Chapter Fifteen

I answer the phone on about the ninth ring, which is how long it takes for me to realize I am asleep amid my sister’s lavender-scented pillows and not being chased through a penis farm by Bo Diddley astride a camo-painted ATV. It’s a relief, actually, as Bo was wielding that X-shaped guitar like an M-16 and the cash crop was starting up with that one-eyed gape that most days of the week indicates one hell of a screwing. A bit blearily, I place the American Teacher’s Phone against my good left ear while Lillian’s voice explains why she once more won’t be making her flight from Memphis. It seems that Mom had a really rough night. Quite the coincidence. I myself stayed very late at that Triad bar Arnie’s been telling me about. They do teach macramé in the back. I made half a sock.

“Listen,” says Lil, “you have to call my boss, Joe, and tell him I can’t make the faculty meeting tomorrow but will absolutely be back Monday for the first day of classes. His number’s there by the phone.”

“Nnngh,” I mutter, groping for the ibuprofen. That was a really close call at the penis farm. I still don’t feel entirely safe so near Lillian’s sex toys, especially the long black one.

“No, this isn’t nnngh,” says Lillian. “This is my job. Call him.”

Nnngh.

“Don’t you even want to hear about Mom? You never ask about her.”

“How’s Mom?” I ask, locating the ibuprofen beside the bottle of ma huang. I dump an unknown quantity of each into my mouth. I think something went down a nostril.

“You never ask about me, either,” says Lil.

“How are you?”

“God, I don’t know,” she sighs. “Just being back in Memphis is weird enough. I’m still jet lagged and it never stops raining and Mom’s vital signs are all over the place. The doctor’s putting her on two new meds. He says—”

“What?” I say, reaching for my notes. “Our mother is already taking fourteen medications. Rush Limbaugh doesn’t take fourteen medications.”

“You sound hung over,” says Lil.

“I don’t yet qualify for hung over. Technically, I think I’m still drunk. I checked online, and the levothyroxine is probably screwing with the pioglitazone and the—”

“Levo-what?” she asks.

“Are you looking at the list? Levothyroxine. It’s her hormone replacement. Regis Labs, five hundred mils, morning and night.”

“Regis Labs,” says Lil. “That’s funny.”

“Why would Regis Labs be funny?”

“They’re a client,” says Lil. “Stuart has them on retainer. I don’t think he ever does a thing.”

“Ask the doctor about the celecoxib. The paroxetine, too. Both of those are way over-prescribed.”

“Celecoxib… and… paroxetine,” says Lil. “You know, this is bringing up all your Mom stuff.”

“This is not a good moment for discussing my Mom stuff.”

“Name me one moment that ever was.”

Falling back on the pillows, I toss the notebook, missing the table.

“Mom was an asshole,” I tell my sister. “Doesn’t make for much of a conversation, does it?”

She never did anything you could actually point to. The courts do not remove children from the home because of the plastic covers on the living-room furniture. You don’t go on SSI because your mother failed to make eye contact before your twenty-seventh birthday.

“I thought you were over it,” says Lil.

“I’m over it. I just don’t understand it.”

After a moment she says, “I understand it. I’m just not over it.”

There were plastic covers on our mattresses and pillows, too. I was a college senior before I could sleep on a bed that didn’t go crinkle-crinkle in the night. As an underclassman I kept a Wonder Bread wrapper under my pillow.

“How’s it going with that animal in my kitchen?” says Lil.

“I’m studying its habits.”

“You’re what?”

“Before you take an animal out,” I say, “you study its habits.”

“Doo, buy a goddamn trap.”

“What size? Baited with what? Placed where? And while you’re waxing eloquent on the subject of wild-game management, dearest dear, you might suggest a blunt object to place beside the bed with which to, stark naked, beat its brains out when the trap that you would have me buy catches it by a forepaw.”

Actually, everything I need to know was written in the flour I scattered on the kitchen floor that first night. I need to buy a goddamn trap.

“I’m going to come back there,” says Lil, “and you’re going to have a bound-and-indexed dissertation on the rat in my kitchen, and—”

“I’ll take care of it,” I tell her.

“Today?”

“Very, very soon.”

The soon whistles slightly because of my missing maxillary first premolar crown. I was eating at the school lunchroom yesterday—mistake number one—and chewing a mouthful of rice—mistake number two; no one chews rice in this country—when a small pebble turned my gold maxillary first premolar crown into a mortar round. Which is to say it come out. I now have an appointment with a dentist whose name sounds like something a xylophone would say. Let’s just hope that’s not mistake number three.

“I found that guy’s business card,” says Lil. “The debt-collector guy? He’s with a company in Kansas City called International Wholesale Distributors.”

“It’s taken care of,” I say. “Gotta go. Time to seize the day, or at least go hug the toilet for a while.”

“Doo, when are you going to start taking care of yourself?”

“We have strong constitutions, Lillian. We don’t need to take care of ourselves.”

“Yes, we do,” says Lil. “You’ll call Joe for me? Without fail?”

“What does syzygy mean?” I ask.

“What?”

“Never mind,” I say. “I’ll call him.”

Making local calls from the American Teacher’s Apartment is straightforward enough, if I admitted it. Just pick up and dial. Two days ago I picked up and dialed Phoebe’s penthouse. She hasn’t returned my message. I suppose it would have been a small miracle if she had, though we may have achieved a small reconciliation during the wee hours of the wedding party. I think I blundered into her on the dance floor. What we did next seemed to be dancing. I was dancing anyway.

“This makes me so nuts,” says Lil, “trying to be on both sides of the world at the same time. There’s something, like, really important going on in China right now. It’s killing me. You know what I mean?”

I never know what she means. “Yeah.”

“Seriously,” says Lil.

“You’re talking about completion,” I say.

“How did you know that? That’s exactly what it is. The Three-three-three’s almost here. Tree says she doesn’t know if we’ll get a window. Do you feel like we’ll get a window? I’m not feeling like we’ll get a window.”

“Have a nice day, Lil.”

“Can’t. It’s night here.”

“Then have a nice one of those,” I say.

“Love you. Call Joe. And buy a trap.”

With a groan, I recover my notebook from the floor and shake off a couple of dust bunnies. Again I see the words: Regis Labs. I know I’ve seen that name before.

Shivering a little from the morning chill, I rise to switch on Lil’s computer, then the kitchen hot plate before stumbling into the bathroom to hear the American Teacher’s Computer wheedle and squawk like some kind of rheumatic prehistoric bird. Not to say this computer is old, but the keyboard’s a manual. I swing back through the front room to hit the dial-up before returning to the kitchen to start tea and egg-drop oatmeal. No hurry. I could create an alcoholic beverage in the time it takes for Lil’s homepage to load.

So. International Wholesale Distributors, is it? That’s exactly the kind of name you’d choose for a business that fronts for narcotics, prostitution, and all-occasion nose-cropping. I still can’t believe I dropped forty-seven thousand dollars in less than three hours, let alone to a guy named Louie the Snail. That’s probably how he’s known in KC. He has two sons named Bugsy and Vinnie.

As I load the rice cooker, I replay my swaggering entrance to the party, the nearness of the gaming table clearly palpable and slightly salty on the tongue as I bore my wine goblet from room to room, pool to patio, overburdened white tablecloth to overstocked bar, noting as I strode through the blasé and over-tanned crowd the video surveillance cameras tucked into this nook and that fern; noting too on the faces of the minglers little glances that said who’s that? I held myself even taller than usual, towering above the torpid rich in their surrendering skin, their shedding scales. Isn’t that Julian Mancer? I flowed past them like a wind, black-out shades in place, magnificent platinum mane sailing around my ears as I followed the unmistakable scent of money.

Clearly there was a lot of it.

Gambling is a vice and an addiction and an abomination and a very Marxist institution for the redistribution of wealth. I felt a major wealth adjustment coming as I crossed yet another patio and entered a formal antechamber attended by more gym rats in black-out shades of their own, plus little wires in their ears. They mutely scanned the stream of people passing through the antechamber into a larger, dimly lit room emitting early Miles.

I sauntered through the antechamber as though I owned the place and immediately wished it were true, as the dimly lit room was adorned with eight tastefully posed women elevated on separate black rectangular boxes. They weren’t wearing clothes. For each, strategically placed spotlights illuminated this dangerous curve, that fine-pored meadow. Slowing my gait to observe, I found that each of the boxes rotated slowly on an unseen turntable, which effected an ever-changing landscape of warm light and dramatic shadow. Security guards stood quite nearby, there being no velvet restraining ropes, and I was happy to join the unruly gaggle, male and female alike, pressing close enough to the nearest model to, had we dared, lean ever so slightly and kiss her sainted thigh.

The first woman on display, her brown hair cropped very short, was a tanner, which made of the pale green eyes headlights. I stood close enough to examine each eye quite closely and found tiny flames of gold and peach in the translucent irises. The woman’s body was aware of being desired. You could see it in the rise and fall of the paramilitary belly, its breath shallow and rapid. I imagined hearing the heart beneath the nearly flat chest.

There’s something about a flat-chested woman. Something simple and inescapable in her design. The note that her instrument plays is somehow deeper and more resonant than that of others, and a short haircut brings that forward somehow. She is a tomboy in her seventeenth summer. All she has to do is wear a plunging neckline, and everyone is in love with her. One wants to know just a little bit more. We want the whole story in two precise words. And no woman is completely flat. Her two little brown hi-there’s tip forward to meet your lips. They speak to the exact centers of your palms. Model number one was exactly that creature, and I removed my shades to enjoy her all the more. Maybe it had been Twenty-One Mule Team Borax.

And this is two-burro bad tea, I reflect, carrying my sister’s smiley-face mug into the front room. I think I may now be turning the corner from drunk to hung over, and frankly it isn’t working for me. But the screen of the American Teacher’s Computer now displays a snarling young Elvis in a black cowboy shirt. This would be Lil’s homepage. I take a seat and turn Lillian’s mug around, avoiding the smile. Here’s a fresh all-caps email from Jeremy. I delete it unopened. I’m growing less and less patient with this man’s inability to handle delayed gratification. And here we have a fresh email from Ralpho with a link to his latest findings on Chinese moon bases.

The idea of colonizing the moon, he has already divulged, arose from China’s worsening environmental pollution along with their commitment to burn Manchuria’s entire vast coal belt. Thus, it can only be a matter of time before people are falling dead on China’s streets. Ralpho says a twenty-person test pod has dwelled on the surface of the moon for some time now. Things have gone well enough, except that the twenty have nothing and nowhere to spit. The government is having to shuttle canisters of bus fumes—and saxophone music, of course—to the base while they figure this one out.

I click on a link where Ralpho writes, “I have uncovered that Bejing [sic] was the first point of human-alien contact somewhere around 3,000 BC. The Intrudors [sic] made a deal with the Chinese Emprer [sic] that provided them with secure living quarters inside the Forbiden [sic] City while they made repairs on their spaceship. That was the real reason for the giant walls and all the secrecy.” In return, reveals Ralpho, the emperor received instruction in an arcane system of medical intervention known today as Traditional Chinese Medicine. And the recipe for Twice Cook Pork. Nothing in the current article concerns gun control, vegetarianism, or gas retention.

Ralpho says the ETs bear a striking resemblance to us, the explanation being that they long ago seeded our planet with crosses between themselves and one of the more promising of the local primates, returning from time to time to see how the experiment is coming.

Not well, I take it.

Ralpho should really sit down with Tree, who maintains that the Great Pyramid was constructed as a blocking diode by a do-gooder extraterrestrial race endeavoring to halt further intergalactic interference with human evolution on the plains of Africa. Eventually, of course, our race sallied forth to other geographical parts, leaving the protection of the Pyramid behind and, well, Tammy Fae Bakker is the direct result.

I’m a fundamentalist. I maintain that God created the world in six days and watched pro football on the seventh. Still, I’m beginning to warm to some of Ralpho’s theories. I particularly enjoy his argument linking ankle tattoos, sushi consumption, and lesbianism.

Think about it.

I close out the email account and open a search engine. I still can’t get that pharmaceutical company out of my head. Tossing down a swig of two-burro tea, I enter two words into search: Regis and Laboratories.