr. Dannyboy's theory, and moved into Parfumerie Devalier. The coffeehouse owner was returning and wanted his flat back. Marcel and Alobar checked into Royal Orleans Hotel for their remaining days in New Orleans.

Thursday night, Madame cooked a gang of gumbo (Down, Big Fellow, down, boy!), and they dined together above the shop. After dinner, Marcel presented Madame with a check for $250,000 so that she might get Kudra underway: modern equipment and additional employees would be required. V'lu and Priscilla received $25,000 apiece as advance on royalties.

The money filled Pris with a great Buddhistic calm. It left her no less klutzy, though. On her way to the toilet, she walked into a door, loudly and painfully banging her head. Her eye required an ice pack, her headache required something stronger than aspirin. Madame administered a single hurricane drop in a glass of orange juice. “This is the last, cher,” Madame said to V'lu, who was trying to work up a headache of her own. Madame washed the rest of the foamy liquid down the sink. V'lu shed a silent tear, but somewhere near the terminus of the sewer line, a Lake Pontchartrain fish or two would soon be nodding out in school.

Thanks to the dream powers of the drop, Priscilla overslept on Friday. By the time she bathed, dressed, deposited her check in the bank, and snared a taxi, the early flight from Seattle had already landed.

Wiggs and Huxley Anne waited in the sunshine outside the terminal. They were patient. They felt relieved to have escaped the rain. If raindrops were noodles, Seattle could carbo-load Orson Welles and have enough left over to feed Buffalo on Columbus Day.

It's unclear who saw the swarm first. A porter, perhaps, or a post-Carnival tourist catching the shuttle to the Holiday Inn. Maybe several people saw it simultaneously, for when the cry went up, “The bees! The bees!” it was a chorus of voices. This was a sober group of businessmen, convention delegates, redcaps, and drivers, and nobody seemed particularly thrilled by the sudden appearance of the famous insects. Nobody except Wiggs Dannyboy, that is.

Wiggs stepped out onto the asphalt and lifted a benign, expectant face skyward, like the good-guy earthling in a flying-saucer movie. The bees ignored his gesture. They buzzed the area two or three more times, then flew directly for Huxley Anne.

Many in the group screamed, but a horrified hush fell over them when the bees landed on the little girl's head.

“Don't move!” someone said, in a stage whisper. “Don't move!” Huxley Anne wasn't moving. The bees weren't moving much, either.

Once they had established their position, evenly distributed, rather like a skullcap atop the child's head, the bees stilled their wings, dropped their antennae, bent their knees, rested the thousand facets of their compound eyes, withdrew their tubed tongues and barbed stingers, and sort of settled in.

Huxley Anne looked at Wiggs. He smiled encouragingly.

The paralysis of the onlookers was finally broken when a driver started up his van. “I'll get the cops,” he yelled out the window.

“You do and I'll rip your esophagus out,” said Wiggs. He moved toward the van. “Turn that engine off.”

The startled driver did as he was told. Nobody else in the crowd moved a muscle.

Slowly, Wiggs walked over to Huxley Anne. “You're okay, aren't you, darling?” he asked. When she nodded, the onlookers gasped. But the bees didn't stir. At close range, Wiggs could detect a slight pulsation of each bee's abdomen, as if it were absorbing something through osmosis.

“Where can you rent a car around here?” Wiggs asked.

A redcap pointed nervously.

Wiggs took Huxley Anne's hand, and as the others looked after them with bulging eyes, they walked off toward the airport perimeter.

While Dr. Dannyboy filled out the required forms, Huxley Anne stayed out of sight at the rear of the car agency, admiring some hibiscus that grew there.

By the time Priscilla's taxi arrived at the airport, father and daughter — and bees — were pulling out of the lot, burning rubber, and scattering the crushed oyster shell that New Orleans used for gravel.

“This is the big one!” Wiggs sang from the wheel. “This one is bigger than Carlos Castaneda and Levi-Strauss put together! Bigger than the bomb! Bigger than rock 'n' roll!” Then he added, “Of course, the next time she goes to the hairdresser, there may be a bit of a problem.”

Priscilla didn't hear him. In fact, she never heard from him again, although rumors were later to reach her that he had moved to an orchid farm in Costa Rica, or else a jasmine plantation in Jamaica.

Priscilla took to her bed and remained there all weekend. She felt like a can of cheap dog food that had been ruptured by a railroad spike. Something mealy and ugly might have oozed out of her, except for the fact that the twenty-five — thousand-dollar deposit receipt made a highly effective Band-Aid.

Material things anchor one in life much more firmly than purists would like to believe.

We seem to face an enemy who, no matter how many times we win, will best us in the end. He has so many allies: time, disease, boredom, stupidity, religious quackery, and bad habits. Maybe, as Dr. Dannyboy has postulated, all these things, including disease and our relationship with time, are merely bad habits. If so, an ultimate victory is possible. For individuals, if not for the mass. And maybe evolution — playful, adventurous, unpredictable, infuriatingly slow (by our standards of time) evolution — will rescue us eventually, according to a master plan.

Meanwhile, we are beleaguered. We hold the pass. The fragile hold the pass precariously, hiding behind boulders of ego and dogma. The heroic hold the pass a bit more tenaciously, gracefully acknowledging their follies and absurdities, but insisting, nevertheless, on heroism. Instead of shrinking, the hero moves ever toward life. Life is largely material, and there is no small heroism in the full and open enjoyment of material things. The accumulation of material things is shallow and vain, but to have a genuine relationship with such things is to have a relationship with life and, by extension, a relationship with the divine.

To physically overcome death — is that not the goal? — we must think unthinkable thoughts and ask unanswerable questions. Yet we must not lose ourselves in abstract vapors of philosophy. Death has his concrete allies, we must enlist ours. Never underestimate how much assistance, how much satisfaction, how much comfort, how much soul and transcendence there might be in a well-made taco and a cold bottle of beer.

The solution to the ultimate problem may prove to be elemental and quite practical. Philosophers have argued for centuries about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, but materialists have known all along that it depends on whether they are jitterbugging or dancing cheek to cheek.

By Sunday evening, Priscilla was feeling slightly better, feeling less like a dented can of cheap dog food than like a dented can of expensive dog food. Alpo instead of Skippy.

For the diversion that was in it, she switched on the television. On the Sunday Night Movie, a small boy named Jesse Jonah was pedaling his bike into the voracious vacuum of a black hole with a message from the Security Council of the United Nations. “I've been here before,” said Priscilla. She changed channels and found a magazine-format documentary program.

After exposing corruption and chicanery in two governing bodies and three major industries, the program focused on a new dance craze that was sweeping Argentina.

“They call it the bandaloop,” said the announcer, “and everyone is doing it.”

Priscilla sat up in bed.

On the screen, the dancers were skipping and bounding about the floor in a kind of exaggerated polka. Every once in a while, they would stop, execute a little backward and forward jitterbug step, then, yelling “Bandaloop!” they would jump straight in the air, up and down, five times.

Priscilla sat more erect. “Morgenstern,” she whispered.

“But the bandaloop is more than just another dance fad,” the announcer said. “It's a health fad, as well. Supposedly, it can add years, even decades, to your life.”

A familiar face appeared on the screen.

“The man who is singularly responsible for the bandaloop epidemic is a veteran Argentine accordion virtuoso named Effecto Partido.”

Priscilla leaned forward.

“A respected amateur ethnomusicologist, Señor Partido last year accompanied a small group of scientists, including the late Nobel prize-winning chemist, Wolfgang Morgenstern, into the most remote area of the Patagonian wilderness. Partido's interests were musical, but the scientists were there to investigate the habits of a little-known tribal people whose average life span was said to exceed one hundred and forty years. The scientists have yet to comment, but according to Partido, the secret of the tribe's longevity was the dance they performed several times each day: the bandaloop.”

The camera panned to dancers in a Buenos Aires night spot, then back to a close-up of Effecto, who, Priscilla perceived, was looking youthful and fit, indeed.

“Theese dance she make zee blood happy, zee bones happy. I don't know how explain eet, but theese dance she celebrate that we are not, you know, died already.”

As the announcer chuckled, the camera panned to a warehouse, painted bright pink. “The bandaloop requires so much space that the traditional tango clubs of Argentina can only accommodate three or four dancers at a time. So Effecto Partido acquired an empty warehouse near the Buenos Aires waterfront and converted it into a bandaloop club. The place is jammed every night of the week — and Effecto Partido, who also leads the band and takes frequent accordion solos, is South America's newest millionaire. His nightclub, by the way, is called Priscilla.”

“I call it for zee only woman I ever love,” said Effecto.

Priscilla bandalooped out of bed.

For fifteen minutes or so, the former genius waitress paced the floor. Then she got the idea to telephone Ricki.

“Hello.”

“Bartender, I'd like some Alpo on the rocks with a twist of railroad spike.”

“I don't make house calls. Who is this?”

“You don't recognize the one who did you wrong?”

“Pris! Maybe I do make house calls. Where are you?”

“Still in Louisiana. Ricki, it's so good to hear your voice.”

“It's good to hear you. You asshole.”

“I'm sorry, Ricki. I was positive you had my bottle. I'm prepared to eat a lot of crow.”

“I'd rather you eat something else.”

“You're a dirty-talking woman.”

“It's not just talk.”

“Can you forgive me, Ricki?”

“Hey, I was a jerk myself. But, look, the Daughters got another grant coming up. This time—”

“No, I don't need it anymore. How're things at El Papa Muerta, by the way? Customers still complaining that there're only nine hundred islands in their thousand-island dressing?”

“Yeah, they don't realize the peso's been devalued.”

“Ricki, you want to go to Argentina?”

“Does the Pope want to play Las Vegas? What're you talking about?”

“I'm not kidding. I'm going. You would not believe the past four months of my life. The people I've met, the stuff I've learned, the things that have been happening to me. . ”

“Try me.”

“Okay, what would you say if I told you a dying god knocked me down and broke my perfume bottle?”

“'Don't cry for me, Argentina.'”

“You want to go to Argentina?”

“What's happened to your junkie boyfriend?”

“He's not a junkie, and he's not my boyfriend! I guess he never was my boyfriend. I don't know anymore. He's amazing. Incredibly amazing. But he's sure not in love with me. He came to New Orleans Friday and then turned right around and left, without seeing me. I think it has something to do with his daughter—”

“The gift of the Magi.”

“What?”

“In the Bible. The Magi brought frank incest and mirth.”

“Ha ha. I didn't know you read the Bible.”

“Only the good parts. There's a lot about me you don't know.”

“You want to go to Argentina tomorrow?”

“I'm off tomorrow. Why not? Why're we going to Argentina?”

“To join my ex-husband.”

“Wait a minute. Are we talking ménage à trois?”

Priscilla paused. “I'm not sure what we're talking. I only know that I seem to require a man of a certain age — and that you're the only real friend I have. I don't know what we're gonna do in Argentina, but one thing I can tell you. .”

“What's that, Pris?”

“Whatever it is, it may be possible to do it for a long, long time.”

The night sky over Paris was the color of beet juice, a result of red lights and blue lights reflecting upon the gun-metal gray of the clouds. The sky was sorrowful and disheveled, like the head of an old musician. Heavy with music, it nodded uncontrollably, strands waving, as if keeping time, against its will, to the cabaret piano that was the heartbeat of Paris. Through breaks in the overcast, a dandruff of pale stars could be seen.

Emerging from the dim lobby of the LeFever Building into the dimmer street, Claude LeFever didn't notice the sky, but looked first left, then right, then left again. He knew that he was early, but he hoped that his car and driver might be early, as well. No such luck.

Claude turned up the collar of his cashmere topcoat. It might have been spring in Nice, but winter winds had not moved completely off the rue Quelle Blague. Chilled and impatient, still Claude was fond enough of the street to stand in it, his back to the edifice that smell had built.

Although the law prohibiting skyscrapers had been amended for thirty years, the LeFever Building remained the sole high-rise in that neighborhood. The rest of the block was oblivious to what, in the modern world, passed for progress. With a mixture of frustration and affection, Claude surveyed the cafés and bicycle shops, and the cathedral, of course, and wondered how a city whose name meant fashion to the world could, decade after decade, get away with conforming to archaic ideas. Paris was like his cousin Bunny, he thought: faithful to tradition, on the one hand, in a constant state of upheaval on the other.

As his eyes swept the street, the door of the darkened bicycle shop next door creaked slowly open, and a somnambulistic figure, as evocative as a silhouette in a period cinema, joined him on the rue Quelle Blague. Claude thought the person might be a burglar, his outlines distorted by a sack of loot, but instead of hurrying away, the figure stood there, drinking in the neighborhood as Claude himself had done.

Since the figure was not threatening, was, in fact, compelling, Claude approached it. He was instantly glad, for it proved to be a woman, a dark, Asian woman, quite beautiful, but dressed in a seventeenth-century costume and behaving as if drunk or drugged. When the woman saw Claude, she drew her hand to her mouth and gasped. Evidently, he appeared as odd to her as she to him, yet she did not seem overly afraid.

“I thought I was back,” the woman said. Her French was formal, old-fashioned. “But now I am unsure.”

“What do you mean?” asked Claude.

“It is not the same as it was. My shop is full of silver wheels. There is a tower next door so tall I cannot find its top. And you, sir. .”

She seemed actually in shock. She must be on some drug, Claude thought. Got loaded at a costume party, no doubt, but what was she doing in a locked bicycle shop? “Uh, how long have you been gone?” he asked.

“Only an hour or two.”

He chuckled. “Well, my dear, nothing's changed in the past couple of hours, I assure you.” He told himself that he should walk away, but he stayed. She was so exotic, so lost and lovely. Despite an otherworldly aloofness, she radiated an erotic heat that melted his customary caution and reason. Even should she prove to be an actress on heroin, and not the creature of marvel that she seemed, he nevertheless craved her company. His loins tingled, not merely with lust but with a kind of spiritual adventurism, almost Promethean in character, as if he might steal something from her (from her lips, her breasts, her breath) that would allow him to surpass himself. He hoped that his limo was stuck in traffic again.

“Where have you been?”

Kudra didn't hesitate. “I have been on the Other Side,” she said. For the first time, she looked into his eyes.

Claude felt weak. It was a result of the eye contact, not her reply. He thought that she meant the other side of the Seine.

“And how are things on the other side?” He hoped he didn't sound flip.

“Oh, sir. .” A tremor ran the length of her, causing her voluptuous flesh to quiver like the throat of a lovesick frog. Her bustle gown was lacy and had three-quarter-length sleeves, with which she wore neither muff nor gloves. Assuming that she was cold, Claude draped his topcoat about her shoulders.

“Actually,” said Claude, “I much prefer the Right Bank. Did you really find it so unpleasant over there?”

“Oh, I would not describe the Other Side as unpleasant, sir. It is quite beyond the scope of words such as pleasant or unpleasant.”

Her seriousness made him smile. “Impressed you, hey? Well, how would you describe it?”

Kudra neglected to answer right away. Instead, she searched the block, pivoting stiffly, like a figurine atop a music box, to stare back into the bicycle shop. She was looking for someone, although in her dazed state she may have been confused as to his precise identity.

Gradually she turned to Claude again, fixed him with a hypnotic gaze, and began a monologue so lengthy and bewildering that had it come from any mouth but hers, he would have done something rude. As it was, there was no question of interruption. She spoke softly and slowly, as if in a trance, and Claude, himself, became entranced. Her manner, her voice, her heat, her scent combined to hypnotize him, binding him with spider wire, wrapping his mind in a web of vision so thick that he could actually see the scenes she described as vividly as if he were dreaming them.

Released with a sudden puff from the electromagnetic convulsions of dematerialization, Kudra finds herself inside a covered wharf, an enormous building of damp granite and soiled marble, extending for two hundred yards or more beyond the shore of some dark sea.

Obviously a terminal, the wharf is teeming with travelers of every race, nationality, and era of time, arriving, departing, waiting.

The travelers murmur, occasionally they moan, but they do not converse among themselves. They hustle in. They bustle about. They stand in long lines. They go.

Although Kudra's body feels normal and intact, there is something insubstantial, almost vaporous, about most of the others. She is soon to learn that that is because they are dead. They have left their bodies behind and are walking about in mental projections, in their ideas of their earthly bodies. They have fleshed themselves in their imaginations of themselves, which explains why the majority of them are rather handsome.

Only the dematerialized are housed in actual bodies, and in all the throng, there are but two or three of these. The dematerialized, moreover, are exempt from the rules and regulations governing the dead. Conductors in white uniforms herd the dead arrivals into groups, from the groups into lines, single-file, but Kudra is allowed to roam at will.

The conductors seldom speak, but they act with irresistible authority. Their faces are radiant, their movements fluid and fluttery. Kudra is reminded of snowflakes, of the fluttering pages of books upon which poems in white ink have been written.

Acutely aware of her own smell, for there is no trace of odor among the dead masses, Kudra wanders throughout the great wharf, which, though miserably crowded, is steeped in a solitude more complete than any she has ever known.

No newspapers are for sale in the station, no sweets or tobacco. Travelers arrive. They go. They arrive in streams, through wide marble portals, carrying neither luggage nor souvenirs. But where is it they go from here? To find out, Kudra pushes to the head of a line. All lines, it turns out, lead to the same place: the Weighing Room.

Timidly, Kudra slips into the room, where she is surprised to find a tall, androgynous figure, half priest and half harlequin, wielding a gleaming knife.

One by one, the dead approach the harlequin priest. With a swift, practiced stroke, he (or she) cuts out their hearts.

Upon a stone altar, there is a set of scales. The scales are ordinary, made of brass, not gold. On the left balance, there is a single hawk-brown feather.

The harlequin priest passes each freshly rooted heart to his/her assistant, a young woman in a white tunic. The assistant lays the heart upon the right balance. If the heart is heavier than the feather — and time after time it is — the person is motioned to the rear of the room, where he or she joins another line, this one filing down steps that lead to the docks.

At regular intervals, ships moor at dockside. The ships are sleek and luminous. In fact, they seem fashioned entirely of light, a cold light, as staid and ordered as a Victorian drawing room. The heartless dead board the ships, which, once loaded, sail away at tremendous speeds. In a matter of seconds, they are no more than distant stars in the obsidian night of ocean.

The woman in the snowy tunic notices Kudra. She smiles. “Do you understand what is happening here?” she inquires. “We weigh their hearts. Should a person possess a heart that is as light as a feather, then that person is granted immortality."

"Indeed? Are there many?"

"Few. Precious few, I am sorry to say. One would think that people would catch on. Those who pass the test are usually rather odd. The last was a tall black fellow with bee dung caked in his hair. The ordinary rarely beat the scales."

"Where do they go, then, all those who fail?” Kudra pointed toward the water, where another ship of light was just whooshing away, leaving a milky wake.

"To the energy realms."

"Never to return?"

The woman shrugs. “As energy, perhaps. As light."

"But the ones who pass the test. .?"

"The immortals? They are free to take any direction they like. Free to embark on a sea voyage, to return to your world, or to some different world.” She places yet another heart upon the balance, squealing with delight when it does not send the balance dish plummeting to the altar top. “Look,” she says to Kudra. “Look at this one. Now here is one that comes fairly close."

This organ was ripped from the corpulent breast of a jolly-faced troubadour. He doesn't comprehend the commotion, but he is winking at Kudra, rubbing his belly, and looking as if he'd gladly trade his butchered heart for a pint of ale.

"Had he combined his hedonism with a pinch more wisdom, had he poured slightly less into his gullet and slightly more into his soul, he might have made it,” says the weigher of hearts. “Still, he earns a pink ticket."

She hands the troubadour something strongly resembling a carnation petal and motions him to a side door. Kudra follows him and learns that this door, too, leads down to the water, but to an empty dock. From above, the woman signals him to wait.

For quite a long time, the troubadour stands there. To relieve his tedium, he whistles a tune, a medieval ballad of courtly love. Suddenly, he is silenced in mid-whistle, his lips periwinkled in a frozen pucker. A ship is pulling into view.

As it nears dockside, Kudra sees that it is a barge, of considerable length, and canopied with pink linen, from whose edges fringe and tassels dangle. The barge is hung with paper lanterns, in which candles blaze gaily. Scattered about the deck are tables and chairs, resembling those of an inn, and here sit people eating spicy southern foods and sipping beer and pineapple coolers. Minstrels with droopy black mustaches wander the deck, strumming guitars. Women in shoes with heels like daggers dance, rattling tambourines all the while and cooing lubricious phrases to the many parrots that occupy crude wooden cages. From below deck, a katzenjammer of libidinous voices is heard. On the side of the barge, the name Hell has been painted.

Despite the fact that there's no odor to give magnitude to the foods on deck or to the sex below, the passengers seem merry. Kudra believes that she recognizes one of them. Unless she is mistaken, it is Fosco, the calligrapher from the Samye lamasery. He is at table, in repartee with a pair of elderly Chinamen, whom he addresses as Han Shan and Li Po. They hurl lines of spontaneous poetry at one another, each trying to top the last, often slapping the tabletop and laughing wildly. Kudra waves and waves, but it is impossible to get Fosco's attention. The dead have little interest in the living, she surmises.

The barge scrapes against the dock with a careless rasp. The captain, a seedy Spaniard in a comic-opera version of a military uniform, leans over the rail and takes the troubadour's pink ticket. Once the fellow is aboard, the vessel floats lazily away, bound for unknown sprays.

As the barge departs, it turns, affording a view of its starboard side. On this side, the vessel wears a different name entirely. Heaven is what it says.

Kudra returns to the scales. The young woman is hard at work, testing hearts, assaying the precious metals of the life well-lived. “How did you land this job?” asks Kudra.

"I was not feather-light, but I was feather-bright,” she answers.

"I am not sure I understand. Yet I cannot help but notice that we strongly resemble one another, you and I."

"Indeed we do."

"Are we related? Am I an incarnation of you? Or something?"

"What makes you suppose that you would be an incarnation of me, rather than me of you?” She giggles and shakes her skunk-black curls. “It is so amusing the way that mortals misunderstand the shape, or shapes, of time."

"I am not sure I understand."

"And I cannot help you understand. In the realm of the ultimate, each person must figure out things for themselves. Remember that, when you return to Your Side. Teachers who offer you the ultimate answers do not possess the ultimate answers, for if they did, they would know that the ultimate answers cannot be given, they can only be received."

Kudra nods. She looks around her. Once one is accustomed to it, the scene on the wharf is neither dreadful nor thrilling. It is, as a matter of fact, fairly boring, an ongoing performance of bureaucratic routine. Death is as orderly as life is disorderly.

The weigher looks up from the scales. “Perhaps you ought to be going,” she suggests.

"Yes. I should. But. . how does one get out of here? Must I once more dematerialize?” As exciting as dematerialization was, Kudra was not looking forward to an immediate encore. Spiraling, ring by ring, through that zone of spin and crackle, was more exhausting than a month in a rope yard.

"That will not be necessary. There is a doorway on yonder side of the station."

Kudra stares in that direction. She is less than assured. “This place is so huge,” she says. “There are so many doors."

"Do not worry. You shall find it. There is a sign above the door."

"What says the sign?"

“Erleichda.”

"Pardon?"

There is a ledge on the altar, caked with dirt and blackened by blood from the dripping of the strange fruit that is weighed there. With her finger, the woman writes the word upon the ledge.

Thanking her, Kudra studies the letters until they are memorized.

"One last question, if I might,” says Kudra. “Why are there no odors here?"

"Outside the portals of our station, there is a holding area, brilliantly illuminated. Had you arrived in the usual fashion, you would have been detained there until it was positively determined that you wished to be dead. The holding area teems with thousands of odors of every description; it is a vast net of odors, a clearinghouse of odors, the odors of a billion personal lifetimes, each separate and distinct. But once having accepted their demise, and having been admitted to the terminal, the dead can no longer smell nor be smelled. Otherwise it would be too difficult for them. Smell evokes memories. If smell were permitted here, the dead would still be connected to life and could not, therefore, accept their fate. As long as there is odor, there is hope of life everlasting. Because you carry odor, my lady, your presence here is potentially disruptive. Do you notice the uncomfortable manner in which the dead regard you? They cannot see you, they can only see what is dead, And they cannot really smell you, either, yet, still they sense something. Smell is like that. Did you realize that a ghost is but a dead person who has not completely lost his ability to smell? Smell is the sister of light, it is the left hand of the ultimate. It fastens the eternal to the temporal, This Side to That Side, and thus is highly sensitive; volatile, if not dangerous. So go now, dear lady, go in good scent And good fortune. It is not the last time, perhaps, that our paths shall cross."

Kudra says good-bye And rejoins the horde in the terminal, moving with some difficulty against the flow. Despite the jostling — were the travelers more physically substantial, her global breasts might have been pounded into flatcakes — she decides to have a quick peek, a sniff, outside the main entrance before searching for her escape.

She pushes through heavy traffic until she is standing in the portals, beneath the mammoth stone archway, facing an immense plaza that is without a pigeon, without an ant, without a leaf or the shadow of a leaf, yet teeming with people of every description, each and every one basking in a soft but relentless light. Some of the people are marching systematically toward the portals, others approach obliquely, hesitantly, while still others are sitting about the plaza looking as if they had been camping there for days or weeks, with no real mind to come inside.

As the weigher has promised, the plaza is smelly. It is, in fact, an ocean of scent in which the travelers are bobbing, each clinging, at first, to his or her favored aroma as if to a life preserver. Often, their final action before entering the wharf is to inhale one parting whiff of whatever it was — a child's blanket, a backyard garden, a mother's kitchen, a horse, a factory, an artist's brush, an opium pipe — that was keeping them afloat.

As one man, sniffing, enters the portals, he accidentally brushes against Kudra. He is red-nosed, rough-edged, proletarian, less than young, but creased with such a mischievous, insouciant smile that Kudra finds herself thinking that this one is a likely candidate for a pink ticket, a berth on the barge called Hell—or is it Heaven? As he takes his last sniff, he is practically pressed against Kudra, so that it is she whom he smells and not the memorable cargo of his terminated life.

Kudra is sorely embarrassed, for her jasmine perfume has long since weakened and its residue is mixed, she is certain, with grime and sweat and the body's other ardent emissions. However, the man's grin only widens at the unexpected lungful of her, and as he passes, in his hospital gown, through the marble gates, he heaves a sigh and mutters in a language alien to her, “The perfect taco."

Puzzled by what he might have meant and ashamed that she interposed herself between him and his farewell taste of earthly existence, she feels that she had better be getting back to where she belongs. She seems to recall a companion from whom she has become separated. A bit apprehensively, she reenters the wharf and makes her way laboriously to the distant wall. Indeed, there are doors aplenty there, but eventually she does come upon the one to which she was directed. It is marked neither EXIT nor ENTRANCE but

ERLEICHDA.

And it is the right door.

So absorbed had Kudra been in the telling, Claude in the listening, that the limousine managed to glide unnoticed to a stop beside them. By the time the driver got out and opened the rear door of the long black Mercedes, Kudra was finished, but the spell held them, like moths pinned to a blowing curtain. At last, the driver cleared his throat, piercing the membrane surrounding them. Claude blinked and wiped moisture from his brow. The driver wondered how his employer could be perspiring on such a night. “Will you join me?” asked Claude. Even as he asked, he was assisting Kudra into the car. What sort of weird carriage she was boarding she had not a clue, but after the events of the past few hours, she was prepared to accept virtually anything. The door closed. They sat in the leather-scented darkness, thighs touching, eyes open but unseeing, like waking dreamers, asleep yet lit by dizzy lamps, prey to some silky fever. And in that condition they were driven to Orly Airport, where Claude was to greet his cousin, Marcel the Bunny, Marcel's new wife, V'lu, and a certain friend of theirs, a man named Alobar.

THE BILL

FOR DARRELL BOB HOUSTON

THE BEET IS THE MOST INTENSE of vegetables. The onion has as many pages as War and Peace, every one of which is poignant enough to make a strong man weep, but the various ivory parchments of the onion and the stinging green bookmark of the onion are quickly charred by belly juices and bowel bacteria. Only the beet departs the body the same color as it went in.

Beets consumed at dinner will, come morning, stock a toilet bowl with crimson fish, their hue attesting to beet's chromatic immunity to the powerful digestive acids and thoroughgoing microbes that can turn the reddest pimento, the orangest carrot, the yellowest squash into a single disgusting shade of brown.

At birth we are red-faced, round, intense, pure. The crimson fire of universal consciousness burns in us. Gradually, however, we are devoured by parents, gulped by schools, chewed up by peers, swallowed by social institutions, wolfed by bad habits, and gnawed by age; and by the time we have been digested, cow style, in those six stomachs, we emerge a single disgusting shade of brown.

The lesson of the beet, then, is this: hold on to your divine blush, your innate rosy magic, or end up brown. Once you're brown, you'll find that you're blue. As blue as indigo. And you know what that means:

Indigo.

Indigoing.

Indigone.