Thunder rattled against the door: fuckaNUCKaNUCKANUCKANUCKANUCK . . .
fuckaNUCKaNUCKANUCKANUCKANUCKANUCKANUCK . . . The closer Harry came to the door of his destiny, it was as though everything that had ever happened was happening that very moment between his ears—this is the closest to describing it his blueprints had ever gotten—as if every sound throughout time had all been condensed into that one moment right between his ears—It was very loud. The closer he got to the scientific trophy chalice that had always and never been his goal and destination, the less sure and all the more certain he was of dropping his lunch inside right away when he got there. it would be the perfect symbolic gesture. It was convenient, what he needed to do. Then he took three or four more of the blue tablets and was somewhere else suddenly, moving his blueprints into the circle of light from a gooseneck lamp. Tiny insects kept running away across his desk all the time, he kept noticing them racing off in the corners of his vision, but they were always gone by the time he raised his head. He was a kind man. He never wanted to smash any insects. He’d been raised in the city, but Harry was a nature boy, deep down, so whenever he saw the bugs running away like that it triggered his natural hunting instinct and made him want to run off through the fields, barking like a dog.
These days discovery seemed farther away but closer than ever before all at once. Maybe that’s what it meant to be a scientist, the price you had to pay. In the daytime, Mrs. Floyd was his lover and his wife, under cover of darkness at night he examined her in trance and gave her tests designed to highlight and display every facet of her waking consciousness, including the timing of her unconscious facial reactions to different stimuli. As a trusted agent with prior expertise in this sub-stratum of bio-research who had the added advantage of being the subject’s husband, Harry Floyd had been chosen to administer the Thunder Machine treatment. It was all part of married life. The air quality was good—the last few days had seen unseasonal rain and cold drizzling dark nights and he thought it was scary since possibly nature had gone out of sync, you know what they say about Global Warming, but when an old friend asked him off-handedly one day, "Haven't you been loving this weather?" the whole question knocked him off balance, just one little question. He noticed the air had a quality of freshness from all the rain, which was good for nature. And he could have said, "Well, you know, I've just become kind of closeted off from the world in a way, so I don't really notice the weather too much, or else I separate myself from it too much, until it becomes like this alien thing, but I still love nature," or something like that. The truth was he’d been too busy doing his research and trying to perfect the experiment. It took a whole lot to be a scientist. But he couldn’t say that, so he said something else. In all that time he kept getting closer and farther away. It was a kind of treadmill that went nowhere in particular, but just kept going.
The “wild card” was a chip whose behavior could never be expected to go by any standards so it was impossible to predict what it might do at any time. Research done with the wild card was very dangerous, and Harry had drawn the “wild card” in his latest version of the Thunder Machine, which he had to admit gave the daring young scientist he was a deep thrill, lounging back in his flexible armchair with a drink in his hand and a straw in his teeth, drifting into another metaphorical scenario from clubland.
In Harry’s mind, A teenage girl with a long sloping face and the eyes of an eel slithered into the room, giving it a bump of her shapely HOOBA-GOONGA hips as she bongo bounced into the room with a flopping harmonica stuck in her gunbelt which was loaded with hot spicy sausage and cannisters of explosive powder. Everybody was looking at Harry. In a flash he threw down his "wild card" when no one was expecting him to.
The dealer raised his eyebrows. There was only one chance. "Senyor," he began in a well-oiled voice.
"Yes?"
“You see that restaurant over there, with the green flowing fountain?"
"Sure, I see it."
"With the beagle outside, with the long, howling eyes, and the starving breath of getting sick last night?"
"Well, I see a dog, but you can't say it's—“
But the sorrowful man seemed intent on expressing himself. "Senyor," he implored.
"Go on."
"You sing a song of the sweetest loneliness. One time I heard you sing it way down in the teenage bongo swamp of the psychedelic music, beating on your bongo drums and wearing a loincloth. You got X-ray vision, cappy."
"Thanks."
Not again, thought the dry, reserved cientist. It was true in his youth he’d been sort of a hell-raiser, sure, but those days were behind him now. “Not again,” he said, giving the man five dollars.
“Very good, senyor, I'll bring your car around.”
Those were his wild years, back then. Soon enough his wife Sylvie came along, then his little son Jerry, now teenage, with his metal detector and his baseball hat on backwards all the time. He made an ass of himself again at the big family picnic last week, circumnavigating the metaphorical park of their lives, bumping into relatives and friends of the family, obliviously searching for buried treasure from the big bank heist he figured there must have been in that park once a long time ago. "I know those crooks stuck it around here somewhere. I KNOW they did!" he screamed.
Mr. and Mrs. Floyd abandoned Jerry to his several pathetic obsessions as a matter of protocol, but for Harry it was strictly a pose. In fact he’d been trying to kill little Jerry for years, but this time a huge drop of sweat had gathered right at the tip of Jerry's nose, which he hadn’t counted on. Without thinking, Jerry reached for the bread-basket as expected. "I'll have one of these!" he announced to the gathered apparently heedless adults. Lucky for him he opened that bread-basket right when he did, just in time for the huge blob of sweat to drop right off his nose and land on the back of a rare Lampilede spider which Harry had brought specially to the forest and stashed in the basket himself for this occasion, obliterating the arachnid before it could strike.
Oh, good goddammit! Harry fumed. His whole plot foiled in an instant! It would have been nice to have little Jerry out of the way, but let the chips fall where they might, he wasn’t willing to chance it again. Each new complicated plot drained out more juice from him, anticipating and mentally counteracting all the outcomes was wearing him out these days, and Jerry always seemed to slip away unharmed in the end, so perhaps it wasn’t meant to be. Ah, back then, he reminisced. The curve of Sylvie’s chin always trembled slightly whenever she realized something. Even the smallest of epiphanies, like, "Oh yeah, I put the keys over HERE," could induce these little spasms, so a highly-trained expert in physical cues and body language, as Harry was after his years at the Body Control Language Institute, could see right through her the moment she said anything.
Her chin alone told volumes about when Mrs. Floyd was being deceptive or forthright in any of her exclamations or statements. He’d noticed it long before the treatment began in earnest. Once Sylvie had realized he was trying to trick her into making an incriminating statement in one of their rare arguments, and her chin started trembling, another time she saw a way out for herself, chin trembling . . . closer scrutiny in the last week with classified bio-instruments, including the Thunder Machine, had revealed this as an actual pathology, but only in the curve of that smooth moist muscle, as if the central bony wedge held all her darkest secrets.
Is her face gonna catch on fire? Harry squinted at Sylvie’s prone form. Even a trained behavioral expert like him could never be sure—but—her face, oh my God her FACE is on fire! It's gonna catch on fire—It—wait, no, just a trick of the light. The job. My nerves. His hands were shaking.
He covered Sylvie with a sheet, took off his lab coat, turned off the light and stepped out of the room into hallways and hallways of silence that echoed and amplified his footsteps as he clattered down the stairs and back out into the parking lot. The caretakers would bring Mrs. Floyd back home right away—she’d already be there by the time he got back. Those caretakers were faster than light, they came from the walls. The next morning the Floyds would wake up and drink some more coffee, looking out the kitchen window at the birdbath and chirping sweetly to each other about married life. Despite his wild youth full of dreams and cocktails, sometimes Harry felt like his life was all lying to his wife and trying to love her and not let her know he was spying on her and do what he thought was right for the country, and nothing more than that, just a bunch of bullet points, but he knew there had to be more. His job at the lab was getting him down, spying on his wife was only part of it. There was more. Most of the time he spent living in his memories or the future. He sure needed new boots. With a new pair of boots he could walk tall again. He remembered a store near the highway that sold boots of all kinds and thought about that as he plodded back home through the pitted fields of mud.
He walked into the kitchen. He knew it was time for a change. After pouring himself a good slug of Old Green Nelson, Harry jingled the mixture in his pocket. Most of it was coins, but there was also lint and a couple of scraps of paper. One coin came from the year he turned eighteen. Many frolics that summer, he'd almost forgotten. There was a big show coming up, and maybe he might change his ways and invite the whole family. Of course the whole point of the production was the perfect cover for all kinds of secret activities going on behind the scenes, these activities were always going out, as they'd told him at the "Body Farm", and it might be another good place to kill young Jerry, too, come to think of it—but no, that was the old way of thinking. What the secret service needed was a new kind of janitor for the high schools, for instance, someone trained to listen, well-skilled with the haft of her mop, if need be. Stuff like that.
“You need to think about that!” he screamed silently at all the bueracrats ignoring him. If they wanted to move forward into this new reality. “My relationship to you is as nothing! There is no ‘us’. Where once you may have thought I was part of you, now I see that you are at war with what you need the most! And it’s fucking stupid! You hear me?” This was all going on in his head, not out loud. They needed things like that, ideas so complete in their subtlety they were their own camouflage, like the plan of society itself. This was steadily bothersome territory, and Harry was only one of a few trusted experts in the matter. “No, this is not just some insane fantasy of mine!” he screamed and screamed in his mind. But no one heard him. He was starting to remind himself of his teenage son Jerry. He wanted a metal detector to drain off the charge like a lightning-rod, but he didn’t have one. What that meant was time was running out, and Harry was turning into his son, but wasn't it always running out, and more and more lately Harry suspected that the whole idea of time was one more giant hoax on people by the caretakers . . . but knock on wood, he'd let the chips fall where they might. Maybe this was a chance for him to start over.
There was a pact he’d been keeping with himself ever since the Floyd family moved into that little red house on Fire-Engine Lane. It was in the back pocket of his blue jeans, written down with a number 2 pencil and signed in his own blood, age thirteen. He’d kept it in his back pocket all these years, riding along with him when he was on a bicycle for instance, sometimes flying over the ocean with him on a business trip by airplane, but always with him to remind him of his limits and his obligations to something that had gone before. He felt more like pulsating through uncontrollably into a new way of being, but not like he was falling victim to it, more like falling along with whatever was going down. Oh, but he could feel it washing over him, he could smell the sweet smell, he wanted that goddam evolution. He pulled that pact with himself right out of his back pocket and tore it up in tiny pieces, then tossed all the torn scraps of paper up over his head and did a little dance under them as if snowflakes were falling. What’ll they think about that move on Main Street? he asked himself rhetorically. Each soul came here to do a certain job. Harry turned and spun away across the room, newly assured of his remarkable purpose.
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