Psychoshop

TWO · THE $HOPING LI$T

"He was gnawing on the outside bort bricks" I said, "and when I asked him what he wanted in fluent Swahili, he dropped dead."

"Probably couldn't stand your accent," Adam grinned, inspecting the bod. "He looks like nothing. Complete John Doe. Any ID on him?"

"I didn't search. Just hauled the corpus in out of sight and waited for your glorious epiphany."

"Check him, Nan. A brick-chewer ought to be interest­ing." Ms. Ssss silently began a rather gloomy inspection. "Now give me the full, Alf. What were you doing outside? Taking a runout powder? Dereliction of duty?"

"No way. I don't deny that I was considering it but the hitching post came charging in."

"What? Not the late, great Ludwig B.?"

"Beethoven in the flesh-ch, storming about his ghost making him compose a Symphony in Blue."

Adam guffawed. "Oy gevald!"

"My very words."

"How did you handle it?"

"I psyched him."

"Go on!"

"I scout's honor did."

"Not in there," pointing to the Hellhole.

"Right out here, at the harpsichord, and I wonder what your observers are making of it."

"Cela m'importe peu. Tell all."

"It was easy. I hummed, sang, one-fingered on the key­board all I could remember from his fifth. He began to shake with excitement, said I was his new inspiration, and jotted it down on slips of score paper. I escorted him out, him bless­ing me in Deutsch, and there was the brick-chewer."

"Alf, you're the genius absolute. Did the late, great offer to pay?"

"Too inspired, but I collected anyway."

"How?"

"I pinched one of his notes." I handed Adam a slip of score paper on which were scribbled various measures with Allegro con brio and Andante con moto and the initials LvB.

"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!" he exclaimed. "This is worth a fortune! I'm thinking of taking you on as a permanent partner, Alf."

"Never mind that. Why isn't Glory talking to me or looking at me? Is she angry? Did I do something wrong?"

"No, no, she's getting ready to molt and that always depresses her."

"Molt? Shed her skin?"

"Right on. She's from the serpent crowd, remember? She never knows what her new look will be and she wor­ries."

"But snakes don't change, they just become more than they were before."

"So does Nan, but she worries all the same."

"I don't see how she could possibly be less magnetic."

"Uh-huh. She's got you in her power."

"What about you cat people? Do you have problems, too?"

"My God, yes! A raunchy song goes with it." And Adam sang:

"With Glory?" I admit I was jealous.

"With my nursemaid? My guardian? Are you mad? Never! Anyway, I'm only attracted to cat-type girls."

I felt better. "So where, when, and how long were you? It's only been a couple of hours, here-time."

"New York. Twenty-fifty. A week."

"So it's still standing."

"More or less."

"Get anything for the Count's Iddroid?"

"Yes, by God! A sixth sense. It's like precognition."

"If it exists. I know women claim they've got intuition."

"Oh, it's real, Alf. I've got some beauties in stock. One's from Doc Holliday, which is why he got kilt in the OK Corral."

"The gunfighter? Why'd he dump it?"

"Said he knew he was going to die soon anyway. Just didn't want to know the exact time and place. But I'm talk­ing about an omnichronosense that enables you to see up and down the Arrow of Time, past, present, and future, simultaneouswise."

"Impossible!"

"Which is why Cagliostro will dig it."

"Where'd you find it?"

"To quote you, in the flesh-ch."

"Quoting right back at you, tell me all."

"About five years ago," Adam obliged, "this guy came in with a portrait of himself painted by a fashionable artist named Van Ryn. He was from the States in the early twenty hundreds, and he was scared out of his wig because Van Ryn had depicted him as 'Le Pendu' from the Tarot fortune-telling cards: The Hanged Man, slung upside down from a beam with a cord around one foot and his hands tied behind his back. Dead.

"The client wanted me to probe him and find out if he had some hidden savage criminal streak which would earn him this frightful punishment. If so, he wanted it wiped. It was crazy, but I explored him and found nothing more dangerous than a yearning for adventure. So I sent him back to twenty-thirty and thought no more about it.

"Until a few years later, when I learned from one of his contemporaries that the client had died in an awful acci­dent. He'd taken up skydiving—that adventure yen—and when his chute opened he'd gotten tangled in the cords, upside down, and smashed to the ground head foremost. How could this Van Ryn have called it in advance, even though he painted the scene differently?

"So when I spotted a sixth sense on Alesandro's list I thought maybe this Van Ryn had something like that and was worth a try. Went off to the Big Apple up then and cov­ered museums, galleries, art schools, and found out the fol­lowing.

"Victor Van Ryn was, is, will be a magnificent and suc­cessful artist. He was born Sam Katz, but that's no name for a fashionable painter. Victor suffered from cognitive astig­matism."

"What's—"

"Wait for it, Alf. Wait for it. Physical astigmatism is a dis­tortion of the eye lenses that causes rays of light from an external point to converge unequally and form warped images. This is what afflicted El Greco and caused him to paint elongated faces and figures.

"But the challenge for the portrait painter is to see through the persona mask of the subject into the true per­sonality, and put them both on canvas, the outward and the inner. This insight requires a sensitive, perceptive cognition. Van Ryn had it but it was astigmatic. He saw the past, pres­ent, and future of whoever or whatever he was painting and got mixed up.

"He didn't know what to believe so he settled for painting everything he perceived, past or present or future and sometimes all together. Clients got sore as hell at being depicted as decrepit ancients or embalmed corpses in a coffin. He even painted one as a small boy engaged in what the Chinese call 'hand lewdness.' Naturally, they refused to pay.

"The end came when Van Ryn received a secret com­mission from a presidential candidate to paint the secret pleasance of his secret mistress, and Van Ryn produced a bijou of her in the garden of same, naked and en flagrante with another lover. You don't dast mess around with pow­erful politicians and their popsies.

"We tracked him down at last. What made it tough was that he'd gone back to his original name and original Bronx, which was a ghetto. He was camping on the top floor of a low-income housing ruin, scraping a living by lettering sales signs for stores and posters for protesters. A damn bad scene."

Glory broke in quietly. "I've finished, Dammy."

"Great. Any ID on the brick chewer?"

"Nothing, except two negatives."

"Such as?"

"No chance of using fingerprints. He has no loops, whorls, anything on his fingertips."

"But that's impossible," I argued. "Even the apes have primitive prints."

"Not our friend here." But she didn't answer me; she only spoke to Adam. "He's a complete blank. Take a close look."

We looked. She was right. I've never seen a more anonymous blank. There was no outstanding feature. He was beige and doughy, the way an android might look before the final processing.

"The clothes, too," Glory continued. "All new, cheap, misfits, unidentifiable."

"Stolen maybe?" Adam suggested. "Or a charity hand­out? What's the second negative?"

"He had nothing in his pockets except a shopping list."

"But that could be a hot lead, Glory," I said.

"No way." She was still speaking only to Adam. "Not when you've seen this list," and she handed it over. Printed on a scrap of what I could have sworn was parchment was:

$HOPING PLEA$E

c .35

$i .25

Mn .25

W 11.00

cr 3.00

Fe 85.15

Underneath was a drawing of a hexagonal cruller and a Ping-Pong ball.

"I'll be damned," Adam wondered. "Mysteriouser and mysteriouser. Didn't you tell me you were the Yankee sci­ence type, Alf?"

"Uh-huh. Straight As at Brown."

"Ah? Rah-rah Brunonia. I suspected you were an Ivy League gent. So what is your scientific deduction, my dear Holmes?"

"Whoever put this list together was kind of weak on spelling and the letters C and S."

"But what do the letters stand for?"

"They're chemical symbols, Watson. Carbon, silicon, manganese, tungsten, chromium, iron. The numbers with them are percentages."

"All adding up to ... ?"

"The proportions of tungsten steel, the hardest tool steel known."

"My word, Holmes! Merely to make crullers and Ping-Pong balls?"

"Not quite, my dear Watson. He was shopping for tool steel nuts and ball bearings. What's more, he probably couldn't speak any of our languages, hence the graphic list to speak for him, and didn't know that he'd have to pay, no money of any sort on him. He's an alien from nowhere that we know."

"Brilliant, my dear Holmes!"

"Add him gnawing the bricks outside, Adam, and you've got a mystery on your hands that only Sam Katz can solve."

"Indubitably. Good old past, present, and future."

"When you bring him in we'll have him draw a picture of this bod and that'll tell all."

"Except for one hitch."

"What?"

"He won't come."

"Why not?"

"Didn't like my offer."

"Which was?"

"The vision of any famous artist in exchange."

"Oy. Wrong offer, Adam."

"How so?"

"Look, I've been dealing with artists and photographers all my professional life and I know that the one thing they want most is to make what we call a new sound—in their case, a new vision. They never want to do what's been done before."

"Proceed, Alf. Proceed cautiously."

"Go back and grab him with a new sight."

"Such as?"

"A wider vision of things as they are."

"But Picasso's done that, and Chagall, and Jackson Pol­lock, and—"

"That's just subjective. I'm talking about a wider physi­cal vision, up into the ultraviolet, down into the infrared, even further if you've got it in stock from anything from anywhere."

"And I do. I do. Macavity the Mystery Cat's got every­thing. Alf, your boss was right. You're the science absolute. You've got to join us. In the meantime, mind the store. Let's go, Nan."

"I can't." Her voice was weak and she looked strangely pale.

He gave her a warm smile and said gently, "I see the change is on the way. Not to worry. Wait for us. We'll be back in a flash. Come on, Alf. I'll need you to help haul Van Ryn. If you're game just wish along with Mac the Cat."

"Right with you, old buddy," and I sang, "Alf on the rooftops, Alf on the tiles ..."

As Adam led me up the desolation that had been the Bronx's Grand Concourse, a man passed us on the street, staring, first at Adam, then—much longer—at me. He had on mirrorshades, mocs, sweatpants, a green and white polo shirt. Also studded leather wrist straps. His hair was red and nowhere over an inch in length. I remembered him from the shop, back when Adam was in the Hellhole with Mr. Tigab. At first the man looked as if he were going to speak, but after studying me again—neat beard and mustache, engaging smile, and all—he seemed to change his mind. He swung on by. I was about to point him out when Adam said, "Here we are."

Adam's brief description of the falling-down housing project had left out the horrors. The apartment complex stank of excrement and rot, and as we climbed to the top floor I saw dead bodies sprawled about, dead dogs roasting over open fires, naked kids who might as well have been dead. And the noise! The tumult!

The Katz-Van Ryn apartment was a relief. It had a locked door with a peephole and when at last it was opened for us the place looked clean and neat and smelled fairly fresh. The walls had been painted with bright abstracts and the broken flooring had been converted into what looked like charming labyrinth puzzles.

"You again." The artist growled.

"With a new sales pitch." Adam unleashed his leopard magnetism. "May I introduce Alf, my partner? Alf, this is Maitre Van Ryn."

We gave each other the once-over-light. I was wonder­ing what he saw in me with his past, present, and future sixth sense. I know I was laughing at myself for what I saw. Because of his real name I'd anticipated a Borscht Belt char­acter. He was closer to General de Gaulle, moustached, tall, and strong. Fortyish.

"Which would you like to be called?" I asked, friendly -like. "Sam or Van?"

"What the hell do you care?"

"Just getting acquainted. I've been an interviewer and feature writer most of my professional life, and I've found that a way of reaching people is through the name they pre­fer. I was doing a feature on a most distinguished Knight of the British Empire. Dame Judith. She was rather careful and standoffish until I asked her the same question. She did a take, laughed, and told me that when she was a kid her nickname was Frankie. We got along fine after that."

He laughed too. "When I was a hotshot they used to call me Rinso."

"Rinso it is."

"What's yours?"

"When I was a college jock they used to call me Blackie."

"Blackie it is." That seemed to ease him. "Now what's the new sales pitch he's talking about?"

Another gimmick in interviewing is to find a mutual enemy. In this case it had to be poor Adam. "Pay no atten­tion," I said. "He can't understand creative professionals and never will, which is why I reamed him out and came to see you. I know you're blocked and what you're going through. I've been there myself."

"Blocked hell!" he growled. "I'm finished."

"Uh-huh, we always think so, which is why artists have to stick together and why I want to back you. You've got too much talent to waste, and we both know that everybody thinks they have talent—'I could write a great story if I only had the time'—but very few actually do."

He nodded. "They've all got delusions, Blackie."

"My very first girl, Veronica Renahen, a freckled red­head, used to cry herself to sleep nights because she was a genius only nobody would admit it. She was all of twelve."

He laughed, took my arm, and seated me alongside him on a bench, ignoring Adam, who quietly took a stool in the corner. "Did you bang her, Blackie?"

"Hell no. I wanted to but didn't know how."

He laughed again. "Same thing with me. I wanted to be a merciless mercenary but didn't know how."

There was a sidetable with neat, clean glasses and decanters. He poured two drinks, still ignoring the villain­ous Adam, and we drank together. It was a very nice peach cordial.

"Old Man Renahen ran a deli in our neighborhood," I chatted. "His favorite story was about a Jewish lady who came in and asked for liverwurst. He took a big one out of the cooler, stuck the open end in the slicer, and began cut­ting. After a dozen slices he asked 'Enough?' She said, 'Slice more.' After another dozen he asked, 'Enough?' She said, 'More. More.' When he was halfway through he said, 'Enough now?' She said, 'Now I'll take ten cents' worth.'"

Katz-Van Ryn roared with laughter. "But of course! Of course! She wanted to make sure it was fresh. Typical! Typical!"

"And there's a fascinating parallel with us," I went on. "We only see ten cents' worth of the total spectrum, smack in the middle. As one artist to another, wouldn't it be sensa­tional if we could see all the way from one end of the liver­wurst to the other—the whole nine yards?"

"My God, Blackie! What an idea."

"Which is what I'm offering you."

"What!"

"In exchange for your sixth sense."

"Are you serious?"

"Dead earnest, Rinso, and we can do it. Think, man! What could your talent do with a vision that extends be­yond the ultraviolet and infrared? No more past, present, and future hangups. No more rages and feuds. You can get back to your real work and create what's never been seen before."

"My God! My God!" He was staring into space. "To paint the aura of people and things, their vibes, radiations, un­conscious receptions and perceptions, ESPs . . . Picasso tried but he was just guessing . . ."

"And you won't have to guess."

"You're not putting me on, Blackie?"

"Look at me, Rinso. Read hard and deep. I'm wide open. Look into me and decide."

We made intense eye contact for at least a minute, never blinking, until his eyes rolled up to heaven and his big body seemed to sag. "You're telling it true," he whispered at last, "though there's a lot of fog blocking parts of your life. I think you've saved me. I don't know how I can ever pay you. It's a deal. What do we do now?"

"The Black Hole," I said. "Rotten Adam Maser will lead the way."

As we came in through the ebony doorway I was so intent on the Who What When Where Why of the brick-eater which Rinso Van Ryn might discover that the scene in the reception room came as a shock and nearly stripped my gears.

The corpse was propped upright in a gold brocade wingchair sort of like a mythical king on a throne, and at its feet lay a Nubian slave girl. Only she wasn't Nubian, slave, girl, or alive—she was the empty, sagging skin of Glory Ssss. The lower body was whole but the upper was in tatters. Evi­dently the renewed Glory had wriggled out that way.

Macavity took it in his stride, went to the foot of the iron stairway, and shouted up, "Nan, we're back."

From above came the sound of a shower over her reply. "Be right down, Dammy." Her voice sounded a little higher in pitch, more clarinet than oboe, and I wondered what the rest of her newdom would be like.

"Don't be too long. Alf, the pitchman absolute, has brought back our artist."

Rinso tore his eyes away from an amazed inspection of the room and demanded, "What the hell is going on in this museum?"

"Tell him, Blackie."

"The deal stands just as agreed," I said. "No ifs, ands, or buts. Your sixth sense in exchange for ultra-vision. Fair enough?"

He nodded.

"We'd like to ask a favor before Macavity removes your sixth sense."

"What favor?"

"Use it one last time."

"Use it? On who?"

"That body."

"Holy Moses, you're all crazy in here," he growled. "I'm getting the hell out."

"Wait, Rinso. Let me explain." And I told him about the brick schtick and the mystery shopping list. Not boasting, I'm a pro and know how to sell a story, and Van Ryn was grabbed. He gave me an approving punch on my shoulder.

"You're the one, Blackie," and he crossed to the kingly corpse. Adam and I waited while he concentrated on it for long minutes. At last he turned, shaking his head. "Nothing, Blackie, but nothing."

"Because he's dead?"

"Because he's completely unreal. Out of this world. Same like him," and he pointed to Adam. "Yeah, I cased him, too. Another weirdo from nowhere. You sure keep crazy company."

More crazy company swept down the stairs to join us, the new Glory, even more staggering than when I'd first met her. She was lighter, more octoroon than quadroon, and the mica flashes of her skin had become odd glows when she moved, as though reflecting rosy spotlights. There were streaks of silver in her hair, and the great golden eyes were hypnotic.

And I was hypnotized. Adam saw it, chuckle-purred, and made genteel introductions as though we were all meeting for the first time. After a warm greeting to the equally stunned artist, Glory turned to me.

"My kid sister told me all about you, Alf." She gestured at her shed skin.

"Glory Hallelujah," I responded.

"She's your boa, Blackie," Rinso burst out.

"What?"

"I saw her in your future when I cased you."

"His feathered boa to decorate him?" Glory laughed. "I'd like nothing better."

"No, lady, his boa constrictor." To me, "I saw you two tangling and strangling together."

"As they glory in the joys of fornication," Adam hummed. "Enough already, Maitre. Come into my den of iniquity and I'll consecrate our contract." He shot me a perplexed brow-lift. "Do we say 'consecrate' in the late twentieth, Alf?"

"I think you're reaching for consummate."

We heard no warning from the outer door but the dead man's identical twin oozed in. He was wearing a raggedy sweatsuit and had a black box hanging from his neck. He took a quick pan, then pressed a button on the box.

"Parlatta Italiano?" it squawked. "Sponishing? Ingleeze? Frenesing? Dansk? Germanisch?"

"Etruscan," I said.

"Shut up, Alf. English would be best for us, sir. Greet­ings and welcome."

Another button. "I sank you. I see my brudder get here too lately."

"May I ask where you're both from, and why?"

A lightning survey of Adam from head to toe. "Haha. Hoho. Another parallelogram like usly. Which cosmos you?"

"Far futurewise."

"We past. We call The Hive. What you?"

"We call ours The Zoo. How'd you come through?"

"Hole same like here."

"Where?"

"Numero quatro planet."

"So there's another hole on Mars to another neighbor. More wonders. What is your name, please?"

"Name? Name?" A complete blank.

"Termites!" Rinso exclaimed. "That's what they are and that's why I can't scan anything from them. They're only parts of a colony."

"I see. Thanks, maitre. Tell me, sir, why did your hive brother come looking for steel objects?"

"Needly to digest."

"My God!" I broke in. "Gizzard stones! Of course. And that's why he was trying to chew off the bricks. Diamond bort is even harder than tool steel."

"Enlighten me, Alf."

"We have life forms that swallow hard stones to help the gizzard fragment food to make it digestible. We've found little heaps in the fossil remains of dinosaurs, dodos, and giant emus. Some species ate still doing it today."

"Correctly. Correctly," the box agreed. "No stones the brudder. Starving deathly. None left in hive so come for help."

"Too late, I'm afraid," Adam said. "What now, sir?"

"Must take back."

"Ah? You bury your dead in your cosmos?"

"No bury. Eat." And exit the termite carrying his lunch, leaving an appalled silence behind.

"No wonder they need gizzard stones," I said.

"D'you think he might have tried to eat us?"

"Not without your diamond dust."

"Please, Blackie," Rinso pleaded. "I've got to get out of this freakshow. This is no place for a nice Jewish boy from the Bronx."

"Right, Rinso. Go with Svengali and let him do his thing, but I'm warning you: once you've seen his psychshop, the artist in you won't want to leave."

Adam ushered Van Ryn through the paneled door into the Hellhole, closing it behind them. Glory picked up her shed skin, folded it carefully, and bore it away upstairs. Shortly thereafter, I heard the sound of hammering. Then she returned and sat down on the couch alongside me and took my hand. Hers was still cool. Mine was trembling. She didn't say anything. I couldn't.

At last, "Part of your charm, Alf, is that you don't come on macho with women."

"I'm the chicken-type with girls."

"But not with men. Dammy told me you were spectacu­larly charming with that artist."

"He told you? I didn't hear him."

"UHF."

"Oh."

"And now you're doing it to me."

"No, Glory, I'm not even trying. God knows I want to, but I know I'm not in your class."

"And that's how you do it. You let us make the first move. That's your stranglehold."

I was going to ask which of us was boa constricting the other when the psychbroker and the artist came out of the Hellhole, Katz-Van Ryn pleading, "Just a little more time, please. Just a little longer. The visions in there are—"

"Enough to kick you back into your real career." Macavity's persona power was in full charge. "When you're back at work you can come any time to recharge, but then you'll have to pay."

"Anything! Anything!" Almost gushy with gratitude. Then the artist stared at us with his magnified vision. "Holy Moley! There's an aural glow around you two that— And a mingling neural borealis and—"

"And don't talk your new sight sense," Adam com­manded. "Paint it. Come on, Nan. Let's schlep this nova back to New York to dazzle the art world. Mind the store, Blackie—" He gave me a puzzled look. "How the devil did you get that nickname? You're a brownie, not meaning a Girl Scout."

"The last name. Noir. French for black."

"But of course. Do they pronounce it French style back home?"

"No, they sort of rhyme it with foyer."

"C'est domage. Right. Ready for the liftoff, Rinso? Avantiartista!"

Glory brushed my palm with her lips and thank heaven

the nova didn't see what that did to me. As they started out the front door Adam called, "We may be a little longer. I think there's something else up there that Cagliostro needs for his Iddroid. By the way, there's a magnifying glass in the top drawer of the Welsh dresser."

"What? Why?"

"Someone's left a minigift on the front step. See what you can make of it. Here it comes."

The three disappeared as a tiny champagne bottle came rolling into the reception room. It was an exact miniature, the cork and label, about the size of a medicine bottle. On the bottle were the miniature letters: old bond ltd—but as I examined it with the naked eye I saw that it contained no wine. Through the dark green glass I could make out a tiny roll of paper.