She made her entrance then. Quick and light, her feet scampered down the concrete steps from her room upstairs straight to a small round table at the back wall next to a Wurlitzer jukebox. She was very petite, very slender, and wore a black lace dress that trailed on the floor and black hair in a pageboy cut.
Once at her table, she would order a bottle of Napoleon Brandy that she sipped from a fluted glass throughout her hours in The Eternal. The waiters understood her to rarely order food as the hours passed.
Smoke rose from off her American menthol and Turkish cigarettes and thin cigars like out of the cheap automobiles behind the eastern side of the wall years ago, the bartenders and waitresses joked behind her back; when they talked to her face, she normally spoke a more precise German than they did and rarely English, though the regulars could tell from their years of experience with tourists to the bar that she was an American.
When at the table, she would sip her brandy and blow her smoke into the pages of the stacks of German and English newspapers and magazines she read from page to page, to front and back, again and again, and look solemnly glum or burst out giggling and laughing at them.
She was particularly well-known at The Eternal as Our Lady of the Jukebox. From time to time, she would rise from her table and walk over to the Wurlitzer jukebox and stand or lean against it, smoking, for hours on end. Everyone left her alone then to make the jukebox her own: They figured it must mean something deep to her, to place herself there for such a long time, feeding coins into the slot, playing one smooth crooner after another from years past:
strangers in the smoke of eyes in the love tramp moon of tears Joe the clown wine that only eyes can make me sets up the river home why she
Before a certain October day, only one person had been visiting Our Lady of the Jukebox. A small woman who moved quickly with delicate elegance down the concrete steps of The Eternal, the visitor wore her chestnut-brown hair bobbed, a pullover sweater or athletic sweatshirt, and either a narrow black-leather mini-skirt or sweatpants. An antique camera hung from a strap on her neck.
She would go to Our Lady of the Jukebox at her table with a strong and buoyant swing to her hips and legs and stop to hug her warmly. After the visitor sat at the table, she and Our Lady of the Jukebox would start talking with abandoned high spirits. The waiters and regulars of The Eternal would hear them go on about albums of photographs and home movies, black-and-white films they loved from the Thirties and Forties, the skiing and swimming vacations they once enjoyed, and how they liked to visit the city zoo and look at the animals in the early morning after a night partying and dancing at local clubs years ago.
They talked without stopping … except for that one time when the visitor brought up a book she had heard about. Our Lady of the Jukebox frowned deeply that time, yelled at her friend to say nothing more, then got up and ran into the back hall of The Eternal toward the washrooms. When she returned, she found that the visitor had turned her round face and blue eyes with tears toward the mirror behind the bar. Sadly, her friend said she was sorry. Our Lady of the Jukebox shrugged with a brief smile and sat back down at her table. Books were never mentioned again.
Their lively talk, their excited gestures, their fond laughter, their warm hellos and goodbye hugs lasted throughout the two years Our Lady of the Jukebox had been a regular at The Eternal.
Before a certain October day.
For on that day, fifteen minutes after Our Lady of the Jukebox had taken her seat at her table, the visitor came down the concrete steps into The Eternal and stopped in the middle of the floor. She was wearing a different look for her: like the native dress of the mountain girls of the south country: a low-cut blouse with a frilly collar and puffed-out sleeves, a swirling full-red skirt and an apron and bodice of black cloth with strands of embroidered red roses.
She pulled a white-lace handkerchief from out of the pocket of the apron and blotted a tear off her cheek. Then she smiled and waved the handkerchief at her friend, who answered with a wave of her own with an unlit cigarette in her hand.
The visitor walked to the table slowly and sat down heavily. “Why are you all dressed up with nowhere to go, Eva?” asked Our Lady of the Jukebox.
In a grave voice, Eva said: “I want to have fun again for this month and forget everything that has happened.”
“What everything is that, Eva?”
“I want to forget that I told your man that you are here.”
Our Lady of the Jukebox looked down at the top of the table. She drew her fingers that held the unlit cigarette in circles on it.
“I tried not to, Abby,” said Eva, “but it was as if I had to tell him. How do you think he found my number?”
Abby shrugged and looked up at her. “He is a snoop,” she said. In English, she added: “A snoop for a scoop.”
“Scoop? What is that in German?”
“It is the story a newspaper prints after it wins over other newspapers for the news. That is his way. He is a real newspaperman as I was a real newspaperwoman.” In English, she then said: “With a flask of newsblack and a Napoleon Brandy in my one hand and a pen in my other hand.”
“Please Abby, speak German. I do not know what you mean by that in your English.”
“I am sorry, Eva. I slipped.”
“I am more than sorry, Abby. I know you are here so nobody will bother you. But now … after I told your man, he said he would take the first flight here. But, Abby, the planes are not flying that much these days. Perhaps he will lose his patience and will not fly to you at all?”
“He will ask one of his poker game cronies to fly him.”
Eva reached out for a pack of cigarettes on the table.
“Eva, you have not smoked for years,” Abby said. “Not since our days and nights before I met him.”
“You know that evil man of mine. He did not like me smoking around him. Well, he and our marriage went up in smoke. Now try to stop me.”
“I will not stop you. I must admit, I should have stopped long ago, especially when I was pregnant.” Abby fidgeted her hand holding the unlit cigarette. “But you go ahead,” she said, “you know what they say …” and Abby said it in English “smoke ‘em if you got ‘em. Lock and load.”
Eva puzzled over this remark. Then she said, “Who cares anymore, eh? These damn times of ours.”
She slipped a cigarette from out of the pack and stuck it between her lips, as Abby did with the cigarette she had been holding. Abby then lifted a silver metal lighter with a tiny, blood-red ruby inlaid at the center, flicked on a flame, and lit up; then she offered the flame to Eva and her cigarette.
On the inhale, Eva gasped. Coughing harshly, she said, “My God, Abby, they are so strong. How can you smoke them so strong?”
“You chose one with the rare Turkish tobacco,” Abby said. She tapped on her pack of American menthols. “Try one of these,” she said. “Smoother on the throat.”
Eva did so and Abby offered her the flame again. Eva inhaled, nodded, and said: “Better”.
“A good brand,” said Abby. “Salems. Like in the witch trials. The kind Pat Nixon smoked.”
Eva blinked at Abby. “I do not know what you mean,” she said. She smoked for a moment. Then she said, “I do not know this Pat Nixon.”
“Do you remember our President Nixon?” said Abby. “She was First Lady under him.”
“I see. Did you like these Nixons?”
“I like her Salems. But he was no Herbert Hoover.” Abby let out a laugh, as if into one of her newspapers.
Eva smiled to join in the joke she did not understand. She took in several deep puffs from off her cigarette and lost herself in the smoke clouds of her thoughts. Then, she winced and said: “Abby, I must also forget a dream I dreamed last night. It is why I had to smoke now.”
“Tell me your dream to forget it, Eva.”
Eva stabbed out her cigarette in an ashtray on the table. She slipped out another from the Salems pack and snatched up a blue lighter to light the cigarette fluttering between her mouth. “Those dark dust clouds everyone keeps talking about far away,” said Eva, “turned into a giant black moth that covered the sun in my dream. The moth killed the sunlight. I felt my shoulders twitch in my sleep when a man who wore a black veil said we all had to go down to a basement because of it. I do not want to go down to the basement, I said, there is something down there. But all of a sudden in my dream, I found I was in the basement. And there was something down there: a scared clown with a white face and sad eyes that cried a streak of black tears. He wore a white costume that had a big round stiff collar with pleats, I remember. He told me he was the Moon Clown and we must hide from the giant black moth because the moon was the only light left.”
“My poor Eva.”
“No more sunlight, just this Moon Clown.”
Abby sighed. “Now I am the one who is sorry,” she said.
Eva reached both her hands out to Abby to clutch at a black lace sleeve on a pale white arm. “Do you think the giant black moth will pass over us?” she said.
“It is all in the winds, they are saying in the newspapers,” Abby said.
“Gone with the wind,” said Eva. “I do not want to go down to the basement, Abby.”
“Then stay with me upstairs in my room here at The Eternal,” said Abby. “If only for a while. You know I am only in the room for an hour, for my nap. You can have the rest of the day and the night to yourself, if you want.”
Eva began picking at the cloth of the skirt along her legs as she thought about the offer. Finally, she said: “I might. But first I must go out and find fun. It is October, Abby. There should be fun out there still.”
“Oh wow,” said Abby. “Fun.”
“I would like to try for some young fun again. Like we use to have here. Everybody acts so old these times.”
“So old.”
Eva frowned deeply. “But I cannot be here when he comes,” she said.
“You mean my man?” said Abby.
“I do not like the way he tricked me into telling him where you are now. I know how much The Eternal means to you.”
“Do not concern yourself with that,” said Abby. “You can go up to my room and wait. I will make him crazy until he behaves. They always said at the newspaper office where we worked that I was good at making him crazy.”
“No, I do not ever want to see him in The Eternal. In your special place.” Then Eva muttered: “Little man with the big mouth.”
“Go outside and look for fun then, Eva,” said Abby. “And if you find it, bring a little back with you.”
Eva smiled away her frown. “I will, dear Abby,” she said.
“My offer is always good for you. Do you want to bring the pack of Salems along with you?”
Eva nodded and lifted the menthol pack off the table and put it in a pocket of her apron. “Thank you,” she said. She stood to leave and, with a twirl to her skirt, headed toward the great steel doors of The Eternal.
Then, suddenly, she froze. She turned back toward Abby and said: “Did I ever tell you I am sorry?”
“Yes, you did, Eva.”
“No, not about that, but about everything else.”
Abby looked away, toward the jukebox. “Everything else,” she said.
“You know, all of that. It was because I was in love with my evil man. It was bad love.”
“You are sorry for bad love?”
“I am sorry over everything.”
“Goodbye, Eva. Find your fun. And do not go down to the basement.”
“He was my husband. If only for …”
“Did I not say goodbye, Eva?”
With a quick nod to Abby, Eva spun away from her toward the great steel doors. An old tall man with a waxen face stood at attention there in a battleship gray greatcoat like a sentry for life. He saluted her as he saluted everyone at The Eternal, then opened one of the doors for her.
Meanwhile, Abby was pondering Eva leaving, the man closing the door behind her. “Oh, wow,” she said.
Then she came out of her thoughts by lifting her glass and swallowing down some Napoleon Brandy. Now she felt ready for her jukebox: She lit a Turkish cigarette and arose to go to the Wurlitzer, to feed it with a coin, to stand next to it, and play the songs that charmed her so:
twirling smoke of leaves a cigarette that bears the fresh winds of the autumn the foolish telephone my luckless grieving fantastic ray of light of stumbling words that hitched and hiked with people I hate and never bother with wine
With sleepless eyes, she gazed out over the range of the floor of The Eternal. Footlights sunk into the floorboards gave a low-cast aura to the room like a dull greyish white film. Abby sighed and smoked. She was sad, but no longer cared much about it:
beaux arts get no no champagne I missed sitting the madonna altar of my verses sitting in Chicago to make more everybody loves wine somebody
“White could play and win.”
The loud voice startled Abby. She looked over to a young man wearing an ink-black sports hoodie with a portrait on the chest of a grim rapper scowling out at a killer world. The young man regarded a chessboard on a tabletop. Tugging the hood all about his head, the man said, in English with a Swedish accent, “White has a pawn on the seventh rank. A quick promotion seems inevitable,” and slid the piece forward.
Then he stood to head to the opposite end of the table and the chessboard where he sagged down into a chair. He planted his elbows on the edge of the table, drew his hands into fists, and pressed his temples between them. “It looks like Black has two isolated pawns that could also advance, but they are farther from the promotion,” he said. “It seems that the White’s rook could attack them with ease.”
He stood to go to the opposite end of the table and fell into its chair and studied his side of the board again. Back and forth, forth and back, as this chessmaster had been doing in The Eternal hour after hour these days and nights.
Across the way, two mannequins sat face-to-face at their table. They wore wigs of silver tinsel with a fringe that covered their eyes and white latex hooded smocks and thigh-high silver boots: In this wear, they looked like robot girls transported out of the space age sixties to pose on the runway of a time tunnel. The right elbow of one of them was set on the table so that the right finger pointed at a bright gold badge showing the symbol of a star on the chest of the other. The other mirrored this look, except with her left finger pointing at a bright gold badge showing the symbol of a crescent on the chest of the other. Here they stayed as the jukebox played:
chances are people dress they dress when they dress as every night I sit here by my window with that old kick in the head watching lovers holding hands with hand upraised in blessing and knees atremble to murder the radiant image that dissolves like a walk in the park I still can hear the jukebox softly playing naked
Abby rubbed her right ear with the hand holding her burning cigarette then brought the hand down so she could smoke. She was now looking across the floor to a corner table where a very lanky young man in a black leather jacket, old jeans ripped at the knees, and white basketball shoes was obsessing over a blank page in a spiral notebook. She watched him tap the end of a pen on the table and hum in a mutter to himself before quickly scribbling whatever he was thinking into his notebook. The way he held his head with its mop of shoulder-length hair and rose-colored round shades hiding his eyes over the notebook had Abby thinking of some giant praying mantis hunched over a plywood city in a cheap horror film.
Meanwhile:
what kind of candy girl separate the fool with rope-long neck keep your eye on the holy crimson heart and hank of hair something’s gotta give the nothing like a dame blame it on my got to be me sparrow sprinkle it with grace anointed princely rubies
Down to her left, a man with a broad head, hulking shoulders, and a big, doughy body sat at a table in front of a laptop computer with a smartphone pressed to his right ear. He was speaking to someone out in the digital beyond through a smartphone as he pecked at the computer keyboard. From time to time, he grumbled as he shook the laptop back and forth and switched the smartphone back and forth between his ears and jabbed at the screen with the end of a spoon.
“Hello, hello,” he said to the party on the other end. “This connection is getting worse and worse. Are we still on?” He shook the laptop again. “That’s it,” he said. “Now we’re on again.” He pressed the smartphone closer onto his left ear and began talking in a precise, measured tone: “You say you’re looking for the right kind of flower arrangement?”
Abby closed her eyes. She went to bring the cigarette back to her mouth but found herself pressing two clamped fingers to her lips instead; she had let the cigarette drop to the floor when she closed her eyes. When she opened her eyes, she saw that her once pale hands were now heavily smudged with nicotine stains.
“Flower arrangements, I can get that done,” the man to her left said.
Even though she had washed her hands only an hour ago, the nicotine stains demanded another washing, Abby was thinking. But first, she needed to add money to the jukebox to keep it playing while she was gone. Better make it a double, she thought, as she stood up, fumbled inside her black dress for the coins, slid them into the machine, and scurried off to the women’s washroom.
She walked into the back hall of The Eternal and tugged open the metal door into the washroom. She went to the stainless-steel sink where she removed, from within her black dress, a golden tin box and clicked it open to take out a bar of her special hand soap: pure white, a lemon-lime fragrance that she savored as she smelled the bar. Then, she carefully placed the soap on the edge of the sink so as not to disturb it and turned to regarding her face in the sharply bright mirror with the fluorescent tubes on either side.
She thought: She really looked much better these days in the page boy cut of her hair. She simply could not see herself in that thinning long hair that faked the forever-maternal look: the page boy cut lent her a touch of youth, especially with the midnight black coloring: she no longer felt as bothered by the creasing in her face, the shadows beneath her eyes: she did not care about those signs of outdating anymore now that she could lather her face with lush soapsuds instead of those gobs of makeup she once had to wear for her appearances: the slash of red lipstick, the paste-on eyelashes, the powder to bring down the shine for the severe eye of the television studio lights, the cameras. In city after city after another city.
Thank whatever they were calling god this year that she was finally back in this city and The Eternal. Where she did not have to worry about tailored outfits to look good for potential buyers. Where black is black day after day and she could speak her second language again without that sad feeling of losing it in the United States of America.
Yes, the face in the mirror felt much better when she patted the soapsuds after rubbing her hands over the bar. Scrub her hands up good and hard under the cold water. Scrub so that the washroom was suffused with the lemon-lime fragrance. Work the soap harder into her hands with the rising lather until it felt like a second skin on her hands as bubbles and foam frothed the sink.
She could never forget how her man had always told her that, when she wrote “on the one hand”, she should never just leave it alone like that. The rule was: “on the other hand” must come next.
On the one hand, the soap went.
On the other hand, the soap went.
On the one hand, the soap went.
Then, the other.
As Abby was soaping down her hands, her man was barging through the great steel doors of The Eternal. If he had been a taller sort, he would have entered in bold strides: Instead, he came in a blunt advance, like a small bull in a little china shop. He showed that he meant business in his crisply pressed three-piece suit, his red-white-blue striped tie, and his fedora hat straight out of a haberdasher of the fifties decade.
He went right to the bar and its bartender, a thickset man who wore a starch-white server jacket with golden epaulets and brass buttons. Short black hair oiled down flat on his head with a straight part on top at dead center and sideburns closely squared off, his stark-pale face had a heavy forehead without a wrinkle or furrow and eyebrows trimmed into pointed arcs over eyes set in dark shadow and mascara.
The man reached out his right hand to the bartender for a firm handshake.
“Mine hare,” he said. “Name of Saul”.
The bartender continued to wipe out a beer stein with a wine glass cleaning cloth. “I am sorry,” he answered in English with narrow, pinched lips, “but we are not shaking hands at The Eternal.”
Saul lowered his hand. “Why wouldn’t you?” he said.
“These times,” said the bartender, glancing at the gold-plated watch around Saul’s wrist. “What will you have?”
“See, my wife …”
“I do not know this drink,” the bartender said.
“Okay, let’s get to the point. I don’t have the time to be standing around in here talking with you. I’m on deadline.”
“She has been without you here?”
Saul fidgeted, impatiently. “What does that have to do with the price of rice in Red China?” he said.
The bartender, still wiping out the beer stein, seemed to Saul to smile to himself. “Then I would know her for sure, sir,” he said. “But I may still help. What does she look like?”
“Okay, mine hare, let me paint you a picture.” Saul lifted his right hand to his side to measure out her size to the bartender and said: “Five foot three. Sharp dresser, always in a woman’s business suit, always wears that when she goes out, cause she has to look her best for her readers. Has long hair, blonde-like. Big rock on her wedding finger.”
“A rock, you say.”
“Jewelry, a ring.”
“What is her name?”
“Abby. Her name is Abby.”
“I have heard of several women of that name. Many people come and go in The Eternal. I know some, I do not know others.”
“Now look, I just got done describing her to you. Am I right?”
“Your Abby, I do not think I know.”
“You’re a bartender,” Saul said, “and isn’t it your duty to know everyone who comes and goes in this place? What does she think she’s doing in here anyway? She only drinks a glass of wine or two every once in a while: She’s not some woman who ends up hanging around in bars or anything.”
Abby came out of the washroom and glided across the floor with her quick, light steps to her table. She sat down, took up a cigarette, lit it, and begin thumbing through a newspaper.
Instantly, Saul noticed her. “Now wait a blinking minute here,” he said, “is that Abby over there, who just sat down?”
The bartender set the beer stein aside and looked her over. “That is our Lady of the Jukebox,” he said.
“Our Lady of the … what?”
“She plays the jukebox for us. Now when I think, I remember that a friend who visits her will call her Abby.”
“Not my Abby, not my wife. Look at her, she’s like something that came out of the basement of some horror movie. Her hair’s cut short and black and … where in blazes is her wedding ring?”
“The rock?”
“Yeah, the rock.”
The pinched lips of the bartender cracked for a smile. “If I were you, I would ask her,” he said.
“How am I supposed to go up to some strange woman and ask her if she’s my gosh-darned wife?”
“In The Eternal, it is nothing, sir. Men go up to strange women all the time and ask.”
Without commenting on that, Saul left the bar and began walking slowly over to Abby’s table. She did not glance up from her newspaper as he grew closer.
When he reached her, he cleared his throat and said, in a much lighter and more lilting tone than he had used on the bartender:
“Hi”.
Abby continued reading her newspaper, without saying a word.
Saul smiled, meekly. “Hi,” he said.
Nothing from Abby.
“Can I, uh, can I at least sit with you?” said Saul.
“That would be breaking the law,” said Abby.
“Now what in the Great Judas Priest are you talking about?” said Saul as he sat down heavily.
“Breaking the law,” said Abby. “In The Eternal, first rule is: the laws of Germany.” She lifted her eyes to gaze at the young man with the black-leather praying mantis look across the way. Still writing, still tapping his pen. Then she returned to her newspaper to turn over a few pages.
“What did you mean by …” said Saul.
“… it means I’m sitting at a bar called The Eternal in Germany where I belong speaking German and where I am staying speaking German and where I am playing the jukebox,” Abby said.
Saul coughed and lowered his voice. “I don’t think that’s for you to say,” he said. “We have to talk about this.”
Abby looked up to Saul. “I guess we … should talk,” she said. “Do you want some coffee? They made it fresh, behind the bar.”
“I don’t want any coffee,” Saul said. “The only thing I want is you back home to see Jack.”
“My home is The Eternal,” Abby said. She looked at a page in her newspaper. “Oh wow,” she said. “Gold is soaring these days.”
“You think I don’t know that?” said Saul. He started fingering and twisting the band on his watch.
“But I finally decided … not to adopt,” Abby announced. “You knew that.”
Saul looked perplexed. “What did you just say?”
“When we were talking … about adopting.”
“We had our own child, Abby, like we agreed.”
“I just couldn’t go through the adoption of the gold standard,” said Abby, with a blank straight face. “Not after … Herbert Hoover was untrue.” Then she smirked to herself and went back to reading her newspaper.
“Well, look,” said Saul, “it isn’t like anybody isn’t going to buy the book about Herbert Hoover now. Matter of fact, I’m thinking more people are going to want to read a book about Herbert Hoover because, Abby, there’s more talk out there where they want to bring back socialism. We haven’t been working our ideology for all these years to watch everything go Communist China right in our faces.”
Abby lifted her head and her blank straight face to stare at the man studying his chessboard. While looking at him, she said: “I don’t know what to say. I’ve decided I must give up Herbert Hoover. I’m terribly sorry. I just can’t … go through it. I’m sorry … but it’s so sad. I felt that … that … Herbert betrayed me.”
“Black now must move his rook,” said the chessmaster, “and if he captures the White pawn and checks the White king at the same time, White would win, I think.” He stood up abruptly and moved to the other side of the chessboard where he sat in the chair there to study the board from that angle.
“I’m sorry … so sorry,” Abby said. “It is just that … Herbert and I could no longer go on together … when he developed that bond with the golden girl. That … that … golden girl of his. He should have known that, when the golden girl kissed him, it was the kiss of death for our relationship.”
“Why are you talking like this, Abby?” Saul muttered.
“How could I have ever known … that his heart was so … cold. How could Herbert ever do this to me … put me into this … great depression.”
“You trying to make fun of me, Abby? You trying to make me laugh? Is that what you are really doing in here, writing some soap opera?”
“After that … shame … I could never, never, never adopt that gold standard of his.”
“Look, you know Abby, what we’ve … okay, you have been writing about for two years now, is coming true. We’re way better off now, going to gold.”
“As the world turns … on gold. Herbert, how could you?”
“Our position always made sense, when you go to a system of sound money backed by gold, just like it made sense back in the days of President Hoover. Hell, it was getting so you couldn’t even wipe your behind with the greenback anymore. Now that they can exchange it for gold, you wait and see, people will start having confidence: it’ll be damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead for all the ships of state at sea.”
“I told mother … I told her … it was like Herbert crucified me,” said Abby, keeping her blank straight face, “on a cross of gold.”
“Okay, look Abby, I know all about how you read that once the Brits came off of gold, their recovery began almost instantly and that countries that stuck with gold like President Hoover had a late recovery and how all that brained you with bad writers’ block …”
“… I didn’t give up writing,” said Abby, “it gave me up. So I went on to bigger and better things …”
“… but nobody’s ever going to tell me that Herbert Hoover wouldn’t have been better for the US of A than some flat-footed socialist …”
“… then mother … she whispered in my ear … she said … she said … ‘FDR would have never succeeded without the war.’ ”
Saul raised his eyes to the ceiling and shook his head, without his hat falling off. “So that’s what this is all about,” he said. “Your mother. Abby, you already earned all the straight A’s in life she wanted out of you at Yale, so why are you playing dress up and acting like you did back at the student union lounge now?”
“And mother loved FDR,” said Abby, “but not as much as I loved Herbert Hoover.”
Saul brought his eyes down to lock them onto Abby and her blank straight face. He barely moved his lips as he talked low and hard to her: “So you reckon you can just leave everything behind you and sit here, right Abby? World Socialism is on the march just when we had them cornered; they see their opening and they’re going to hit us with everything they’ve got … so what do you do? you pack your bags and desert. Abby, a bar in Munich is where you should be, not here, because that’s where you could get some real good appeasing done like in the real bad old days.”
Abby looked at her right hand, how it was shaking. She used it to take a cigarette out of the Turkish cigarette pack and put it in her mouth as Saul stared at her, darkly. Then she removed the cigarette, placed it in the ashtray, and reached for the bottle of Napoleon Brandy instead. She opened it and poured what was left in her glass; she took a deep breath and swallowed it all down. Then, she checked the bottle again and found it empty. Nothing.
She motioned for the bartender standing at his post.
“Sandor, please” she said in German. “Another bottle of my Napoleon Brandy, please.”
“There was a time when you’d get a little tipsy on a glass of Manischewitz is all,” said Saul. “But no US of A potions of optimism for you now, no, now you’re some handwringer, some doom and gloomer deep in her cups like the rest of the world now.”
Suddenly, with a wide sweep of her left arm, Abby cleared the table of the ashtray, her cigarettes, her glass, the empty bottle of Napoleon Brandy, and the pile of newspapers and magazines. At that, she stood to attention from off her chair and glared at her man:
“You can hire me as your wife and have me sign a paper saying I want to bear your children. You can give me a job and bring me into the office so people can talk behind my back and call me a sex worker. Then you can put cream that smells on the top of your old bald head and wear nothing else but your poker face before you climb into bed with me at night and think that I like sex then. You can play poker with your rich cronies until the early morning hours as I try to write books about failed American presidents. You can leave your dirty socks in the desk drawers for me to find when all I needed was a pen and a notebook. You can play your record with the anthems of all the nations on Earth after you school me in our ideology. And you can bribe me into the best-seller lists and the top television talk shows. But … you cannot … you can … never … insult my drink of choice,” Abby said in German. “Napoleon Brandy!”
Pounding both her tiny pale fists on the top of the table, she screamed in English: “Second rule is: Be Nice to Mommy”.
And then she threw herself off the chair and scurried to the washrooms in the back of The Eternal.
***********
A world of people had entered into The Eternal throughout its long days and nights over the years. These days and nights, they mostly wandered in, not with the thrusting push of someone like Saul going to Abby. Roaming around in a faraway daze, hazily circling the floor, shuffling over to wherever they might go.
Learned thinker types found themselves gathering in tables around the chessmaster, where they talked about darksome matters in hushed voices and drank morosely. A clique of grim fashion designers and their languid, pouting models, dressed in the threadbare haute couture of yesteryears, met at tables in the area of the space-age mannequins. Electro Goth Ravers in authentic black leather and imitation red pattern leather costumes, draped with nets of silver chains and webs of white lace, headed toward tables close to the young man with the black-leather praying mantis look, where they drank and smoked while wearing mirrored aviator shades, as if blind now to looking for concerts and parties outside the walls of The Eternal. High-strung, nervous sorts in dusty suit jackets and wrinkled slacks who stared into battered laptop computers with hairline cracks in the screens or spoke with rapid desperation into smartphones with bad connections or drummed their fingertips madly on legal pads smeared with scribbled notes and numbers, all sat near the man at his table still trying to arrange flower arrangements.
Saul had turned his chair around to train his practiced eye of a newspaper reporter on it all as the bartender was placing the fresh bottle of Napoleon Brandy on the table, then cleaning up the mess Abby had left off the floor.
“I have never, sir, seen our Lady of the Jukebox act that way,” said the bartender. “She usually sits and smokes and reads and drinks and plays music for us and she is at peace.”
“That right?” said Saul, without looking at him.
“Ja, sir,” said the bartender, as he wiped broken glass into a dustbin at his feet. “She did act something like that one time when she and her friend were talking about a magic book.”
“A magic book,” said Saul.
“Ja, but it was not as bad as what we just saw. Do you know what she said to you?”
“Well, mine hare, it was in German, but I think I got the gist of it.”
“After she yelled at her friend, she went to the washroom but came back later better. I am sure that will happen like that now.”
Saul said nothing, for he had just noticed two figures cloaked totally in body veils entering the door of The Eternal. In walking, their body veils bulked out around them as they saw their path to the bar through a mesh screen cut into a rectangle on the face of their garments. A waiter in a red fez hat bowed to them, solemnly, when they arrived at the bar and he slid two full shot glasses before them. As if as one, the figures reached out their right hands from beneath the body veils to the shot glasses and took them up. Then, they brought the shot glasses in through a flap on the collar of the headpieces. They bent their heads back as their hidden mouths drank off the shot glasses, then they stuck their right hands out of the body veils again to slam the glasses back down on the shelf of the bar.
“Now wait a gosh-darned minute,” said Saul, “did you see that? What are they doing in here and what are they doing drinking …”
He swung around to face the bartender, but instead, there was Abby, sitting at her chair, boldly prim.
“Mother and Hoover,” she said. “Both sucked.”
“Okay, look, I’m sorry, okay?” Saul said. “But you know … 11 years in Vietnam … writing for the Stars and Stripes, watching America’s heroes sweating bullets in some jungle … you think I’m wasting my time in this bar with the frigging Socialist Commies on the streets again when I’m working on deadline?”
“Third rule is: Don’t Talk to Commies.”
As if Abby had just slapped him silly, Saul fell back into his chair. He gawked at her and said, “there must be … isn’t there something I can do to make you laugh again? Turn that frown upside down?”
“Nein.”
Then, smiling sadly, Saul stood to put on a little shuffling dance on the floor for Abby. “How’s about some of the old soft shoe then?” he said. “Put another nickel in the machine, Abby, and I’ll dance us back home.”
“I only take requests from the bar,” she said. She looked in that direction. “Sandor?” she said.
“Play more of your Rat Pack,” said the bartender.
So Abby did just that:
And you linger like a haunting rope neck like a summer with a thousand Julys can’t you see that it can never be on his guilty sinful neck she may be weary do I get knees that tremble shaking quaking can never take
“Can you … could you sit back down when we are talking?” Saul said.
“You know I don’t want to talk,” said Abby.
“Well, we have to, Abby.”
“Then I’ll do it standing.”
You won’t regret it women don’t forget it a word a smile and a kiss snowman of verse rips open his priestly spinning around in my brain like a hammered-in nail give a thought to my plea cast a spell over me at night with fellow tipplers
“What do we have to talk about,” Abby said. “Your painting?”
“Look, I can’t be wasting my time painting these days. I got a deadline to meet,” said Saul.
“When I was considering the marriage, I thought, well, at least he paints.”
“You never told me that. What is this, a night for bringing out everything? And, you think I believe that anyway?”
“You didn’t finish your portraits of Ronald, Maggie, or Sharon?”
Saul blinked. “No, and I didn’t have the time to finish my Mona Lisa either,” he said.
Don't save your kisses just pass them the moon shining and that's a good Italy old pantomime my loving arms are tenderly twine twee twee twine oh scent of fabled yesteryear the world is gonna be mine rubs and rubs but can’t get rid of it
“White then starts a series of checks leading to White Kc7,” said the chessmaster. “Qg4; Black Kg2, f2. Then after that: Kh1, Qf3+, Kg1, Qg3+. Now, Black does not protect his pawn with Kf1 because then the white King steps back up the board, and then … let us see here … a series of checks and King moves again, leading to what will be a mating position”.
soul and my heart inspiration so the player drops his fiddle when you're all I wake up for each day has the right to be dunce-like once fight, fight for the right to be green of morning’s rim bitter mood turned to peace
“Jack’s coming home so you have to come home for him,” said Saul. “You know he’d want you there.”
“Oh, wow,” Abby said. She inhaled deeply off her Turkish cigarette and sighed out smoke. “How is he?”
“Slicker than spit on a silver spittoon.”
“I was always proud of our Jack.”
“We were always proud about our Jack, Abby. Remember him out there, on the parade field? Perfect, in formation, by the book.”
“The magic book,” said Abby, sighing smoke.
Looking for a girl who saved her love for a rainy daydream believe sealed book of wizard spells a sinner kissed a bewitched bothered bewildered angel lies a soul-destroying spell
Abby said: “What begins and ends and begins again? Says love and then kills it? Gives land, takes land? Says feast, says diet? Talks peace, declares war? Prays, then damns? Works miracles, denies them? Raises the dead, kills babies? Good animal, bad animal? Drink wine, stay sober? Make the poor rich, the rich poor?”
“If this is a riddle,” said Eva, “could you tell me it in German, please?”
“And everybody says it is magic,” said Abby in German.
“A magic book,” said Eva.
“My struggle,” said Abby. “I do not want to hear about books again.”
Not slept a wink by the branches melancholy nightwood waltz since this silly situation on the blink a simpering, whimpering child
“Well, you know what they’re saying,” said Saul. “It’s going to end up better for the country than it was before, is what they’re saying. These entrepreneurs they got are already working on special equipment that’ll take that oil right out of the ground and make it even cheaper in the long run, hell, less than one measly American greenback for a gallon, they’re saying. They’re going to pump it in new cars and airplanes and trains that’ll just run like gangbusters on the stuff.” Saul pounded his right fist on the table, then checked his watch for any damages. “You doom and gloomers,” he continued, “you’re wringing your hands, calling it contaminated when … you know what it is? If it was Grade A before, it’s going to be Grade A Plus Extra now.”
“Oh, wow,” said Abby.
We get speeches from our rouge skipper and advice from white and wonderous Tokyo roses we get letters doused with morbid tones of wood-dry perfume wood-dry rouging lips
The man on the smartphone in front of his laptop was still arranging the garden of his mind with his contact, talking excitedly: “Roses, yeah, we can work some roses in there. If you want them, but you have to tell me. Wait, a minute, I lost you. There you are … no, yellow, red, pink, whatever. What, tulips? Well, it’s still spring out there, I think. But look, if you want me to arrange the arrangement you got to tell me what it’s for. What? No… I lost you again”.
That brought you joy one day a broken toy the horizon’s broken bowl I got the routine but this torch that I've found it’s gotta be drowned so drink to me only that's all I ask or it soon might explode but you lay out upon the darkling meadows of persistence you wore down my resistance on that ebony high altar
Because the graceful hand was plastic, it did not feel the prick of the thorn on the stem of a rose as the mannequin was seen stretching her right arm out to offer the gift to her companion, who was poised to accept it with the fingers of both her hands set in V signs.
“I saw that,” said Saul. “Right over there. I saw them move.”
“They’re mannequins,” said Abby. “The Eternal repositions them from time to time. Part of their floor show.”
“No, by themselves. I swear to you Abby, I saw them move by themselves. When I came in, they were pointing at badges on those uniforms, then I saw the one over there take that rose over there off one of the chairs and hold it …”
“Now that you mention mannequins,” said Abby, “during my freelancing days here, Eva and I would go to this little art movie theater on the weekends, you know, where they had these long, long marathons of long, long films: five hours of Dr. Mabuse or 442 minutes of Our Hitler or eight hours of Warhol Empire. Then, between segments, the theater would roll vintage newsreel films, like atomic bomb test movies that showed a typical fifties mannequin family having a nice wax food dinner at their kitchen table—the son with a baseball hat, the daughter holding a doll, the mother in her pleated skirt, the father in his business suit.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know, then they get blown away. So what?”
Abby sat back down so she could slide a cigarette out of the pack. Then she noticed only two cigarettes left in the pack. As she was staring into it, jiggling it, she said: “I began to feel sorry for the mannequin family in the movie. Not so much before the blast, just them sitting still in there, but then the smoke and ash cloud collapses the walls of the house and blasts through the living room. That’s when their arms and legs and heads would start moving, like the blast was bringing them to life for a second, only to send them flying apart the next second.”
“Huh?”
“And when they repeated the scene in slow motion and then with close ups, it really made me sad about the mannequins. For a second, they came to life with death.”
Saul flung out a few aimless gestures with his hands. “What does that have to do with what was coming from those mannequins over there?” he said.
Abby filled her glass with Napoleon Brandy to drink it down in one gulp. “Oh that,” she said. “Made in Japan.”
Suddenly, she stood from the table and said, “I need more cigarettes, I’m going to get another pack upstairs.”
“What … where upstairs?”
“Upstairs to the room of my own.”
“Wait, wait, wait,” said Saul, “you have a room here? This isn’t just some place where you’re drinking and smoking and playing the jukebox? You have a room here?”
“Of my own, correct.”
Now Saul flung his arms in the air. “A house on 10 acres by the ocean in Maine with Lilly the Maid and Gomez the Servant and Liberty the Golden Retriever and a personal library that puts the Library of Congress to shame, but now you’re living upstairs here?” he said.
“For an hour, while they’re cleaning The Eternal. Other hours, I’m here.”
“Not anymore,” said Saul. His voice sunk into a grim note. “Not anymore. You are returning to the fabulous house on the lovely 10 acres by the ocean and the personal library where you’re going to finish the Hoover book and you’re going to be there when Jack walks through that door to welcome him back with a delicious meal of Maine lobster fresh out of the ocean, swimming in pools of melted butter. So, go upstairs and lock and load your suitcase, Abby my wife, because you’re coming home.”
Abby rose from her chair. “And when I come back,” she said, “you’ll be gone.”
At her leaving, her man sat licking his lips and staring down at his feet. He stayed motionless for a while until the voice of the chessmaster shook him out of it:
“The White Queen takes the pawn. Meanwhile the Black King threatens to promote. So the White Queen here has to give perpetual …”
“Lobsters swimming in melting butter … now I’m starving,” Saul said to himself. “Just a couple of crackers and a bag of peanuts on the plane.” He turned his eyes to the bar and snapped his fingers in the air. “Uh, what did she call you?” he said. “Sandor … What kind of food do you have in the house?”
The bartender smiled to himself. “I will send the waiter to you,” he said.
The waiter he sent to Saul towered gauntly over the floor of The Eternal, his bony arms with a crook at the elbows dangling long hands at the end. One of the hands held a menu of a single page that he set on the table before Saul.
Saul sniffed openly as he reviewed it. “That’s it?” he said to the menu. “That’s all the food you serve in this place my wife calls home these days?”
“Your order, sir?” said the waiter.
“Order what? They had more food choices on the winter menu at the concentration camps in the Gulag.”
The waiter said nothing.
“All right then, well … the all-you-can-eat meat plate. Sausage, bratwurst, salami … does it come with the pickles, the hot mustard, the warm rye bread, the …”
“… all you wish to want,” said the waiter.
“Then I want it all. I’m hungrier than a skinny puppy on a diet.”
“As you wish,” said the waiter, who then turned to leave. But before he could take a fourth step away, Saul called out to him, “Uh, waiter.”
The waiter returned.
“Waiter,” said Saul, “you ever heard of a self-respecting all-you-can-eat meat plate that didn’t have cheese on it? Every self-respecting all-you-can-eat meat plate has to have cheese on it.”
“We have cheese,” said the waiter.
“But do you have soup? Was that on the menu?”
“Yes. Soup.”
“What kind of soup was on the menu, waiter?” Saul leaned his face and eyes up close to the menu, as if he were half blind and nosing around for braille. “I don’t see soup here,” he said.
“In the soup,” said the waiter.
“In the … huh? Oh, what do I want in the soup, you mean. Well, how about, let’s say, oh … well … put some noodles, potatoes … uh … maybe some … well … chicken in there.”
“What you want.”
“Hot. Soup. It’s hot, right?”
“All soup is hot,” said the waiter. Slowly he turned, step by step, toward the bar. Until Saul called him back. The waiter stiffened, stopped, and pivoted back to the table.
“I’m going to have something to drink with that order,” said Saul.
“Ja?” said the waiter.
“But non-alcoholic. I don’t want to be drinking something like Napoleon Brandy on an empty stomach, now do I, waiter?”
“Mais, non.”
“Now everything’s in French? Aren’t we in … oh, never mind, I’m thinking some fizzy water. With lemon. And, uh, ice. Fizzy water with lemon and ice. Think you can do that, garcon?”
“I will bring it.”
And with that, Saul left the waiter in peace to place the order.
As Saul waited, his short body appeared to fume through cycles of agitated workings: He looked at his watch, sighed with a grumble, slid a newspaper over to him that Abby had been reading, glanced at it, then pushed it away a minute later, shifted in his seat, coughed, looked around the room at nothing much, slid a magazine over to him that Abby had been reading, flipped open the cover and through several pages, pushed it away, grumbled with a sigh, cleared his throat, and looked at his watch before shifting in his seat, with a huff under his breath.
And he was looking at his watch again when the waiter interrupted him with the all-you-can-eat cold cut plate, placing it very precisely on the table. “Ho ho,” Saul exclaimed, “looky here, it’s actually food.”
The waiter nodded his head, once, and departed as Saul began spearing slabs of meat with a fork, sliding them off the end of the prongs with his fingertips to fit them onto slices of rye bread that he had already coated with the hot mustard from off a tiny knife, all to create a bulging sandwich. Leaning over the plate, he plunged into the sandwich with powerful munching and chewing, pausing occasionally to lay it down to bite into a pickle or a sausage he would jab inside his cheeks.
Soon, he was finished. Without wiping his mouth with a napkin, he snapped his fingers toward the bar at the waiter who was standing next to the bartender. Solemnly, the waiter bowed once and returned to serve Saul.
“It’s time for my second helping, waiter,” said Saul, quickly. “And this time, could you bring me the soup?”
“The soup,” the waiter said, as he removed the plate from the table and started to walk away, before Saul summoned him back with a “uh, waiter?”
“Sir?”
“Why don’t you … uh … bring me more salami with this helping. Keep the rye bread and pickles and everything else on there, but I reckon on a heap of salami for this go round.”
“Ja.”
The waiter turned again to walk away.
“Oh, and waiter …” said Saul.
The waiter turned back to Saul. “Ja?” he said.
“Make sure there isn’t a fly in the soup, will you, waiter?”
The waiter breathed heavily – a groan of a breath in the hollows of his narrow chest. “No to fly,” he said and walked directly to the bar.
Saul: a shifting in the seat. A glance at the watch. A sigh, a grumble. A newspaper, a glance, push it away. Cough. A shift in the seat, then eyes shifting around the room. Watching the chessmaster studying his moves on the board. The mannequins, the rose, the V sign. Checking the watch. The young man with the black-leather praying mantis look scribbling on his legal pad, his pen swirling as if he were conducting an atonal musical chamber work. Watch again. The arranger, busy with his laptop and smartphone, arranging flowers. A stare into the watch.
The waiter with the all-you-can-eat meat plate and soup, arriving.
Saul dropped his eyes to the plate the waiter had just laid on the table and sputtered in feigned astonishment.
“Waiter,” said Saul. “You didn’t happen to look at this plate before you brought it over, did you, by any chance, waiter?”
The waiter said nothing.
“Because you down-sized the plate,” said Saul, with a fling of his arms and a push on his back into the chair.
Nothing out of the waiter.
“Don't think I haven't seen this before when it comes to all-you-can-eat specials. Where they keep down-sizing the plates, so I’m not getting the full deal. It’s just some optical illusion you’re pulling on me, right, waiter?”
Nothing from the waiter.
“Waiter … I mean … what do you make of this down-sized plate?” Saul looked up at him. The wedge-faced head with sunken cheeks and lantern jaw had been drawn instead toward the chessmaster. There was a touch of a smirk to the sparse lips, as if he were thinking this was a game he could win.
“You know, waiter, if this were the good old US of A, you’d always be thinking about your tip,” Saul said. “But because there’s no tip incentive in these parts, I’m just going to have to appeal to your sense of fair play. Take this plate back and give me the right-sized plate. And keep bringing me right-sized plates for all I can eat, understand?”
Still watching the chessmaster, the waiter nodded.
“Well … waiter?” said Saul.
The waiter took his eyes off the chessmaster and stepped back so he could lift the plate up.
Saul said, “And, uh … waiter?”
The waiter halted.
“Could you get my drink this time? You know, the fizzy water?”
The waiter did not look at Saul when he said: “I bring the drink”.
The waiter walked over to behind the bar and set the plate down. He smiled at the bartender waiting there. The bartender nodded and reached down beneath the bar to come up with a silver-foil packet, which he placed neatly on the counter. Still smiling, the waiter watched the bartender take a bottle of sparkling mineral water from out of a small refrigerator, fill a tall glass with ice cubes, then empty hot pink powder from the packet over the ice cubes, followed by the entire bottle of fizzy water. The mixture swelled up to the top of the glass in a tangle of streaming bubbles.
The waiter set the drink on a silver platter, then brought it to Saul.
“Well, okay, you got the fizzy water right,” said Saul, “but maybe you forgot the food with the right-sized plate, waiter?”
“Next food for thought,” said the waiter. And he left.
Saul shook his head. “Help these days,” he said to himself as he took a sip from the glass and licked his lips. Then he said: “But, let me tell you, this … this ain’t half bad.”
Moments passed slowly, as they would do in The Eternal … or stopped to hover, as they did over Saul at this moment, when the polished metal surfaces of The Eternal began to reflect on themselves brightly in the mirror behind the bar to waver in gold-toned ribbons around the fringes of the room, when Saul noticed a husky man walking out from behind the bar toward him, when, as the man approached, Saul was attracted by how the sight of the starched high collar of the white Nehru jacket that this fellow was wearing seemed to have taken the place of a neck to support the stout head with the ruddy, plump face. The strict line of a mouth on the drab face clasped the stem of a red rose limned in blinking outlines of neon above the red, white, and blue love beads around the stiff collar.
“Why, Mr. President,” said Saul, in awe.
The man stopped at the table to let his mouth open so the rose would fall onto the table, giving way for the voice of Abby out of bloodied lips:
“Fourth Rule Is: Eat Kosher Salami.”
********
As the mortar shell hits your jukebox of a typewriter, your editorial calling for the shutdown of troop brothels explodes on the page. Musical keys fly in your face in a jabbering jingle of letters, numbers, periods, commas, exclamation points that sing: Go See Jungle! Go See Jungle! Go Join Clown! Yeah, Go Jungle, Boy, Go!
Batting away the swarm of rabid keys from your face, you see your way to escaping this crazy Quonset hut, but end up slipping on a banana peel on the doorsill that throws you outside, to fall on your hands and knees to a clown in the distance.
He stands in blackface at the outskirts of a jungle in flames that do not burn. He wears floppy black pajamas and a conical straw hat above the blackface that smiles through a streak of painted white tears. Above the clown, the sky shimmers and glows over the trees in a soft chimera of slow fire that licks the palm leaves into swaying like the welcoming dance of hula girls.
The clown beckons you, waving a crescent-shaped wineskin to join him in a toast. So you bring yourself off all fours to go to him.
Reaching him, he grabs you by the scruff of the neck and, cackling wildly, starts pouring all the wine from the wineskin down your throat. Wine is spilling over your lips but the cackling clown keeps pouring so that now you are swallowing it all down and seeing the skies fall into a black velvet darkness that blots out the fire to set the stage for the rising happy face of a moon whose blooming light you drink in.
You hear the clown laughing in victory like a whip crack on a metal snare drum. Laughing away as he tosses the drained wineskin over his shoulder and claps his hands three times together to call up a white feather pen dribbling red ink to appear on his right palm and a parchment scroll on the left. Now he crumbles the parchment scroll in his hand to mash it into your face as he would a creme pie until clots of words coat your eyes:
FREE ICE CREAM TO BEARER
That voice in your head of your woman nagging you into crash fad diets has you screaming for ice cream. And you get it, too, cold and sticky, straight on the top of your bald head, with the clown plopping a jumbo two-scoop vanilla ice cream cone there, with the tip of the cone jutting up so that it looks like a baby party hat.
“Forward march, Private Buck,” the clown says. He grabs your hand to haul you up to your feet and drag you behind him into the jungle. Your feet wobble in struggling to find a path beneath the moonlit canopy of twisted, clinging vines entangled in the sagging tree branches of matted palm leaves. Look at you now, blinded by melting ice cream, playing the dupe in putting your trust in a blackface clown to lead you through the undergrowth and overhang of this plant world that haunts the memory of your stay in this country with the deadly names of living things: Heartbreak Grass, Flame Lilly, Twisted Cord Flower, Bark Cloth Tree. And a few steps farther, your ears perk to the flow of a stream that sounds as if someone is watering these plants to nurture them in your mind.
Suddenly, the blackface clown says “Company, Halt.” You obey. With a “HA” of a laugh, he slaps the silly hat off your head and starts wiping the vanilla ice cream off your face so that your eyes can see him dangling a moist gold wristwatch that is melting into a puddle at his feet of the same ice cream you were wearing.
Now he throws the wristwatch into a pile of black men’s dress socks full of holes heaped next to an ancient washerwoman, who is crouched over her plastic washboard by the banks of a jungle rivulet. “AAAch,” she mutters in a sour German accent. “Little man with the big mouth for ice cream.” She wearily picks the wristwatch off her pile-work and starts to rubbing and scraping it across the ridges of the washboard.
Now, finished with scouring it, she takes the watch off the washboard and dips it down into the stream. Her naked arm and hand glisten white as silver as she sees the wristwatch slip from her grasp into the rush of the current. “AAAch,” she exclaims, “I do not have time for his time anyway.”
“Well, now, ain’t that slicker than spit on a silver spittoon,” yells the blackface clown and turns from you to make a dive onto the banks of the rivulet to try to fish out the watch … but instead comes up holding soaking-wet playing cards. Laughing madly, he swiftly brings them up to fan them out in your face, saying “royal flush, Private Buck, you lose. Time to show me the money.” You respond by jabbing your finger at the watch you see the water carrying away from you.
“Looks like you’d better pawn it, babe,” he says.
He grabs your hand again and tugs you onward in a hurried trot, shouting “follow the money” over and over in this chase to snag the bobbing watch, still melting as it leaves vanilla ice cream stains on the water in streaks and ribbons trailing behind it.
But now, as you are sprinting headlong for your watch, you start to sense that someone, or something, is keeping a watch on you. You have been in the habit, ever since you found yourself in this country, of placing yourself on high alert for menacing eyes hidden behind the teeming foliage of jungle camouflage, spying on your every move outside of your office in the hut. You now suspect the faces behind those eyes of wrecking your hut in an explosion of typewriter keys to force you into this jungle, to bring you closer into their view.
Now it hits you: you were so right, bang!, a shot to the eye. You fall backward from taking the hit into the welcoming arms of the blackface clown. Your left eye is swelling shut, but your right eye can still make out something of what poked you; protruding out from a curtain of leafy vines blocking your way, it looks like the lying snoot of the Pinocchio puppet, with a circle of glass at its very tip as its only nostril.
“Okay, we got the slapstick close-up,” announces the blackface clown from behind you. “Next, I’m thinking a full view shot of … I dunno … how about him in shock and awe, looking over the happening scene on the beach out there?”
On command, the poker withdraws into the leafy vines as the curtain opens out onto a widespread night beach tinged with quicksilver beams from off the happy moon, playing on the faint ocean wavelets brushing the shoreline. Now your left blackeye and good right eye make out the foggy sight of a portable television camera that two handsome workwomen are carrying. Must have been its telescopic lens sticking through the foliage that caught you face first, you think.
Striking in their lithe, diminutive beauty, the almond-eyed workwomen guide the camera across the beach as the tightly wound pigtails from their black long hair wag and jounce on the shoulders of their matching purple-blue tracksuits. Four Japanese characters stenciled over the left chest pockets somehow come out reading M-OTH in English to your sore eyes. Now, one of the workwomen directs her partner to aim the camera she hoists on her shoulder toward the happening scene that the blackface clown wants them to capture: he and you walking out of the fringes of the jungle toward the beach; how, when suddenly your left foot drags in the sand, it seems to act like you just hooked it on a tripwire that sets off the first quavering sunbeams into gracing the lip of the horizon to begin the end of the night.
In the face of this new light, the clown now turns his head to look over the ocean, to lift his finger to a point on the water. “Lock and load, for there she blows,” he shouts to the two workwomen, who scurry into wielding their television camera around, aiming it now at a roiling whorl of churning foam and spume out there. To where the glistening forehead of a woman is rising from the depths as if the motion of the dawning sun were working to bring her up.
Your blurred vision sees her as a swimsuit model out of the magazines the troops read in those brothels that have been bothering your mind of late, except that her swimsuit is nothing but gold – for she is everything gold. The twirls and curls of her bouffant hairdo held in place by a halo of gold spray. The golden glow to her eyes. Her sleek cheekbones like liquid gold flowing down to burnish her chin. Her broad shoulders of a marathon swimmer with the heft of gold ingots. Her golden globed breasts that stand out firmly above the flat of her gold-plated chest and belly.
You catch your breath at the sight of the vein of gold between her thighs that opens to you in her walk out of the water and onto the shore, her smoothly muscled legs with golden calves and knees like gold nuggets leaving footprints that press gold dust into the pebbly sand.
You gaze at her golden face now, yes, that shines with the golden shine of a sun now rising higher over the beach in step with her walk to you, all up to where she is in your face, to where the thick of her mouth puffed with lips of gold brush your left ear with a watery sigh that whispers “H20AU” to you.
Now she draws her lips across your left temple and over your swollen left eye before she lays her kiss upon you that heals the hurt to miraculously lower the swelling. You can now clearly see the ever-melting watch on her right wrist: the face frozen in time, stuck exactly at 8:15 on this morning when the sun is pulsing red, hotter than any sun has ever felt before on your skin.
Laughing brightly into the searing air, the golden girl pulls her wrist away from your eyes so she can point a gold finger up to a dark spot next to the hot sun, a round black mark on the steaming mad sky that grows larger as its bulbous bug-eyed face descends onto the beach. At the sound of its stiffly flapping wings and cawing shrieks, the two pigtailed workwomen drop their camera onto the sand to stretch their arms and hands into the sky and raise their piping voices into clarion song to hail its coming:
M-OTH oh M-OTH
May your reign
Continue for a thousand, eight thousand generations
Until the tiny pebbles
Grow into mighty boulders
Lush with moss
To rock the shade
M-OTH oh M-OTH
“I didn’t ask for sunshine,” the blackface clown says, pulling a frown, “and I got World War …”
He stops, confused, trying to count it all up on his fingers. Finally, with a shrug, he quits and turns to you, saying: “Look, you’re a guy … you ... you’ve got great numbers. You talk about numbers? I'm beginning to think not only did you invent the abacus, but you invented the computer too. It's fuzzy math.”
Here, he pats the top of your bald head and says, in a pout, “Fuzzy wuzzy math”.
*********
Cleanly washed, a wan hand puts another coin in the jukebox.
strangers in the smoke Joe the clown wine that of eyes in the love tramp moon of tears only eyes river home why she can make me sets up the twirling smoke of leaves a cigarette that bears your name
“Did you bring back fun, Eva?” said Abby.
“No,” said Eva. “I have no fun.”
chances are that old kick in the head people dress they dress as every night I sit here with holding hands with hand upraised in blessing and knees atremble to murder the radiant image by my window that when they dress watching lovers
The chess master welcomed those who had congregated at the nearby tables throughout the evenings to visit him now and stand around him in a circle as he showed off the results of the match against himself.
“You see, ladies and gentlemen,” he announced, “it is my variation on a writing of French surrealist Marcel Duchamp, known as Opposition and Sister Squares Are Reconciled.” He opened his arms down to the board below. “This,” he said, “is my endgame. And so, in the end, I am the final champion, beyond winning and losing. Surrealism made it all real for me.”
Grinning, he looked up to his audience, expecting a surge of hands to shake and slaps on his back. Instead, he found the face of the towering waiter, thinly smiling, like out of some dreamland fog.
“I clean this table,” the waiter said. “I always win.”
twirling smoke of leaves a cigarette that bears the fresh winds of the autumn beaux arts get no no champagne I missed sitting the Madonna altar of light of
As if waiting for someone to reposition them, the space-age mannequins stayed still. One of them remaining strictly poised to accept a gift with the fingers of both her hands set in the V sign and her companion stretching her graceful plastic hand out to her. Only, a rose no longer graced that hand.
when they dress knees atremble to murder the radiant image that chances are people dress they dress with hand watching lovers upraised in blessing and as every night I sit here by my window with that old kick in the head dissolves
The young man with the black-leather praying mantis look scribbled one last thought into his spiral notebook then closed it abruptly. He shot a glance up to the Electro Goth Ravers and said, “With a hey and a ho… let us go.” With that, the scruffy pack stood together and went for the great steel doors of The Eternal, where the old tall man in the battleship gray greatcoat met them to salute their passing.
that's all I ask or it soon might explode but you lay out upon the darkling my luckless grieving fantastic ray of light hand upraised in blessing and knees the Madonna altar of my verses that brought you joy one day a broken toy
Giving his laptop a violent shake against the spotty wireless service, the flower arranger spoke louder into his smartphone: “Look, I think we got the kind of flowers you want and the colors you want, but you still haven’t told me what they … what … breaking up again … I got to leave this place soon so … going to be closing…So, if I’m going to do a job, I got to know… what’s that? Shiver? You there? Something about a … nish mat? … nut? … kiv … your … what? … he’s ped … hell,” he huffed, saying, “gone damn dead.”
strangers in the strangers in the smoke of eyes eyes of smoke in the love tramp moon of tears the clown wine that only eyes can make me sets up the river home why she and you linger like a haunting rope neck like a summer with a
“Oh wow,” said Abby. “We went through all of that just so you would admit it was friendly fire?”
Though facing her, Saul did not look Abby in the eye. “Well,” he said, “I figured, well, you know, that … well … you weren’t going to come back if I painted the whole picture." He reached his hands up to the top of his head that was missing its fedora hat to pat and rub at the scratches crisscrossing the raw skin.
“Friendly fire took him in the end. Even after doing everything by the book.”
“He’s still one of our heroes. It didn’t really … it doesn’t really matter how.”
Abby slumped back into her chair and reached for a calming cigarette from out of her pack. “Giving me a rose isn’t going to matter either,” she said.
Saul placed the rose whose thorns had left streaks of blood on the palms of his hands on the table. “Don’t know … how’d I end up with it?” he murmured.
“You weren’t going to tell me about the friendly fire, thinking you would convince me to come home and see him,” said Abby. “And what would I find waiting for me? Jack in a …” Her sneer was crooked as she lit the cigarette, then smiled a little.
“Please … now, Abby … you can still come home,” said Saul, as his hands dug into trying to smooth down the wrinkles that creased his shirt and suit coat.
Abby sighed out a cloud of smoke, thoughtfully, then blinked through it to look around the room. The Eternal was empty of patrons except for Sandor the bartender who was keeping an eye on two stragglers at the bar, nursing their drinks until the final seconds before the cleaning crew arrived for the hour to themselves.
“I’m sorry, Saul, but I have a headache,” said Abby. “I need to go to the room of my own to take a nap. It was a long night, longer than usual, as you should know.”
“Well, I’ll find somewhere to wait outside until you’re ready to go,” said Saul.
“Nein, straighten your tie before you go for good, Saul, you alone.”
“Hey, Abby.”
“And when you return, say auf Wiedersehen to Jack for me, would you?”
As she rose to leave, Saul dropped his head to stare at his fedora hat where it lay crushed in the dirt on the floor. He stared as if hypnotized, silenced, for a moment, until he said: “What can I do to make you laugh, Abby?”
“Ha, ha, Saul.”
“No, I’m serious.”
Abby stopped to hear him out. “What could you do that would seriously make me laugh now, Saul?” she said.
His eyes on his hat, Saul said, “How about I paint you some clowns?”
“Ronald, Maggie, Sharon,” said Abby. “You didn’t know it, but you were already painting clowns. Who’s laughing now?”
Saul raised his wettened eyes to her and said, “How about I paint you some happy little palm trees?”
THE END
For Eric Van Denburg
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