II. Surreal Logic

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Bing bang bing …

She was out of my life.

Numbness filled my mind; lying there, staring at the infirmary ceiling, legs bound tightly together, arms strung to my sides, only able to move my head side to side, I realized I was hopelessly tangled in this complicated mess: Livia was to help me break up with Knuckles, but she was suddenly gone; Chip would want revenge, stitch for stitch; and if Mr. Mustache put it all together, I was dead. Tears streamed down my face, pooling in my ears. I thought nothing intelligible, nothing memorable, but when I looked up at the art teacher, she reached over and, rubbing my chest, cooed something about going on with life. I just stared up at her, gape mouthed, like a big baby.

Somehow, she had transformed, having untied that tight top-knot, letting down this humungus bush of wild black hair. It was so long and wavy it seemed to move by itself, as if crowned with a bush of tiny, wiggling snakes. Her eyes glittered in the darkness. She was silent, and had been for a long time. She suddenly jumped, moving across the aisle onto the edge of my cot. I couldn't take my eyes off her head of hair.

“Where did you get those incredible eyes?” she whispered. “They're gorgeous.”

“From my parents,” I answered mechanically. “Blue from my father, brown from my mother.”

“Your father is of the sky. Your mother is of the earth.” She rubbed my chest slowly, gently, in small circles. “Do you know what that makes you?”

“A retard.”

“No,” she hissed, smiling. “That makes you a god.” She undid my knight shirt and rubbed my chest. “Does that feel good?”

“Yes.” I was afraid, but I needed her. I needed someone.

“Do you know who I am, Maynard Ix?”

“No.”

“I know you. My name is Hetta.” She held out her hand to shake, but I was tied up. She pulled it back with a smile. “You may not know this, but you're quite a celebrity. We've been waiting to meet you since we heard that you were in the infirmary.” She touched my face. Her fingers were hot.

“Who's we?”

“Friends. You're a freaky little fly, aren't you?”

“What?”

“Freak,” she hissed, then chuckled to herself in the dim, resting her hand lightly on the blankets over my stomach. “I'm a freak, too. There are more of us out there than they know of.”

“Us?”

“Outsiders. Artists. Musicians. Free-spirits. Before the Civil War, the Serves allowed us to live among them because they needed to feel sophisticated. They needed to look at our work, to listen to our music and nod their little Serve heads and tell their little Serve friends they understood. They needed to chat about us at their little Serve dinner parties, so everyone knew how cultured they were. They're all gone now, except for you.”

I didn't know what she was talking about. I was playing with words of my own. Hetta had a head a hair.

“Would you like me to set you free, little fly?”

I jumped against the restraints at the idea of freedom, then sank back, remembering. “If you let me go, they'll catch me and tie me up again.”

“I didn't say I would let you go. All I said was that I could set you free.” She stood and walked to the end of my bed, taking a clipboard that hung on a long string. “All I need to do is sign for you. I'm staff here; I can do that.” She laughed. “No one else will.” She looked at me, grinning out of the corner of her mouth. “Do you have any idea how long you'll be trapped here if I don't free you?”

“Until I get better?”

“To them, this is a better.”

Hetta scribbled something, then dropped the board with a loud clack, spun on her heel and walked away, her hair fanning out over her shoulders and down her back, the ends waving good-bye as she receded down the hall, disappearing from the infirmary.

Hetta had a head a hair.

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I didn't sleep well that night. I had a feeling my life was moving in a new direction. The next morning, after the nurses gave me a shot of something that made my head thick, bathed me and tied me loosely in bed, Knuckles came to visit. It was a week since the fight with Chip, and Hetta was the only outsider I had seen. It was a nice week. Knuckles came by herself, the majority of The Triad apparently still in the dark about our relationship. She stepped hesitantly down the aisle, hands behind her back, wearing her smock unbuttoned revealing the white skin of her chest. I smiled.

“Hello, Maynard,” she said, lowering herself gently on the cot next to mine.

“Hello, Virginia.”

“Are you having a nice rest?”

“Nice.” I looked at her a little more closely. She was pale, more pale than normal, and sweating. “Are you OK?”

“I just feel a little sick. It goes away.”

She didn't say anything for a long time, just kept looking at me, then looking away to anything else in the room. I let her squirm.

“I heard Chip's going to be all right,” she finally said.

“That's nice.”

“You nearly killed him, Maynard. I thought you said you were afraid of them.”

“Of Alex. Chip is just a little idiot.”

“He won't be coming back.”

“That's nice.”

We sat there in silence, then something occurred to me. “Virginia, how are you handling the scandal?”

She smiled proudly. “I like it. Everyone knows who I am. Alex got all the blame and all they did was put me on quarantine. I don't care if I can't sleep with anyone. I have you.” She sat up straight. “Pick a hand.” She still had both hands behind her back.

“Left.”

She pulled out and empty hand. “You lose.” Then she took out her right hand and placed a small box wrapped in pink paper on my chest. “Happy birthday, Maynard.”

My jaw dropped open. Was it my birthday? Had I forgotten? Yes, I was sixteen now. I was so caught up in this whole mess that I forgot, (not to mention all the morphine cocktails they were giving me, to keep me cooperative).

“How did you know?” I said, bewildered.

“Peggy works in Records. Esther works in Administration. I can find out anything.”

I just looked at the package, then smiled, nodding at it. “I'm a little tied up. Why don't you open that for me.”

After unwrapping it, she lifted out this little silver thing, a little spoon, holding at an angle and twirling it around, then pretending to eat little bites of food with it. “Do you like it?”

“Sure. What is it?”

“It's a silver spoon.”

“What do I need a silver spoon for?”

“That's what I want to talk to you ab--”

“Hey!”

We both jerked around, as if caught with our clothes off. Down at the end of the cots stood Hetta, tall and thin, dressed in black, hair wound taught in a knot on the top of her head, so tight her eyes seemed pulled into slits.

“Don't think I don't know what's going on around here,” she said, sauntering down the aisle. “Don't think we don't see everything.”

Knuckles turned to me, confused. “Who's this?”

“Hetta--”

“I know all about you two,” Hetta said. “All about everything.”

Knuckles stood up and turned to face Hetta, looking like an awkward little kid standing there, caught with her blouse unbuttoned, her face deep red, breathing heavily, clutching her little spoon for her life.

“We aren't doing anything. I was just giving Maynard a birthday present.”

“I'll bet.” Hetta came right up to Knuckles and glared in her face. “More than just a little birthday present, hum? Listen to me you flat-chested, pimple-faced little slut. I know all about you and your little love games, and I know all about you and your little friends. So if you want to spend the next two years here at the Trust under so many demerits you'll never see anything but underwear and dishes, I suggest you take your little hormones and your little problem somewhere else. Maybe Alex can help you now, like you helped him.”

Virginia actually stood her ground for a second, clutching the spoon so hard her hand turned white.

“Now, missy,” Hetta hissed.

Virginia slowly placed the spoon on the edge of my cot and edged around Hetta, then moved quickly down the aisle, stiff-legged, staring down at her feet. She was not through the swinging doors before Hetta turned her attention down on me.

“A little play friend?”

“Don't you know?”

“Phht,” she smirked, flicking the pink wrapper on the floor. “They're all the same, with their little blackmail games and their little friends. That's what makes them so vulnerable.”

I looked over as the swinging door swung. Knuckles was gone now too. “But she was my friend,” I said, lamely.

Hetta sighed. “Listen, little fly, there are bigger things in life than your hormonal dreams of skirts and fighting. Besides, I'm not going to let a project of mine get all screwed up in the head by love games. Not yet, anyway.” She took the spoon from my bed and looked at it, then slipped it up her sleeve. “Pure amateur. That approach only ruins your own life.”

I looked up at her pitifully. Hetta Kujl, the black-hared Swede, art teacher, avant-garde performance artist, political Bral, carnivore. She reached into my world and slapped my face.

“Let her go, Maynard,” she said, untying me. “Today is too important a day to be caught up in the past.”

“Why?”

“Today is your liberation day. Today you are a human.”

She stood me up and helped me dress, packed my things and lead me out of the infirmary. Hetta led me across the quad, down into the kitchen to get my things. No one looked at us as we crossed the kitchen. I was used to being a non-person, but Hetta found it fascinating. We went into my little room and I began packing.

“Maynard,” she said, sitting on my cot, taking both my hands. “Did you see how they treated us out there?”

“They always treat me that way. They think I'm genetically defective or something.”

“Who cares what they think. People believe what they are told to believe; it's their nature. They are innocent in their ignorance, fatted calves, too self-absorbed, too complacent in the asylum of pleasure, too obsessed with their waist-lines to care for the responsibility of thinking. Did you see how they reacted?”

“They always act that way.”

She shook her head, staring down at my stomach. “I know artists who have spent their entire careers trying to accomplish what you have here.”

“To be an out cast?”

“To be a freak.”

“Who cares about freaks? When you fail, no one cares.”

“Who told you such trash?”

“My dad.”

“The Butcher? Forget him, Maynard. You are what you are, and his judgment will only cripple you. Your existence depends on how you define freak. Artistic freaks are the true elite. Everyone cares about them. It's the nature of Fame.”

“He understood me--”

“Your own Serve father condemned you as a loser. That's understanding? Brals are different. We commune with everyone, share everything, govern with love. And when you stand out, you become the chic-elite. The Brals are the true artist's legitimate audience. The Egalitarians don't care if it's good or bad, fair or unfair, art or violence, so long as you stand out from everyone else, reinvent the status quo.”

“Uh huh.” I turned and continued packing. “All I know about egalitarians is that their idea of good and fair is making me wash dishes, make salads and calling me a retard. The sooner we leave here the better.”

She rose and helped me pack. “Little fly, you don't understand. Everything moves toward equality in this the most equal of all equal worlds. As trapped and tangled as you are, you have power.”

We went back out into the kitchen and began the ascent out of there. I didn't know where I was going, or what I would do out there in Hetta's equal world, but I knew I would never come back here. Otto had his back to us as we passed, so I paused to tell him off, but Hetta shoved me along. When we broke out into the sunlight, I was ready to scream and cheer, to do cartwheels and run and play in the grass. But before I could dance off into my new found freedom, my mentor grabbed me by the arm.

“Not so fast,” she growled. “Do you know what real Freedom is?” I looked at her blankly. “It isn't shooting your mouth off, or scampering around like an idiot. Freedom lies in control.” She shook me by the arm. “Otto Van de Camp is one of the greatest Chefs in the city. His wife's name is Dr. Maria Van de Camp, head of the Art Criticism Department.”

“He hates me.”

“No he doesn't. He fears you. Not because of hate, but because he can't understand you. There's a difference. When people don't understand you, their fear is rooted in curiosity. Curiosity is the gold mine. Your whole experience down here is useful to you, so don't waste it.” She let me go and walked a little further along. “Now that you're free, you have to learn how to use the fear inspired by your difference, and that's the root to your freedom.”

She turned and looked me in the eye. I could actually see something there I hadn't seen before. Something like envy. “Listen to me, Maynard. Don't ever cut yourself off from using your uniqueness. When you become like the rest, you have no future, no freedom.”

She turned and hurried along towards the Humanities Compound, near the library. I followed Hetta along like a little dog.

As we went through the doors I was hit in the face with this salty smell. She turned a sharp right and stepped into an elevator. We shot up into the building. The elevator suddenly jerked to a stop and the doors slid open. Hetta stepped into a hallway and I followed her along. There were people in the hall, all who stopped and watched us pass. They were different from the other people I had seen on campus, dressed differently, all wearing brightly colored smocks over their gray tunics. They were artists.

We moved all the way down the hall toward this big window and stopped. What a view, the whole city of New Gaia stretching out under my feet. Skyscrapers. Parks. Monuments. It was breathtaking. I had only seen the city from the streets. Now I felt like a bird. Hetta opened the door and pulled me into her office. It was huge. There were sculptures half sculpted along the wall, some covered with tarps, like half-dissected people with little signs on their innards. The walls were covered with all these wild paintings of red and blue flowers and green and black people and orange and purple animals and things that were just blobs of color. Every corner of the room, every crevice was filled with stacks of brushes and mallets and chisels of all shapes and sizes. And across the back of the room were windows. This part of the building didn't face the city, but the mountains to the West. I could see them, off in the distance, glowing purple in the dropping sun.

“Beautiful, isn't it?”

“I never saw anything like this.”

“The view from the kitchen is rather limited.” She moved off to a little side room and flicked on a light. I could see a desk in there. On the desk was a pile of severed arms and legs. She called me with a nod and I followed her in. A little desk stood by the door, covered with papers and books, but further in I could see a bed, a huge bed in the center of the room, raised up on three steps that wrapped all the way around, so you had to walk up to get into it. It was the biggest bed I ever saw. I was surprised.

“How did you get such a big bed? No one else has a big bed.”

“It just isn't fair, is it Maynard?” she hissed in my ear.

She walked over and sat on the top step, pulling me along with her. “I brought it up here myself. It was much work, but it was my effort. You are my reward.” She wheeled me around and shoved me towards the other side of the room. “How about a shower?” I was thunderstruck. She had her own bathroom, too? “Don't be too surprised, Maynard. All the faculty have them. Even Otto and the Trustees have their own facilities.”

She pushed me into the room and flicked on the lights. It was clean and shinning and new and smelled like sweet flowers. The fixtures shone like my dishwasher at the end of the night. It was beautiful. Hetta turned me around and looked at me.

“The first thing to do is bathe.” She slipped her fingers into my tunic and jerked it open, the buttons flew off clicking everywhere on the shinny fixtures and tiles. She pushed me into the shower with her body, reaching up and flicking on the water as she tore off my clothes.

Her body was like Knuckles', hard and thin, but she used it differently than Knuckles ever did. She bit me, making me do things I never thought of doing before. I never even knew people took showers together like this. We spent the next two hours wrestling in her huge bed. A few times I thought she was going to kill me. Life out in the world was fun, but tiring. I slept afterwards like I had pulled a whole day of work with no breaks or food. And when the sun came up she woke me and we wrestled some more. She called me her project. And when we were done, she gave me a cup of something hot and sweet, creamy and delicious. She called it cocoa. It was far better than the black, bitter coffee we drank in the kitchen. She climbed on top of me, gripping my face, holding me very still.

“You're beautiful,” she said, pressing her tongue deep in my throat. “But I have to go out.” She pulled on another black dress, identical to the one she wore the day before.

“Where are you going?”

She turned and looked at me as if I were a talking dog. “To teach, silly. I am a Doctor. This is the Trust. I'll be back after lunch.” She moved out into the studio and rummaged around, then I heard the outer door shut and click. I rose from the bed and moved out into the studio. She was gone, but the door was locked. I was going nowhere. No matter. Looking around her office I could see there was plenty to do.

I took another shower. I would never tire of hot water and clean fixtures. I had no comb or toothbrush or any of my toiletries. We forgot them in my cubby in the showers back in the tombs. No matter. I messed my hair into a wild ratty tumult, just because I could. It would have made Otto boil to see one of his workers so disarrayed. But what to wear? My tunic was a buttonless ruin, and it did stink. All my clothes were worn and reeking of sweat and grease. Being clean now, I could smell them. I looked in Hetta's closet and poked around among her things. It was filled with black dresses and women's clothes. I was as tall and thin as she was, but it was still all too small. Girls are shaped differently. In the back of her closet there was this long, smooth red robe, all cover with gold lace stitched in angular designs. I put it on. I never liked black. The sleeves were much too short, and hung loosely at my elbows. The neckline was low, and I could see my belly button, but it was warm and smooth and I liked it. It was clean. I laughed, looking in the mirror like a raving maniac.

I started to explore this new place. The walls of Hetta's room were lined with bookcases, something I failed to notice the night before. I was thrilled. More books, and I didn't need to compromise myself to get at them. I moved over and looked up at the titles: Itness and Nullity. The Encyclopedia of Erotic Art. American Apostasy and Feminist Spiritualism. The Communist Manifesto. On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense. The Metaphysical Gratification of Pleasure. The Conservative Problem: Progressives Speak Out. The Freedom of Fairness. The Egalitarian Creed. Idealist Interpolation on the Constitution of the Democratic Oligarchy of America. The Decline and Fall of the Moral Order. There were hundreds and hundreds of titles just like that. Livia would have been thrilled with the selection, so I avoided it. I didn't feel like reading anyway.

I moved out to the studio again and started poking around, lifting the tarps from the bodies arranged around the room and looking more closely at them. Each one had a different person's name scribbled on the base. These must be the art students' homework. Being an art student didn't seem so bad a thing to be. It sure beat washing dishes. I decided I would give it a try. There was nothing else to do. Besides, I missed playing in the fields back in Red Hook. On a stand by the window there was a massive heap of gray clay. I decided to play. I took a knife and started to shape and mold it, all the while thinking of what Hetta said about using the past.

What did she say? Hold onto it. I tried to remember Westphalia, but it was growing dark. I thought of Livia. She was easier to remember. Where was she now? On a slab in the morgue? Did they cut her open and label her insides? Was she buried in the ground? Was her skin cold and hard? I wasn't really paying attention to the clay while I thought of her, cold and dead. A mutilated face emerged from the clay, gaunt, hollow sockets looking up to the empty sky, empty mouth gapping for food, receiving nothing but kicks to swelled lips, blood. A hand formed from scraps, digging angry nails into a sunken, dead cheek. Livia emerged from my thoughts, how I envisioned her dwelling in my mind, how I felt about her and this whole Mr. Mustache-Livia suicide mess. I didn't want to think of that, but it just welled up in me. Standing there, face to face with the horror I had created, I began to cry. I didn't even hear the noise behind me, not until it was too late.

When I turned, my robe hanging open, naked, my hair wild, tears of mud streaming down my face, I found Hetta's entire class of artists standing in silence, watching me, fifteen boys and girls, my age, all dressed in neat, green smocks, clean faces, hair combed, looking at the freak, the monster, their eyes blank, repulsed by the Livia I had aborted. And Hetta, she stood in the front, leading them. I screamed something unintelligible at them, threw the clay to the ground and ran from the room. It was horrible. I expected the whole bunch of them to laugh, but the room loomed in horrible silence. I ran further into seclusion, into the bathroom, slamming the door.

I stood panting, eye to eye with a mess, my face smeared with tears and gray guck, arms gored to the elbow. Even Hetta's red robe was smeared with gunk. I was a freak. I looked like a wild monster, an outsider. Who knows how long I was in there. I took another shower, to wash away the humiliation. After a long while, I came out to the bedroom. It was empty, the door still closed. I was still angry, still ashamed of myself but too shaken to care. I listened at the door for life in the studio; it was silent. I peeked out. The sun was setting, the shadows in the studio growing long and eerie. None of the students were there. Over by the window I could see my creature, perched on its stand, gasping up at the ceiling, begging for death. And sitting in a big recliner in front of it, cigar smoke wreathed around her wild head of hair, was Hetta.

“Come here,” she hissed softly, not turning to see if it was me. I stepped into the room, moving next to her silently.

“What is this?”

“Love.”

She looked up at me quickly, as if I punched her in the side of the head.

“Is that so?”

“Yes.”

“What do you know about love?”

I looked at my Livia. “Enough.”

“Do you really think so, fly?” she scoffed. “You only presented one aspect, one dimension of love. Puppy love.” She stood and took my hand, leading me back into the other room. She pulled me along, turning to reach back and muss my hair. I tried to stop her, but she slapped my hand away. “I like this look better.” She mussed it some more, pushing me backwards across the room. “My students were quite impressed with you today. They helped me recover your art.”

“My art?”

“Your Love. They're interested in seeing more of you.”

“I think they saw enough of me.”

“Oh no, Maynard Ix,” she hissed in my ear, laying me back across her bed. “You don't know what exposure is, yet.”

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The next day, she made me hide in the bedroom while she had two students cart off my “Love.” She said she was going to show it to her friends. I spent the next month locked in her office. She went out to do her teaching and returned with food for me. I hate to admit it, but when she returned with my dinner I would come running out from the other room and bounce around her feet like a dog glad to see its master. It suited me at the time; to hide out there from the things I had done, the people who may want to come looking for me. Much to her disappointment, I didn't sculpt again, and I wouldn't pick up a brush and paint no matter how she enticed me. There was just too much I felt I didn't know about this whole art business. She seemed obsessed with the idea of me learning something from her.

“You can read?” she said one night as I read in bed, smiling as if I was doing a particularly cute little doggy trick. “Who taught you that?”

“My mother taught me, out in Red Hook.”

“Westphalia?”

“Yes.”

“People actually live and work and eat and read out there, don't they?”

“Of course they do.”

“Murderers and traitors and rapists and Serves. And you' re their progeny. Their prodigy.”

“I guess so.”

She rolled over and looked me in the eye. “Books are a private thing. A woman's bookshelf is a window to her soul. Do you want to know me so well?”

Not really. I just wanted to find out about art. “Sure.”

She smiled a toothy, gray smile at me, reaching behind my head and pulling me closer. “You may read.” She hurt me that night, more than usual. And while she was gone the next day, I began to read her precious books, to look into her soul. I started at the top shelf and worked my way down. So I spent the mornings and afternoons curled in bed, or in her recliner, reading my way through her books. Most of them just confused me, like Livia's philosophy book. I looked through her encyclopedias, especially the art ones, and kept a pile of them by my side of the bed. In those books I had every sculpture and painting ever created at my finger tips to compare, contrast and soak into my brain. There was one artist I really loved. His name was Rabo Karebeckian. He was a minimalist, but his work impressed me. Maybe it was because so much of the interpretation depended on knowing the title, and I loved words.

Also during that time I discovered something else to read. Something I could understand, as if they were written for people like me. Newspapers. It's hard to imagine that I had never picked up a newspaper in all the years I lived at the Trust, but I never had. No one read them in the kitchen, and no one ever would think to sell me one out in the store. No one knew I could read but Livia, and now Hetta. The things I found in there were the most fascinating. I found out what was happening in America from the newspapers, just like I found out what had happened in the history books. As soon as Hetta realized I was reading the paper voraciously, she began bringing it to me in bed, with my cocoa. When she wasn't hurting me, it was nice.

The newspaper knew what was right and what was wrong, and it told me what to think about what was happening. I read articles that told me one in four Americans liked to have sex with people the same sex as they were. I never even heard of that. And since there were so many citizens who liked to do that, and since it was determined by their genes, just like I was an idiot because of my genes, these people were being given full rights and citizenship defined by whom they had sex with. I wanted rights too, since my idiocy was genetic, but I knew I would never get them. Except for me, all the other idiots were aborted.

A new bill passed on Capitol Hill that gave 100 million dollars to the Trust to teach all the students how good it was to have sex with each other, especially when they were the same sex, but the token moderate Serve minority was against it. The paper said they were nothing but “homophobes” whose “intolerance and bigotry was the kind that led the country into civil war.” Sex with another boy seemed strange to me, but the paper said it was good, that being against it was the only really bad thing.

I looked up “Serve” and “Bral” in one of Hetta's history books. All I knew about them was that they fought in the Civil War, and that my parents were some of the Serve War Criminals banished to the AZ. I found out the Serves were an ultra-reactionary party way back before I was born. They were so intolerant that they started the Civil War over “moral issues.” I even found my father's name, Humphrey Ix, and a short history of his career. There was no picture, which was too bad, since I had forgotten what my parents looked like. But it was full of things that he did. He was Governor of Fornicalia, the state where our Capitol is. He was responsible for the deaths of over twenty-three thousand people he called the army to “put down during food riots,” in the beginning of the Great Uprising. Everyone in America hated him and wanted to kill him, but the death penalty was against the law, so they sterilized him and sent him and my mother to the Abortive Zone, the AZ. And I thought he was just a dirt farmer. I didn't want to be a Serve, especially since everyone hated them so much.

Serves were the most evil people in the world. I read an article called “Religious Exodus? Moral Separatism.” A small Northern Province called Köhralmondiel wanted to withdraw from the Union over religious and moral issues. The Serves who were not sent to the AZ after the Civil War were migrating there because they felt the nation “was going in the wrong moral direction.” But the paper said the Serves were responsible for, and involved with, everything bad going on the country that needed to be fixed, so they didn't deserve their own nation. Everything the Serves stood for was evil, so their own nation would be evil and eventually a threat to the rest of the Egalitarian State. The paper said territory should be given to the people whom the Serves traditionally discriminated against and all the remaining Serves should be sent to the AZ. The writer seemed to be saying that aborting them would be more cost effective, especially if it avoided another civil war. I turned page after page. That was what everyone in the paper was talking about. Another civil war. I tossed the paper to the floor. What did all this have to do with me?

When Hetta returned that night, she put my food in my dish and watched me eat, petting my leg and humming some tune I never heard before.

“Why are Serves evil?”

She looked at me with a grin, then said, “Who told you they were evil”

“The newspaper.”

“What is evil?”

She patted my leg, rising from her seat. “When do you think you'll give sculpting a try again?” She moved off into the bedroom. “I showed your 'Love' to one of the other faculty. I told her it was a beginning project by a freshman student.”

“Why?”

“Maynard, if they found out I was trying to teach you how to sculpt here it could be very embarrassing to me.”

“Why?”

She came back out wearing a silky, black negligee and took me by the hand. “Because they don't understand.”

“Who?” I resisted. She pulled harder; I stayed put. “If you want me to make things, I can. But I don't want to do it in secret. I have a right to work like anyone else, that's only fair.”

She stopped pulling, looking down on me with anger and disgust. “You're right, Maynard. They don't own you anymore. But there's something you don't know about our little system here, a thing called quotas. If they found out I was giving you freebies outside the system they could accuse me of unfairly disadvantaging others who already dropped out, or never made the artistic cut.”

“What others?”

“What, do you think you're special? People drop out of the Trust all the time. They join the work programs. The Trustees don't follow them out into the world to give them free training. It wouldn't be fair to those who stay in the system. There's another system out there to catch them, a safety net. As long as we follow the systems, no one falls between the cracks.”

“If I sculpt here, then someone out there gets gypped?”

“Something like that. If I get caught, I pay.”

“What?”

“Ten thousand dollars.”

“So it's a risk for you to keep me here?”

She laughed. “Don't be silly. We're not prudes here. I can keep anyone I want. We're consenting adults. But it's a risk for you to receive formal artistic training.” She grabbed my arm again, this time digging her nails into the meat. “I'm getting tired of this, Maynard. Come.”

I went. I had what I wanted, for the time being.

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The next day, I began to sculpt. I really didn't know what I was doing, but it felt good. I set a piece of clay on the stand and stared at it, not looking at the clay but looking inside myself, to see what the clay could be, slipping further and further into a sort of trance. I don't really remember starting, all of a sudden the sculpture was just created there on the pedestal. The first thing I sculpted after “Love” was a twisted mass of arms and legs, hands clawing and tearing at flesh. At the center was this tiny mouth, stuffed with fingers and toes, the hands carrying more down to stuff in. It was a painful looking thing; I called it “Sex.” This was the beginning of my Minimalist Stage, but my minimalism had nothing to do with the visual medium. I wanted the shortest, bluntest titles I could think of. Over the course of the next few weeks I made six sculptures: Sex. Pain. Work. Fair. Retard. Learn. Rabo would have been proud.

Each started off as nothing but a wad of clay, and when done I stared and stared, until I realized what I was trying to say. Each time I was done, Hetta hid me in the room and two students came to cart it off for her friends to criticize. She told me to never sign the work, because of our little freebie secret, but I scratched my mark under the base of each. Hetta grew more and more amazed at her critics reactions; they were in awe, wanting to meet the sculptor. But this raised a dilemma, how to justify our “relationship.” Hetta worried about that constantly, but that was the furthest thing from my mind. I was more interested in my art, distilling the highest intensity of feeling into the smallest title contrasted against the most disturbing imagery. My titles grew wonderfully short: ? € ¥ $ ‰ £ ?. I was really on a roll, creating one complete piece a day. Within a month I had twenty-one pieces, all of them siphoned from the studio.

Hetta kept taking the pieces to her friends. She wanted me to stop, since the pressure was really on her to produce the artist. She became so preoccupied with getting caught that she even stopped pestering me for favors. I produced even more. One day, while in a frenzied trance of clay and sweat, she came into the room and called my name. I didn't answer. She called again and again, finally smacking me on the back of the head. I turned irritably and stopped dead. Hetta was pale, stricken and fearful. I never saw her like that.

“They want to show you.”

I looked at her blankly. “Show me what?”

“Not you, stupid.” She shook her head, turning away. “Your art. They want an exhibition.”

“What?”

“They set aside a room next Tuesday in the Exhibition Hall for a special exhibition of the works of the incredible Idiot-savant of New Gaia Trust 123,” she said, shuffling into her room. “They think you're a genius.” Hetta lay silently on her bed all day, not responding when I came in. Later I tried to soothe her with her favorite amusement, wanting to comfort her; it's disturbing to see any creature suffer. She wouldn't have me that night, lying side by side, too sad to even touch.

“What is it, Hetta? Why are you acting this way? My work used to turn you on.”

Her voice was tiny in the dark. “When I first found you, you were nothing more than a little stray dog. I thought it would be fun to play with you, but I never intended to care for you. But I realized there was something different about you. I thought it was just the way you made me feel. No one made me feel like that before. Now, I can't get enough of you.” She rolled over and looked at me, brushing the hair out of my eyes. “I was right when I said you were a freak, but I didn't see how much of a freak you are. I have to confess, I tried to take credit for some of your pieces.”

“Really?”

“Don't worry. I was too late. My students already spread rumors about you. 'The wild-hared idiot sculptor.' No one has even seen your face, and already you're known as the idiot-savant genius.”

“Then they don't think you've been training me? You won't get in trouble? Then why are you so sad?”

She sighed heavily, shutting her eyes. “When I stand there watching you trance, I'm struck, right here, by the shear beauty of the act of creation. I've never seen a man so close to the eternal femininity of creation. You're a super-freak. At first I thought that if I discovered you, you would take me with you to the top. But you won't. You're going to leave me behind here at the Trust. It'll be, Phbt,” she motioned to the door with her thumb. “Sayonara sucker.”

She began to cry, tears streaming from under black lashes. Hetta was right, I had some kind of power. I held her in my arms, stroking her shoulder as if to soothe her. I could hardly deal with it. I was too impressed that this faculty member, this Doctor of Philosophy who snapped her fingers at the Trustees and stared down Otto the Kitchen God was now just a blubbering girl in my arms. I did have power. I wanted to jump and shout, to rejoice at this new development. I had not failed. I was not forgotten. I didn't want to spend the whole evening lying there in bed, getting soaked under Hetta's tears. I had things to do. I waited for her to cry herself to sleep, then pulled myself from under her and went out to the studio. I was a somebody.

I stayed up all night, at first tinkering with clay, but clay didn't do it for me anymore. I didn't really have anything else to say with it, just then. A few days earlier Hetta showed me how to stretch and prime canvas. We stretched out this huge piece on a frame, about six by six. I set it up on an easel. I was in a mood to paint, you see, and I had the beginnings of an idea.

The primary colors were royal blue and blood red. I started by sketching a woman lying on a huge blue bed, her naked body bony and diseased, her face covered by a wash of sandy blonde hair. The side of her head was opened up, and vapor poured out. The vapor was red, but it transformed into other figures in mid air, insects, snakes, people, cars, men plowing fields with long sticks as a great battle raged behind them, an ocean liner filled with waving babies, The Empire building standing off in the distance, its foundations lost behind the bed, trolls under the bed in the process of tearing apart the Trustee, whose mouth was stuffed with Fig Chewies, a little pile of soap suds, an orgy, a firing squad and a library book with words written in blood, a wedding, a funeral, a bowl of steaming baked beans and a yellow casaba melon. I gave everything this surreal feel, altering perspective and proportion so it all blended together on the same plain of visual consciousness, the sleeper consumed by her sleep. Up in the top left corner I left it black. I called it “The Trust,” my first compound-poly-word title. I was really developing.

Just as I put on the final touches, I heard a little sound behind me. Turning, I found Hetta staring at me and my painting. “What are you doing?”

“I thought I'd try painting.”

She stood staring for a long while. “You did all this last night? In one night?”

“Yup.”

“What do you call it?”

“'The Trust.' Do you think I can add it to the collection?”

“Huh.” She went over to the sink and poured herself a cup of cocoa, then came over and looked a little closer, clicking her tongue. “Stick to sculpting, Maynard.”

My heart fell. How could she say those things about me being a genius, then come out here and say the opposite? “It's just my first painting,” I mumbled. “I plan on doing some more. Maybe I'll get better.”

“And who's going to pay for all these materials? Your savings are nearly gone.”

“How? I never leave here. I never buy anything.”

“I've been deducting for food, board, materials. Everyone pays their fair share.”

“How much do I have left?”

“About three hundred dollars.” She turned and wandered back into the bedroom, slipping her robe down her back. “Don't quit your night job, lover.”

The week that followed was long and hard. I worked at painting all day long while Hetta was out teaching classes, and when she came home we wrestled into oblivion every night. She was beginning to scare me, some of her penchants leaving scars and burns. And not only that, I had to start thinking of where I was going to work next. I was broke. This three months out in the world cost me as many thousands of dollars. I had no idea life out here was so much more costly than the sheltered life I led in the kitchen.

I became more and more anxious as my exhibition neared. Hetta didn't help. She began tallying the cost of the materials I used up. My three hundred dollars were gone by the weekend, so she began amassing my debt, registering it in a little black book. That weekend Hetta locked and bolted the door, not letting me out of her clutches. I didn't get any work done, yet her acrobatics left me exhausted. By the time Monday rolled around, I had to sleep in most of the day to recover. Before I knew it, Tuesday morning arrived.

? € ¥ $ ‰ £ ?

Hetta dressed in black, as usual. All I had were old tunics and slacks from my kitchen days. I had taken to just walking around in an artist's smock in the studio, naked in the apartment. What need did I need clothing for? But I was concerned that morning, since none of my clothes seemed suitable for an exhibition. As I primped in the bathroom, Hetta called.

“Maynard.”

“Hum?” I stepped out, nearly dropping my shaver when I saw her there holding up a beautiful, black suit. “Is that for me?”

“Yes.”

“How much--”

“It's a gift, Maynard. Something I want to give you for your big day out.”

Over on the bed there were other things too: a black shirt, black tie, black underwear, black tee shirt, and a black tie clasp. I dressed quickly, reveling in the cool crispness of the new clothes. Looking in the mirror, I could not believe the transformation. I wasn't a greasy, slimy kitchen-boy, a skulking cousin-pimp, not even the overworked bed-savant anymore. I was a somebody. I didn't know who yet, but I was.

“Do you like it?”

“Yeah, but I need to finish shaving.”

“Don't. A goatee adds to the look you want.”

“What look is that?”

“Artist, silly.”

We had an hour to kill before our entrance at the Exhibition Hall, so Hetta hurt me again. We forgot the time and had to rush to get ready. Hetta turned and attacked my hair, mussing it into knots as we raced through the door. As we ran across the Trust, I realized I had not been out of Hetta's office in over three months. The air outside was cool, but it smelled of exhaust and filth, burning my eyes. I kept having to stop and rub them until I just wanted to tear them out. It was wonderful!

We were late getting to the Hall. To my amazement, there were a ton of cars parked out in the lot. There had to be a concert going on, or an exhibition of someone famous. I could hear a throng of people as we rounded the corner and then I saw them, hundreds of faces milling around this brightly lit room. We must have been in the wrong place, but then I saw the sign by the door.

“Special Showing of the Works of Maynard Ix, Idiot-Savant.”

I stopped dead in my tracks, my mouth hanging open in sheer wonder. That was my name there, written in big, black letters. And then it happened, all these lights started flashing in my face, all these people came over to tear and pull at me. I was thunderstruck.

“Buh buh buh,” I said, turning my head this way and that, nearly panicking as I searched the crowd for Hetta. She was gone. The people pulled me into the hall and we began a tour of the pieces.

“Mr. Ix,” this big, fat lady asked me. “One can not but notice how young you are, and yet you seem to have the Trust art community in awe. How does that make you feel?”

“Good.”

“What do you think of this turn out?” a little, dark man asked.

“Big.”

“Where do you get your inspiration for these works?”

“Life,” I blurted at them, blinking at the flashes, shaking my head. Just a few months ago no one even cared if I wallowed in my own greasy filth, and now they couldn't wait to hear me speak. I couldn't. I just turned and pushed my way to the back of the exhibit hall.

Just as I came through the throng I came face to face with “Love.” But it wasn't my “Love.” It was different. It was metal. I put may hand on it, to feel its coolness, and the universe erupted in flashing lights. I covered my eyes, pushing still further to the back, away from all these people. Just as I thought I was going to be torn apart and swallowed whole by these reporters, someone pulled me into a little office, slamming the door behind me.

I thought of Livia.

“Well, well, well,” hissed a voice from behind me. “You thought it was going to be easy. You thought it was going to be fun?” I turned. Hetta stood there, scowling at me.

“They're like a pack of rabid dingoes,” I said breathlessly. “They were going to kill me.”

“Oh no. They're just reporters. You haven't even faced the critics yet.” She shoved me into a chair, then sat on the desk next to me.

“Where did you go?” I snapped angrily. “Why did you leave me?”

“What do I matter? You're the star.”

I never felt so rescued, so grateful to anyone before in my life. She smiled at me, running her fingers through my hair. “Do you want to go out and see your work now?”

“Not with them out there.”

“I can take care of that.” She turned and nodded, and I heard a sound. Turning, I saw a small man rise from a shadow in the rear of the office. He was so small and thin, I thought he was ill. His eyes were beady and small, his nose large, overpowering the rest of his face, making his mouth seem just like a little dot. He nodded as he left the room.

“Why was 'Love' different? Did you do that?”

She looked at me as if I stabbed her, then shook her head. “Such a stupid little genius. That was bronze. We took casts of your clays and poured molten bronze in them, so they could be spared for posterity.” She shook her head, leading me back to the door. My gratitude was completely gone. She wasn't saving me, she was hurting me, scaring me, using me. “Just stick with me and the critics won't be quite so nasty.” Before I could stop her, she reached up and mussed my hair into a knotty mess, turned and jerked open the door. I braced myself for another assault by the press, but when we stepped from the office the place was nearly empty, just a few dozen people waiting calmly for me to come back out. None of them were press.

We stepped out into the gallery and Hetta began introducing me to the faculty. No one shook my hand. After a few introductions, I learned to just nod, like the rest of them. When we were finally wandering through the gallery, I turned to Hetta.

“Where are the press dogs?”

“Caesar had them ejected until after the initial showing.”

I sighed. “Good.”

“Don't be too relieved. They'll be back. First you have to meet the critics. Now you will see what a hell this business is.”

She was right. We walked up and down the aisles, looking at the various exhibits. I recognized each of the pieces as we went, but they were all bronzed now. It was actually pretty cool. I liked the idea of my work cast in metal. But there were other pieces there as well, interspersed among my works. They were little sculptures of children's dolls doing sadistic things to one another, horrible, gruesome, sexual things. It was Hetta's work.

We caught up with a group of professors and students and attached ourselves to the rear, to hear their comments.

“While the composition is crude and the execution is sophomoric,” a bony woman dressed in gray said, “the expression of raw emotion is nearly overpowering. They represent many aspects of maleness, especially those depicting the brutalization of femininity. Just look at the bestial masculinity enacted against these female images. They obviously represent the fundamental productivity of womanhood maligned by his natural Whitemale perspective. But that he is able to even perceive this point of view is unbelievable. His hyper-sensitive perception and feeling are uniquely feminine.”

“I agree,” another bony woman said, this one taller with gray hair. “His lack of instruction is apparent, but I understand he is nearly uneducable. Dr. Kujl believes his IQ is so low it would be impossible for him to survive if un-institutionalized, yet his apparently intuitive awareness of the varied complexities of female consciousness in connection to an array of emotional abstractions is highly questionable.”

“Is that so?” I jumped. It was Hetta. “Well, Dr. Van de Camp, if you insist on being such the skeptic, put your questions to the man himself.”

A path cleared between the gray woman and me. She was severe, hair pulled back so tightly I could not even see a hairline across the top of her head. Her nose was like a blade, cutting down the center of her face. Her mouth was twisted into a nasty, amused smile. She walked slowly through the path up to me and smiled even nastier.

“Hello, Maynard. How are you today?” She spoke to me like I was five years old.

“Fine.”

“Are you enjoying the party?”

“It's noisy.”

“I'll bet it is. Tell me, Maynard. Did anyone give you help with these sculptures of yours. Did Dr. Kujl tell you what to do, or have you scratch your name in clay she sculpted?”

I thought for a second what she was asking me. Did Hetta do the work, and have me sign my name? I looked up at this old crow angrily. Hetta pinched my arm from behind. I caught myself, waited, calmed down. “I never had any help doing what I do. I used to make things in the killing field back in Red Hook and it was fun. My mom taught me how to play with colors and shapes because we didn't have anything out there, not even electricity.”

“So Dr. Kujl wasn't there to guide you?”

“No. She was at work.”

“At work?”

“Or sometimes she was asleep in the next room.”

Everyone turned and looked at Hetta. It was the first time I ever saw any real color in her face as she glared back at them defiantly.

“I see,” the gray woman said.

“What?”

The lady smiled. “Until now, your artistic relationship with the good Dr. hadn't been clearly defined.”

“What does it matter?” Hetta snapped. “I was against this show from the beginning. He's not ready.” Hetta stepped up to the others and said very low, so only I could overhear. “You two were the ones to rush this through, and I know why. But there's something you didn't count on. He's good. Better than either of you. And he's just a boy.”

The severe woman just smiled. “I'm sure he's very good.” They turned and moved on with their running commentary of my work. Hetta and I dropped to the side and followed half-heartedly. She was more interested than I was, especially the comments on her work. All she did was walk along scowling at them as they tore our work to shreds. Every once in a while she muttered, “Critics.”

I decided not to worry as much. What did a bunch of old crows have to do with me, anyway? I hid behind Hetta for the rest of the day, never wandering very far from her, imitating her reactions to everything and pretty much enjoying the commotion. After the critics tore my work apart, they left, and the public was allowed in for a look. The two old crows called the press and made a big to-do, trying to embarrass Hetta. But it seemed to be backfiring. This part of the day even Hetta was enjoying. I started playing around with the press, posing with stupid looks on my face while saying really abstract, nonsensical things about dogs and food. Some thought spirits were channeling creativity through me, others thought part of my brain was overdeveloped because of the underdevelopment of the rest, and still others thought I was a fraud. It was all very fun, once I got used to the commotion. After three months locked in the office, I was having the time of my life.

I was pretty tired by the time we got home, and Hetta just wandered off to brood. I sat in the studio window, looking down on the city. About a mile off a warehouse burned. Another gas fire. It wasn't so bad out there. I went out and they chewed me up pretty badly, at first. But after the initial shock, it wasn't so bad. Hetta came over and sat in the opposite corner of the window.

“Do you have any idea what happened to you today?” she said tiredly.

“I had a show. It was fun.”

“It wasn't fun, you moron. It was dog-eat-dog. That's what you have to look forward to out there. Bitches like Van de Camp and Little deriding you in public; the press hounding you like famished dogs; the fickle public loving you one day and despising you the next. Don't think because you do well today that you have any kind of future.” She shook her head and mumbled something.

“What?”

“Before we left, the Director asked me to inform you of your sales.”

“What sales?”

“Some of your pieces sold today. That's the purpose of a show.”

“You mean they're going to give me money? For those?”

“Not much. After the cost of smelting, and the labor, you're only going to see a little.”

“How much?”

“Eleven hundred dollars, thereabouts.”

“Eleven hundred dollars!” I jumped down out of the window and took Hetta by the arms. “They gave me that much money, for my work. So much for your cynicism.” I jumped into her arms and actually kissed her for once.

I didn't sleep well that night. Too excited. The next morning her students began bringing copies of the newspapers. Suddenly people knew who I was. Some of the papers even took liberties with my new identity, calling me Ix, or in several cases just X. Even her students knew my name and treated me with respect. Respect.

I soaked up the headlines on the various Society and Living pages:

“Idiot Savant Crowned Boy Genius”

“Retarded AZ Mutant Takes City By Storm”

“Art World in Uproar Over Idiot Revelations”

Respect. It was something I never had before. My favorite headline was in an art trade journal, The Voyeur. On the cover there was a close up of my eyes the photographer had asked me to look wild and crazy for. I barely recognized them, except that one was blue and one was brown. Across my forehead it read:

X = 8
Inside there was a picture of me with my hand on “Love,” my hair wild, eyes bleary, the expression on my face idiotic and insane. I wasn't too thrilled at looking like a clown, but the things the article said about “Love” were nice. They loved it. The paper bought the piece to display in their lobby with a plaque that read, “Love, By Maynard X, Idiot-Savant. An extraordinary piece capturing the dichotomy of pain and ecstasy that make up passion, created by a man incapable of writing his own name.” Well, that wasn't exactly true. I endorsed the check for my eleven hundred dollars just that morning. But what did it matter? I was only sixteen. There was even another exhibition scheduled, and this time there would be paintings.

? € ¥ $ ‰ £ ?

Every exhibition had more and more people. I got friendly with the Hall Director, who was a big fan, since he got a cut. He introduced me to the business end of art. My various pieces went for around one hundred dollars each at the first show, but the good press of my unleashed talent drove up the interest in my work, and the prices as well. Up up up. By the end of the year a signed casting of the piece @ went for two thousand dollars. And then there were my paintings.

The bronzes were cast from the originals, signed and numbered by me. The paintings were signed originals. My first piece, The Trust, went for a little over two thousand dollars. And I painted more. I completed one small work, usually 24 by 36 inches, every two days. They went for around a thousand dollars. About every fifteen days I finished one 6 foot by 6 foot masterpiece. Overall I was making about twenty thousand dollars a month. I have no idea what the director, the Gallery Association and Hetta were pulling down, but I didn't care. I was too used to making three bucks an hour sudzing plates. I bought my first car before I was eligible for a license, and when I went to the DMV, I was told I was too stupid to drive, so I traded in my car for a limo and hired a big, burly chauffeur man, with thick hands and a mat of black hair on his head. His face was interesting, with a long jaw, groping lips, muzzle nose and little, beady brown eyes. His name was Stanislaus Testostaronski. I called him Stan. My accountant told me in a very nice letter that I was now worth $ 205,234.98.

I turned seventeen.

Who knows why my relationship with Hetta soured. Who knows anything about love, really. Our little wrestling bouts became more infrequent, dwindling to three times a week. I began to notice during our rare couplings that her attitude began to change entirely. Where before she was overexcited, now she became really mean. She often set her recliner in the rear of the office, by the door, and sit there for hours, watching me sculpt or paint. And of course I was in my trance, so I never knew she was there, really. (I was all caught up in my abstract impressionistic neo-naturalist post-urban meta-spiritualism stage at the time, mostly mixing earth tones with electric colors in surreal food shapes.) I was working away at a painting, splashing and smearing and jabbing at it one afternoon when I noticed her, smoking a cigar, sipping red wine.

“Well,” I said, swaggering triumphantly across the room, wiping my hands. “What do you think?”

“What do you call it?” she said, her voice stupid and drunken. I hadn't noticed before how much she was drinking lately.

“I call it 'The Drunk.'“

She bit the end of her cigar, then swished down the rest of her wine. “It sucks.”

I smiled. “Of course it does.” I pulled up a chair next to her and straddled it, patting her arm, the old girl. “What's the matter, Hetta? You haven't been yourself since that first show.”

“What does it matter what's the matter? You're happy, making your little art things and scraping in the cash while you can. What does it matter what people say?”

“Since when do you care about what people say? What ever happened to the free-spirit outsider freak thing?”

She turned and slapped my face. I fell back, astonished. She never hit me outside the act of passion.

“Don't talk to me about outsiders,” she sneered attractively. “I'm the original.” She reached over and refilled her glass. “You think you're the genuine article? The real thing? You cocksure little puke. You have no idea what you're doing.”

“Whatever it is, I'm doing it fairly well.”

She scowled at me, shaking her head. “Well? Sure, you're getting rich. Tell me something, Maynard, I know you remember Dr. Van de Camp, but do you know who Dr. Courtney Little is? No? She's the other critic who's been savaging you in front of all the art Professors these past ten months. I've spared you from her ridicule because I wanted you to produce, not lose whatever it is that's spilling out of you right now. But your time is running out. They've been trying to discredit you, have you thrown off campus as a hack, a pop artist, an entrepreneur. Do you know what that is?”

“I've heard it before. Someone who profits?”

“Someone who gouges. They say you’re nothing but a petty bourgeoisie. Do you know what that is?”

She stumped me on that one.

“You think you're so high and mighty,” she glared with disgust. “But you don't know a thing about the world you're getting into. They're going to tear you limb from limb.”

“Who is?”

She was really enjoying this little game of power/helplessness, so I let her have some fun. She got so little pleasure out of life lately. “Even as we speak there are people in the department amassing a critical treatise against you. They propose you're really an idiot retard, and that I'm behind your genius. That I'm the one who's really profiting here.”

“How much have you made? A couple thousand?”

“That's none of your damned business,” she barked. “What matters is that they're gunning for you.”

“What do I care if a bunch of old hags are coming for me?”

She reached out to slap me again, but this time I ducked away. “What?”

“Old hags? Little and I were married to the same man at the same time. What do you think that makes me?”

“You're not as old as them. You're what, thirty?”

She laughed. “I'm forty-nine, you little moron.”

Forty-nine! I reeled back from that one.

“Courtney Little is fifty.” Hetta began to laugh. “Courtney and I share two kids older than you”

“Share?”

“She's barren as dirt. They hired me to have kids for her. She divorced John, he married me and we had two kids. I divorced John and they remarried. I waved my parental rights and she adopted. Now she hates me.” Bing bang bing. Hetta began to laugh. “She's been trying to get me out of the Trust for twenty-two years, ever since Alex was born, but she couldn't get around the EEOP. And then you came along. My little puppy dog. If they have their way, I'll be in the private sector by the end of the year.”

I stared at Hetta a long time, my mouth hanging open in wonder. She was a mother. But she didn't look like a mother; her skin was smooth and tight, her body rigid and supple as Knuckles'. She was quick and vital, but she was almost fifty! “So what were you to them, some kind of baby machine?”

“You make it sound dirty.” The cruelty in her eyes was terrifying, but I couldn't escape it. “What makes you so noble, Maynard? You're nothing but a random little fly buzzing happily around, just begging to be devoured. I fought for everything I have, every scrap of dignity, every shred of respect. I chose to have those kids, and to leave them forever. I was in control. It was what was right for me at the time.”

“So they used you, and now you're mad and taking it all out on me--”

“You haven't learned anything from me,” she hissed, clutching my wrist, wheeling me around so hard she nearly broke it. “You need to live in the serial-present, to move from options to decision without fear of moral circumstance, from moment to moment to infinity without concern for the Whitemale pseudo-ethics of past or future. To survive like me--”

“Survive like you?” I scoffed. “I'd rather die fly foolish, crazy and alone out in the AZ than survive like some perverted bloodsucker using your serial logic.” She turned with a hissing shriek, hurling her glass at my painting, the red wine splashing all over it. I started to yell, but she dragged me off to her bedroom. We fought that night, kicking and screaming as we tore off each other's clothes, biting as we rolled from the bed to the floor to the bathroom to the bed again. My hip joints popped twice, I wrenched her neck out of whack, she clawed my skin until I bled from every flank, I pulled her hair out in knots. And when we were done, we lay side by side panting. I rose from the bed and she tried to claw at my backside, to draw me back, but I slapped her hand away. Her eyes rolled and she passed out.

I won.

I went out to see the damage done to my painting. The red wine dried in the five hours since its bath. It gave the painting a tinted glaze. And it reeked. I decided to keep the name I gave it and took it down from the easel, put up another canvas and took a sketch pencil to rough out this new vision of Hetta. Serial logic. Spider ethics. No. I wouldn't put this one on paper.

I went over to the door and set up a portfolio, then I went around the office collecting all my paintings. I filled four portfolios, tying them with string. I went back into the bedroom and looked down on Hetta. She was in the same position as when I left her, lying all bent and dried out, like a dead insect. I packed my clothes into a paper bag and took all my toiletries from the bathroom. Back out in the office I scanned the wreckage once more, to be sure I left nothing behind. I saw her little black book. It had a gold “Accounts” on the cover. I couldn't just walk out, not if I owed her money. She would be able to get me back if I owed her something. The book had one of those number locks on it, but I had seen her open it enough times to know the number, 143. I leafed through the book, past all the diary stuff to the numbers stuff in the back. There they were. I went to the bottom line. $137, 651.49. Was that what I owed her? I was dumbfounded. I flipped to the top of the list to see what she thought it was that I owed her so much money for and saw the heading “AVI.”

I sat down and began to read through her journal.

“July 7: The boy is progressing at an astonishing rate. He has mastered painting his kind of form in only a few months. I have never seen a student capable of expressing this range of feeling with this medium.

“August 11: The bitches have done it. They have filed a petition to the Dean for an inquiry into my artistic relationship with the boy. They contend that his genius is ingenuine, and that I have orchestrated his rise to prominence for gain. I must make sure to cover my AVI.”

There it was again.

“December 29: Have gone over Assets Accrued for the last year. Did very well. The fine will be a drop in the bucket.

“February 14: I am afraid now more than ever that the boy will leave me. He was at a show today and I never saw a young artist so admired by the girls. How will he ever want to stay with me after being with one of them?

“March 12: My accountant has advised me to turn over all information in the Assets Via Ix account. He thinks it advisable to have them secured, in case the treatise is a success. If they are able to attach AVI, then this whole endeavor will be a great loss.”

I set the book down on the counter. We had been together for nearly two years, and she had done well by me. I owed her nothing. I rose to leave, but as an after thought set the book open to the last page, the one with the big number on it. At the bottom I scrawled the last thing I would ever say to her.

“Sayonara sucker.”

I paged Stan on my cellular phone as I walked down to the garage. He was waiting, of course.

“Good morning, Stan. Up in the office you'll find four portfolios. Please get them quietly, since Dr. Kujl is asleep, and bring them down to the car. I'll be waiting.”

Stan went for the portfolios and I waited. When he was done loading them into the trunk, he came around to shut my door and looked in to see if there was anything else.

“No.”

“Mr. Ix, what happened to your face?”

I felt my cheek, several welts were raised along my jaw line, just above my jugular. I smiled. “Spider bites.” We drove off. For the first time in my life I was truly free.

? € ¥ $ ‰ £ ?

How can I describe the next five years? Fun? Terrifying? Amusing? Insane? Whatever I decide to call them, it will never describe them fully. It started with a car ride. We drove down to 33rd street, the galleria district, on our way to Che' Donald, where my work was currently on exhibition. It was a swank little gallery owned by billionaire art dealer, Donald MacRonald. Hetta and my manager picked this place without asking me. Oh yes, I had a manager by this time. Pulling down six figures, I needed all the bells and whistles. I signed a stack of papers making Caesar my business manager. He weighed all of a hundred pounds and suffered terribly from adenoids as a child, deforming his face slightly.

“Stan,” I said from the back of the limo.

“Yes, Mr. Ix.”

“What time is it?”

“Six AM.”

“Pull around to the rear and park. I need some sleep.”

We went around back and parked next to a dumpster. The sour sweet smell drifted into the back of the car and I remembered the kitchen. I pulled my coat around me. How could I have gotten into this? I felt so low, so sorry for myself, I didn't know what to do. What if Hetta came looking for me? I rubbed my sore ribs.

“Mr. Ix?”

“Yes, Stan.”

“I don't mean to pry, sir, but I was just thinking. Why are we sitting next to the garbage when you can just go to the Fritz and get yourself a suite?”

He annoyed me. I was the one making the plans here. “Just do the driving, Stan.” I said irritably.

“We aren't driving, sir.”

“Go for a walk, then.”

Without another word, he got out of the car and left me there. I was a little surprised. Even though he was my man, Hetta usually gave all the orders. I liked giving orders. When I awoke the car was completely surrounded. I don't know where they came from or how they found me, but there were reporters from every trade rag and scandal sheet in town, rattling the door handles and knocking on the windows.

“Mr. Ix, is it true you've left your lover to live with your chauffeur?” one demanded.

“Maynard, where will you go from here? Back to Westphalia?” another barked.

“What will your next project be, a tribute to homosexuality?” They swooped on me like vultures.

I dialed Stan's page and sat there trembling under my coat, watching in terror as they clawed and slobbered all over the windows of my car. It was really rather exciting. In only a few minutes Stan came pushing through the crowd, half dressed, and shoved his way into the car.

“Where were you?” I roared.

“Home, in bed. I live the next street over.”

“Take me there. Fast.”

He nearly ran the idiots over as we pulled out of that alley. Stan hid the car and we went up to top floor of his run down tenement. It was just like the place Mr. Mustache lived in, but older. Much older. Stan let me in and I moved directly to the window, looking out on the city to be sure no one followed us there. No one did. I turned to find Stan motioning for me to sit on his couch, so I sat. What a pit. I had no idea Stan lived like such a common dog, but it was still nicer than the store room. His apartment was really just one room, a studio, he called it. The couch I sat on folded out every night and that was where he slept. I began to relax.

“Those reporters really knew where to find me, didn't they Stan?” I said looking up at him over coffee.

“Yes, sir. They sure did.”

“How do you suppose they knew where to find me in this whole big city?”

“The phone book?”

I let it go. Even if he was the one to tip them off, he was the one who rescued me. I was trapped, he came through. I smiled to myself.

“Do you know what one of the reporters asked me out there, Stan?”

“What's that, sir?” he said, leaning on the wall across the room.

“If I left Dr. Kujl to have a relationship with you?” I began to laugh, but Stan just stood there, looking at me. “Pretty pathetic, huh, Stan?”

“It's just another lifestyle, and it's not that funny.”

I stopped laughing. “What are you talking about?”

“I'm gay.”

“What? What do you mean? That you like... boys?”

“You act like it's sick,” he said defensively, almost nastily. I shrank from the tone of his voice. “My gender is gay, that's all. You're going to penalize me for my genes?”

“No. I just don't--”

“Don't worry, Mr. Ix. A. I never sleep with my employers. And B. You're not my type.” He wheeled around and went to his kitchen, a sink in the wall, and poured himself a cup of coffee. I was amazed. I never would have thought Stan was not a man. He never even acted funny or anything. I began to notice things about him now. When he did things, his hands never moved steadily along, from one task to another. They sort of flitted along, dancing in the air. They were smoother and whiter than I remembered them being. Had I ever looked? Was Stan even a real person to me before this moment? No. He just drove my car.

“I'm sorry--”

He turned back and faced me dramatically. “Don't apologize for me. I have nothing to apologize for.”

“I'm sorry. How did it happen?”

“I didn't get it caught in a door, or something, if that's what you mean.”

“Then what happened to you?”

“Gayness is something you're born with, like your skin color or your gender. Don't you know that?”

“No,” I jumped.

Now he came over and sat on the couch next to me. I moved a little further away. “You wouldn't believe the life I've had,” he said tiredly. “If I had to blame anyone, I guess I’d blame the men in my life, my father, uncles, priests, scout leaders, you name it. My analysts helped me remember that I’d been passed around like a used hanky. They’ve recovered forty episodes of sexual abuse in hypnosis so far.”

“That's horrible.”

“Yes, but I'm thankful that they’re doing it. It’s been like having cancer removed. The operation and sickness are horrible, but the liberation and retribution are worth it.”

“Retribution?”

“The Fed went after all of them. They’ve been castrated all and sent off to Westphalia to die.”

“That's horrible.”

“Nah. What comes around, goes around.”

“I know someone else who had identical experiences. Her name was Livia.”

“Was?”

“She died.”

“How?”

“Suicide.”

“Another victim bites the big one.” He stood, taking my cup. “Enough true confessions. Maybe sometime you could tell me about life in Westphalia?”

“Maybe.”

He offered me a cigarette. I didn't smoke. Stan returned with a little candy tin and sat next to me on the couch.

“You look like you've had a long night, Mr. Ix. How about a little respite?” He produced a little clay pipe, shaped like the body of a reclining man. It had a large mouth shaped like a big O, in which Stan placed several small pieces of crystal. At the other end it had a particularly long male protuberance, from which the smoker smoked. Before I was even done looking at the thing, Stan slipped it into my mouth and lit it. The smoke burned my throat, and I wanted to cough and choke. I didn't. Something strange happened. My brain slipped backwards inside my head. I actually felt it move, like a large, crawling lizard inside my skull. And I began to see things, not in the room, but in my mind. I saw Hetta, dancing like a long snake to the sound of Stan's voice. I lay back on the couch and looked up as Stan stood over me, saying something. All the while I watched things inside my head, feeling the dreams move parts of my body, feeling the sensations of my imagination acting on me physically. I shut my eyes, listening to the singing of serpents and witches hissing tingles all over my body. As I spiraled down a huge sinking motion, I felt this breathless explosion of warmth throughout my body, culminating in ripples of pleasure deep in my chest.

I awoke on the couch; I don't know how long after. It was still light. I looked under the covers, and somehow I was naked. My clothes were arranged neatly on the chair to the side of the sofa. Stan was under a blanket asleep in a chair. Without waking him, I dressed. I was a little uneasy about being naked in front of a man who liked men, but he was my driver. He wouldn't even think of doing anything that would jeopardize his job. I half expected my head to split after such a hallucinatory experience, but I felt good, invigorated. After I dressed, I woke Stan.

“What was that you gave me?”

“Blaze.” He smiled blearily up at me; I shook my head. “It's a psycho-stimulant. It makes what's up here as real as what's down here,” he smiled touching himself at each 'here.' “It was good for you, wasn't it?”

I nodded. I liked it. “It was fun, but right now we need to get back to Che' Donald's and make sure Hetta and Caesar don't mess around with my art.”

Stan dressed and we went down to the gallery. The place was a mess. Just two days ago we had opened there, and now it looked like a hurricane went through. About half the pieces were gone.

“Donny!” I called. “Don!”

After a few minutes, Donny came out, a large man with orange hair, shuffling side to side with a huge smile etched on his placid face. I never trusted him. He smiled too much.

“Maynard,” he bellowed. “Can you believe it? I sold half your inventory. Just this morning Caesar came in with an order.”

“Caesar?” I moved around the pieces, taking note of each missing piece and painting. All the most valuable ones were gone, probably a million dollars worth. “Did he show you any money for them?”

“No, he just came to pick them up. He had a chit signed by you.”

“I never signed anything.”

Donny was confused, but he didn't stop smiling. He pulled me back into his office, a huge, lavish room with thick leather furniture and expensive original oils on the walls and green carpet underfoot. He motioned for me to sit, so I did.

“This is the order,” he beamed over the desk at me. I took the paper, recognizing it as one of the papers I signed when I hired Caesar. He told me it was for inventory control. In the middle of the page was a list of all the works they had taken. The bottom line: $1,274,820.27. My jaw dropped.

“I did not sign this as an order for you. This is a misrepresentation.”

“Misrepresentation?”

“Yes. I left Hetta last night. We are split.”

“Split,” Donny smiled. “What do you mean split?”

“Sayonara sucker. Over. Done. It was fun while it lasted, but, see ya. This order is a forgery. You should have never given them anything. I don't even know where they took the stuff and I certainly don't have 1.2 million dollars.”

Donny just kept smiling and smiling. He smiled when he called his lawyers. He smiled when the police showed up. He smiled when they served me papers and he smiled when I finally saw him in court. Hetta and Caesar were much less friendly. I found out that Caesar was a lawyer as well as a manger. Somehow they seized my assets. They got hold of everything they couldn't steal that morning from Che' Donald's, as well as the things they did steal with the forged documents. No one returned my calls. I moved in with Stan, for the time being.

I found a lawyer in the phone book, Maurice Kabal, Attorney at Law. The next seven months I spent in and out of court, in and out of the papers and in and out of the bars. It was a horrible way to spend my seventeenth year, but I endured it. Stan was a good friend and companion through the trials and headaches, and he seemed to have an endless supply of Blaze. The only real injury to me was that I didn't produce a single artistic piece in that time. I had no need of money. The pieces I squirreled away in the four portfolios were suddenly even more valuable, since the Fed had all my work in custody as evidence and there were none available for sale on the open market. During my stay with Stan, I sold $1,240,254.75 worth of paintings on the sly. The Fed was all over any account with my name on it, so I asked Stan to open an account in his name, allowing him to keep all the interest as payment for the use of his name. He eagerly took the deal. Two percent of a million dollars is a pretty good wage. We lived like kings, moving out of the cheesy little apartment and renting a suite of rooms at The Fritz. We lived there for a month, until I had my Realtor find us a townhouse on the lower east side, where all the Senators and Representatives lived. I threw myself quite an elaborate eighteenth birthday, only a mile from the Rainbow House.

When I turned eighteen I was worth nearly two million dollars. Most of it was in Stan's name, and the rest was tied up by the Fed for some legal thing they were working on. We went out almost every night, bar hopping, shows, the theater, museums. Stan became to me the best friend I never had, up until then. At the Trust I spent so much time talking to food and being Hetta's pet, I never got a chance to realize what it was like to have a buddy whom I could talk to and get drunk with and just be around. I shared some of my deepest thoughts and fears with Stan, what I remembered about Westphalia, loneliness in Otto's kitchen, Livia... I never talked about her with anyone. It hurt too much. Sometimes Stan and I drove around the city graveyards for hours, reading stones, looking for her. We never found her.

But most of the time things were lighter. The invitations to come to other artist's shows came pouring in. I remember one showing in the lake district that was fun, when I was about twenty-one years old. We were drinking champagne and smoking Blaze all morning, and by the time we were ready to leave the press arranged a surprise interview for me. One of my paintings had just won the Teddy Award, a prestigious award for excellence in the visual arts sponsored by The Thermadyne Nucleics Technocorp. I was told a few minutes before meeting the press that I would receive a five hundred thousand dollar award during a ceremony, so I was pretty giddy.

“Mr. Ix, could you tell us how you feel right now?”

“Giddy as a school girl.”

“Did you and Stan Testostaronski sleep together?”

“Sure, why not? Next question.” I went around the room answering their questions with whatever popped into my head, so high on success and Blaze I never thought a thing about what I was saying.

Of course, Stan and I hadn't slept together. But the press was always trying to dig up as much sleaze on me as they could. So I was flip, shooting it back at them. Besides, I was getting so used to seeing my name in the papers that I began to think of Maynard Ix as some poor relation forever embarrassing me. They thought up all kinds of wild things to say about me: I was having an affair with Stan of course, but they liked to add things, like that I was married to Katerina Smolenska, a Ballerina dancer whom I sent a drink to one night at a fancy French restaurant. (I thought she was a professional volleyball player.) They claimed once to have found some of my art work in a crater on the moon (I hid it there with the help of my unisexual alien friends to get me through this legal stuff). None of it bothered me too much, though. Let them say what they wanted. It helped drive up the prices of my work, and that was the most important thing. I didn't even mind not producing for a while. It was like a paid vacation; I deserved it.

My vacation lasted five years, five drunken, Blazing, screaming, laughing, racing, crashing years. I have no coherent memory of those years, just bits and snatches of wild things we did and exotic places we saw. Stan and I took dates on a world cruise once. I flew to the North Pole, and once I saw it I gave orders to fly to the South Pole, the whole time living on nothing but champagne cravings and caviar delusions. We were arrested for drunken disturbances all around the Capitol, and when restaurateurs and night-clabbers saw us coming, they hid their breakables and rolled out their most expensive fare.

I remember one night I picked up this tall red-headed bimbo with legs so long I thought they would never stop. I was so drunk; all I remember was rolling around naked on the floor of the cloak room with her at the Metropolitan Museum (I have no idea why I was at the museum, since I hate museums). Our little date was interrupted by flashing bulbs and people laughing. She cried. I think I chased her around the great marbled hall of the Met, flicking her naked buttocks with a garter belt. She was the archetype of all the women I knew at that time, clinging to me no matter how I treated them or what abuse I thought to put them through. It was an acid test, to see if they could get to the real me. None of them did. All they were interested in was the money, the fame. If that was all they wanted of me, I made the price high. After the red-head and I were immortalized by the paparazzi, buffed and blushing, they wrapped my “date” and me in stolen cloaks (which I was later charged for) and threw us out into the New Gaian streets. She clung to me all the more as we ran for my limo, but she was no different. Stan dropped her at the end of the block.

“Call me, Maynard,” she insisted, over and over through the window.

“You're Maynard,” I said. She was no different. The next morning I barely remembered her. They were all nothing compared to the women I Blazed, the women I loved in my mind.

During that whole time I only sculpted one statue and painted two pictures. The statue was an experiment in scale. After receiving a government grant, I went out to the American wastelands, a useless stretch of desert between Fornicalia and the outer boundary of the AZ, and purchased a seventy thousand acre canyon filled with incredible clay and rock formations, some chasms dropping half a mile down, some precipices reaching half a mile up. I hired a team of four thousand workers and set about sculpting the canyon into a realistic presentation of New Gaia, a complete recreation of the real thing on a 1:1 scale. Then, five miles away, on the top of a huge scaffold nearly a quarter mile in the sky, we erected a comfy room, climate controlled, AC, wet bar, big screen TV, the works. Three of the walls were mahogany, but for the wall facing the sculpture I used a huge slab of indigenous rock. Right in the center I cut out a round hole, three feet across, and inserted a pane of glass, to keep the cold breeze out. If you stood just so, right on the little gold star on the floor, it was like looking at the New Gaian Skyline through a little round hole. I called it Rocktology. I spent a year out there in the desert, living like a king in my little bevy of government provided trailers, eating government provided food and wine. The critical community raved, hailing me the greatest creative Neo-Surrealistic mind since Heinriech Brachdickdeckendorf. At first ticket sales were brisk, we charged two hundred dollars a head to go up in the comfy room to see it. It cost the National Endowment for the Arts about forty million dollars. Someone told me they're charging two dollars to go up now, and the Fed provides soda and crackers once you're up there.

All the rest of the art stuff produced under my name was done by hired artists. I'd look through a catalogue, assembled just for me, picking and choosing all the things I wanted to elaborate on. I called this stage my Neo-Minimal Realist stage. Most of the things I sold were constructed with household waste and glue, but I averaged about fifteen thousand dollars profit per sale. By the time I was twenty-two, Fortune Magazine estimated my worth at 150 million. They were way off. I was only worth about eleven million. You see, I had made some interesting investments lately. I had discovered film!

When I was twenty-two I directed my first film, Omphalos Zoogloea, the torrid love story of a people and their passion for freedom, based, of course, on our fair Capitol, New Gaia. It opened with a bevy of prostitutes moving through the theater district, hunting for johns. The camera disengages from them as they roll a drunk, moving on like a floating spore. From there it goes through theaters and fish markets, night clubs and stock brokerages, strip joints and the halls of congress, exploring every facet of our collective American Liberty. It took four months in the field to collect the footage, and another four months editing and arranging the score. The style was vaguely documentary, although with no voice over, plot, reasoning or logical progression. Oh, it was black and white, of course. The movie industry was politely interested, but everything they touch is fueled with great amounts of wealth, so I marketed and distributed the film myself. It was a flop, box office wise, but some of the critics seemed to understand it. One even said it was thought provoking. I never heard of her again. After four million dollars and a year of my life, the film finally found a home in a private gallery, shown nightly to the few faithful followers of Neo-Minimalism.

I made five other films, and since I was learning more and more about this film thing, they cost more and more. They were:

The Love Governors, a tawdry little film short about the double lives of those who govern us;

Trinitrotoluene Patisserie, a little short drama about a gay man fighting between his carnal desires for violence and a spiritual longing for honor. (All the critics thought it was autobiographical, but it was a script that Stan wrote. I produced it and put my name on it so it would get maximum coverage, sort of a trade for Stan keeping his name on my money. Besides, who would go see a film by an effeminate chauffeur named Stanislaus Testostaronski?);

Zucchini Meany, about life in the Trust;

Cestus, the only film I ever made that had what could be called a plot.

Fornicalian Nights, a take off on the Arabian Knights sagas, with a cast of one thousand midgets, all named Fred. It was the last film I made before growing tired of the medium and moving on to finger painting. Just how much can be done with the superficial, narrow, surface experience offered through the camera lens? Besides, I was finally growing tired of the nasty things said about me by the press. Overall, I lost seventeen million dollars on my little film foray, but it was worth it. I had several miles of celluloid for my own personal viewing. Besides, by the time I was twenty-four, the Fed had finally caught up with me.

? € ¥ $ ‰ £ ?

All the while I was playing with various art mediums, the Federal Cooperative was amassing this huge case against me, revolving around the events leading up to, and the “heisting” of, $1,274,820.27 worth of art out of the Che' Donald Art Gallery, some five years before. The Justice Department was involved mostly, I think, but there were a lot of attorneys there from the IRS as well. I mostly ignored the whole thing. It wasn't my problem. Hetta and Caesar ripped off Donald, and the Federal Cooperative didn't feel it was right, especially since they weren't getting their share through taxes. Me? I let Stan and Kabal handle all the legal notices and whatnot, that's what I paid them for. Over my extended vacation they kept trying to haul me into court to testify, but Stan and Maurice kept pleading the Fifth, so I kept bouncing around The Nirvaniera. The whole thing bored me to tears, anyway.

The supposed last day of our court proceedings finally arrived. All the pertinent witnesses had come and gone, saying what they thought happened and who they thought was to blame, mostly me. The only two people involved who had not testified were Hetta and myself. We did not have to testify, if we didn't want to. I entered the court with Kabal and the place went wild. It was my first appearance in court. Lights were flashing, people were leaning out to get a statement from me as I walked by, omnipotent as a god. The judge quieted them down and we got things under way. Hetta was already in the courtroom, sitting over on the same side as the Fed. It was the first time I had seen her in all those years.

“All rise for the honorable Judge Ida Hammerhym, presiding.”

We all stood, except for Hetta, who hunched feebly in her seat. She looked rather sick. I could play these games as well as she could. If she was going to all this trouble just to get me back, she was going to be greatly disappointed. The judge got things under way. I pretty much ignored the proceedings, as I always did, sketching wacky faces in my legal pad. After about an hour of speeches by the various lawyers, Hetta suddenly stood up and limped across the courtroom. She stepped into the witness box and swore on the Constitution that she would be honorable and tell the truth and blah blah blah blah. Her lawyer came over and began talking with her in nice, calm tones.

“Now, Dr. Kujl. Would you be so kind as to tell the court a little about your relationship that transpired five years ago with the accused.”

“Well,” she said, still feebly. “It all started when I went into the infirmary for some elective surgery. I heard there was an actual idiot up in the staff ward, so I went up to observe him. He seemed so sad, so alone tied up there in his cot. We spoke for several weeks about his predicament and I surmised his mental condition was not dangerous, though his intelligence seemed rather low. I assumed responsibility for him and took him to my office, for humanitarian purposes. I not only wanted to get him out of the cold infirmary, but I was somewhat interested in teaching him some type of useful work, so he could support himself in the real world.”

“And was it your intent that he stay there with you?”

“No. I was just passing through to get my checkbook so I could set him up in his own studio apartment somewhere, until he could get on his feet again.”

“And then what happened?”

“He got very sick with a migraine headache. He told me he suffered from them terribly and that was what triggered his attack on that poor waiter. He was so sick I was afraid to move him, so I let him stay. Over the next few days he got into my confidence, lying to me and eventually seducing me--”

“That's a lie!” I looked around the room to see who said that. Everyone was looking at me.

“Mr. Ix, another outburst like that will get you thrown out of this courtroom.”

“Excuse me,” I said, smiling.

“Please continue,” Hetta's lawyer said.

“Well, at first he was the sweetest boy. So needing, so afraid, I began to fall in love.” She blushed. “I'm weak that way. After about a month, he began to change.”

“Do you mean to tell me that a retarded boy was able to deceive his way into your life and confidences, fooling one of the Trust's prize winning Doctors of Philosophy?”

Hetta looked down and blushed more hotly. I almost burst into laughter. I had never seen so humble and smitten a look on her brooding, scowling face.

“He is no idiot. There's something evil inside him, something disturbed.”

I looked over at my lawyer. Was he going to let her say that about me? He was busily scribbling something on his legal pad.

“Just look at his art,” she continued. “The first thing he sculpted was a mutilated aberration he called 'Love.' It's a monstrosity of perverse emotions and an expression of a pathological loathing of women. When we found him, he stood naked in front of the thing, grunting and screaming like a wild animal. My class was intrigued, as was I.” She blushed again. “It is impossible to look into such a thing, to see the bare expression of all that is male and bestial, and not be affected. Being both scholar and artist, intrigued by the pure animism of the creative process, I was pulled further in.”

“What happened immediately after that episode?”

“He began raping me--”

“That's a lie!” This time I knew it was I who yelled, and so did the judge. She had me restrained and dragged out of the courtroom. They took me down to a tiny cell with padded walls and a tiny black and white TV hanging from the corner. I lay in the cell, hog tied, watching the proceedings. I yelled down there, I yelled loud and continuously, but it was for nothing.

“He began a long process of beatings and raping at the office. And every morning he would sculpt another statue capturing the essence of the abuse he inflicted on me. I tried to escape every day, out into the Trust, to teach my classes and spend time with my own work, but I was somehow drawn back into the office every night for more abuse that I could neither stop nor escape. My own art suffered, I couldn't work anymore. I could barely teach, and seeing how my students suffered was the worse trauma of all.”

“And were these sexual abuses all he inflicted on you?”

“No. Shortly after his artistic success, he robbed my house and ran away...” She looked down again, possibly blushing. I had a black and white screen, so I couldn't tell. “Afterwards I noticed I was getting sick. I went to the doctors and found out I had an advanced case of The Mark. Soon afterward I had to have a complete hysterectomy. He was apparently whoring while I was teaching school and passed on his diseases to me.” She looked up crying. “He used to brag about the young girls he was with and how I was nothing but an old hag he was using, but I thought he was just being cruel. I had no idea.” She fell into sobs for a few minutes as the court watched piteously.

“I think we've all seen the articles and stories of the prowess of our good Mr. Ix,” Hetta's lawyer said. The TV panned to my lawyer. He was eating a cookie. I felt sick to my stomach.

“What was the eventual effect of your relationship with Mr. Ix?”

“Just last month I was excused from my position from the Trust. I couldn't keep up my work schedule because of all the operations and medical treatments I had to endure. I am now living in Fed provided housing.”

“What responsibility would you assign to Mr. Ix for his part in this?”

“All of it. All I wanted to do was help this poor boy. But I realized that he was no boy. He is a monster. To me, he is the embodiment of the Whitemale Privileged Class that was eradicated in the Civil War, taking the cream from what America has to offer and giving nothing back to the hard working people of the Fed, forcing his ways on women and children, all the while hiding behind the guise of Underprivileged Ward of the Fed. He was conceived in Westphalia by traitors the Fed tried to sterilize, and yet he's here today, spreading the ideological venereal diseases they were deported for starting. He has ruined my life. He has ruined my career. And he is entirely to blame.”

The courtroom buzzed excitedly as the reporters slashed at my reputation. I sat there in my little cell, drooling from my lower lip.

“Does the defense have any questions?” the honorable Judge Ida Hammerhym asked.

Kabal nodded and stood, collected his papers and strolled over to Hetta. “Dr. Kujl,” he began, clearing his throat. “This testimony is all very dramatic and inflammatory, but until this moment this case has been mainly a financial hearing focused on the handling of some twenty-three pieces of art stolen from Che' MacRonald's five years ago. Are you expecting this court to believe an educated, scholarly woman such as yourself could possibly get involved with an abusive, retarded boy you claim Mr. Ix to be?”

Hetta looked out at the crowd pathetically, almost embarrassed. “I never had any choice. I was abused by a mailman as a little girl. He was captured, convicted, castrated and shipped off to Westphalia where, I believe he was beaten to death in a food riot. I have been chronically unable to assess male character ever since. It's all in the public record.”

Kabal looked over at the judge like a wounded child. “Mr. Kabal,” the judge said angrily. “This has not been a case focused entirely on finances for quite some time. That's just the way you're perceiving it today, leaving the feminine issues out of it. If you had been present over the last year of the proceedings, instead of sending your junior partners, you would know that.”

I nearly had a stroke. He told me that he and Stan were attending regularly.

“Well,” Kabal muttered, “Mr. Ix hadn't been subpoenaed until recently.” He turned back to attack Hetta. “And that's not the issue here, anyway.”

“What is then?” Hetta snapped. “This has never been about money; it's about human dignity. It's about a woman being treated like a piece of meat for this monster's pleasure and benefit. It's about women everywhere being treated like second class citizens. It's a horror to me that our Civil War was fought in vain, that these kinds of injustices can still take place in a society that deems to call itself Egalitarian...”

It was all very dramatic, and she went on and on. All the while my lawyer stood there nodding understandingly, occasionally patting his pockets, as if looking for a pen, and nodding like he understood, but the monster was the guy who paid him and he was stuck in a bad situation so what could he do? It was like a scene out of one of my movies, Cestus, where the hero is trapped inside a nightmare of his own creation, suffering horribly under the weight of his own faults while those who professed to love him tear him to shreds from the inside out, like razorworms.

Kabal dismissed Hetta without further questioning and limped back to his seat. I was sick. And then the DAs played their trump.

“The Court calls Stan Testostaronski to the stand.”

My heart jumped. If anyone could bail me out of this mess, it was my good friend Stan. If anyone knew how I felt, how I suffered and how I deserved to be where I was because of talent and work and not because of rape, it was Stan.

A slick looking lawyer came out and began to examine Stan.

“Mr. Testostaronski--”

“Call me Stan.”

“Stan. You've know Mr. Ix for how long?”

“Six years.”

“So you knew Mr. Ix before the events described by Dr. Kujl?”

“Yes. I knew Maynard for about a year before Hetta hired me as his chauffeur.”

My jaw dropped again.

“You knew him a year while he lived with Hetta Kujl?”

“Yes.”

“And what relational capacity did you fulfill for Mr. Ix during that time?”

“I was Maynard Ix's lover.”

The courtroom buzzed wildly until the good judge gaveled them back into submission. The DA continued.

“So you're claiming Mr. Ix is a bisexual, and that you had an affair with him for what, a year before he broke up with Dr. Kujl?”

“About seven months.”

“And could you tell the court what the nature of your relationship was with Mr. Ix?”

“I was his slave, he was my master. He's heavily into Sadomasochism. If you look at his movies you can see what he really thinks about humanity, and what occupies his mind most of the time.”

“Like what?”

“Well, look at that one he made about me. Trinitrotoluene Patisserie--”

“Objection, your honor,” Kabal blurted out. Finally, some justice! “The witness is referring to something out of context. There is no way to ascertain if what the witness is talking about has any bearing on the case or the character of the defendant.”

Suddenly I was a defendant? Kabal's objection was sustained and they all recessed long enough for a screen to be brought in and a copy of my film to be shown. And they showed it, all right. They turned down the lights sat there for three hours watching Stan's hero suffer through the agonies of indeterminate sadomasochistic psycho-sexual desire. Sitting there in my cell, watching my movie about voyeurism and desire, I realized for the first time how my work could be seen by someone other than myself. It was absolutely disgusting. By the time the credits rolled, and Stan was not counted among them, I was nauseous.

“Stan?” the DA said. “Stan?” Stan was too involved with the emotion of the picture, sobbing gently into his hands.

“I just love that picture,” he said.

“Now we understand. That was made for you?”

“By Maynard, during the peak of our passion.”

“A year ago?”

“Yes.”

“And how do things stand now?”

He paused for a second, as if embarrassed. “They don't.”

“But you came in together?”

“It's all just a front. He's been absorbed with his little prostitutes again lately. He pretty much treats me the same as he did Hetta before he dumped her. I can see the writing on the wall.”

So could I. The DAs recessed for the afternoon. They held me in a cell for contempt of court and wouldn't even let me return for the next day's trial. They were busy. The DA brought out witness after witness to defame my character: bartenders who swore I was a brawling drunk, children prostitutes who swore I had solicited them, beat cops who swore I bought and sold drugs. And one by one, after each had sat up there and slandered me in front of the shocked and offended jury, the good judge ruled their testimony inadmissible, circumstantial. By the end of the day I had a pretty good idea where this was going, even though not a word of testimony was entered into the official record against me. After three days locked up in a little cell like a dog, they brought me back into the courtroom with the understanding that if I made a sound I would be silenced. They led me back in, wearing a bright orange vinyl jumper with huge stenciled letters spelling CITY JAIL on the chest. The testimony was over, the good judge had finally heard enough.

The lawyers closed their cases. The Feds took and hour and a half to wrap up their case. Kabal took ten minutes. The jury was out fifteen minutes. The foreman read his lines like a pro. “We find the defendant, guilty of all charges.”

The courtroom fell into tense disarray until the judge gaveled them into silence. She glared down on me from on high.

“While the nature of this hearing,” she said, “had been to determine the facts in the case concerning the claim to ownership and responsibility of taxation of items disputably taken from Che' Donald's five years ago, it is apparent now that the character of this case has been radically transformed by the detrimental influence of the character of the defendant on those around him. I am just as progressive, open-minded and activistic as any free thinking magistrate in our enlightened society, but after listening to several months of testimony, in the complete absence of the defendant, and witnessing the shift of foci to his misogynistic behavior over the last week, I can no longer sit on this bench without comment.”

A heavy silence hung over the room.

“Mr. Ix. While it is your right to support your own habits and penchants, as guaranteed under the ninety-third amendment to the American Constitution, you are not allowed to impinge upon the rights and desires of others. No man can go about in a civilized society as nothing more than an errant sensualist. Your treatment of those you used in your business dealings is nothing less than reprehensible. It was believed, after the end of the Civil War, that the WMPC were wiped out, or at least completely deported to Westphalia forever. But it is becoming more and more apparent to me that the vital work of the previous generation, who sacrificed so much to ensure our absolute equality today, has not been completed. And so, just as I believe it was the intent of those who died in our Civil War to equalize those unduly burdened by the masculincentric infrastructure of our past, and to generally mandate fair compensation form the oppressive Whitemale Privileged Class, I believe it the specific duty of this court to so deal with you.” She didn't speak for a moment, to let the weight of what she said sink into the note books of those in the media who recorded her great words. When it seemed everyone was finally ready, she continued.

“It is apparent that the responsibility of ownership, sale and taxation of this merchandise is solely your responsibility. The legal impetus for this judgment will be upheld with citation of numerous precedents dating all the way back to the Civil War, to be published after the proceedings.”

The court was so quiet you could hear my heart racing. I sat there, mouth flopping open and closed like a fish. “In all my years of judging I have never heard a case more deserving the full penalty of law. Therefore, I find payment of the financial responsibility for the Che' Donald's situation, a sum of $1,274,820.27, recompense to be solely a matter of Mr. Ix's concern.” Donald MacRonald smiled. “Further, I sight you to pay damages to Dr. Kujl to cover the cost of her housing, repatriation for lost salary, legal fees, all medical expenses and twenty percent of all proceeds earned for your work up until the present. That's only fair.” Hetta smiled even more.

“I regards to Stan Testostaronski, while he has not petitioned this court for damages, the court sees no reason why it cannot act as his advocate. This court demands the payment of 2.2 million dollars in damages to Mr. Testostaronski.” Stan fainted. “And finally, in the matter of taxes not collected and outstanding fines in the total of $6,249,109.85, the court orders the seizing of all assets and properties owned solely or jointly by Mr. Ix until full payment is made to the Federal Cooperative.” She finally looked over at me, nothing but contempt and hatred in her face. “In the future, Mr. Ix, I suggest you take a little more interest in the details of your personal life.”

Just as she said that, I remembered part of something my father said to me once, a lifetime ago. Understand the things you believe--

“Do you have anything to say before this sentence is carried out against you?”

I looked up at her from my chair, mouth hanging open. She scowled and smacked her gavel, ending whatever little piteous show I may have been trying to pull.

The next few days were hell. They threw me in jail until the provisions of the judgment could be carried out. In jail I watched helplessly on the news as Feminist and Homosexual Groups rallied together for pyre-burnings of my work. I watched in the jail house common room as the screaming, naked protesters tossed into the flames one of my paintings after another, my movies, my children, decrying me as a monster, an evil leftover from an age they thought had been put to death. That's what they were doing with their fire, exorcising me. And when the flames were really high, they tossed in my sculptures. I wept loud and long, and later that night the other inmates beat me for crying.

It wasn't until I was released, two days later, that I finally got into my townhouse. The Fed had it sealed off and wouldn't let me in unless accompanied by an officer of the court. I found Stan had cleaned out his things, but he didn’t stop there. Anything of mine that had any kind or artistic stamp was gone as well. Even my old drop clothes and used brushes were all gone. Later, I saw one of those pathetic old drop clothes, splattered with paint and covered with my footprints, selling for one hundred thousand dollars. All of my accounts were seized by the court.

They wouldn't let me stay in my own home, either. I moved into the Young Maladjusted Citizens Association, a filthy little building filled with drunks and perverts. But at least I could be a nobody there. Everywhere I went all I could see was my face and name splashed all over the covers of the tabloid rags:

“Sadistic Misogynous Bisexual “Artist” Released on Cool Million Bail.”

“Bittersweet Love Affairs Plague Perverted Autistic Genius.”

“Simpleton or Sadist? The Downfall of a Pop Icon.”

“Nix Ix!”

They were all terribly amusing, but the best was from my favorite magazine, The Voyeur. It pretty much summed up everything:

X = 0

? € ¥ $ ‰ £ ?

The YMCA Supervisor greeted me at the door. She knew who I was, having watched me on the tube, expecting me to wind up there eventually. She was a young woman, about five years older than myself, but she was butt-ugly: her skin had the consistency of old oatmeal, eyes gray and lifeless as boiled turnips, her forehead small and sloping. She promised with a little wink to keep my identity a secret and gave me the choice of either sleeping in the communal halls or, for a small romantic contribution on my part, of having my own room. I chose my own room.

“I thought you might,” she said, her eyes lighting up. Taking me up to the third floor, she babbled rules and regulations at me endlessly. I had no idea what she was talking about, having slept the night before under a pile a trash. All I wanted to do was go back to sleep. When she shut up for a second, I asked her why I had to take a room all the way at the top.

“Newcomer,” she said, slipping right back into her harangue of rules and regulations. I laughed; the people there worked their way down the ladder, since stairs were too much like work. Letting me into my room, she whispered loudly that she wouldn't let on I was once rich, since the other residents might get it into their heads that I may still have some money somewhere and kill me. Four vagrants lay asleep at our feet.

“Don't you worry, Mr. Ix,” she said, stroking my arm. “We won't let you fall through the cracks. Oh, one more thing,” she said, turning in the doorway. “The YMCA mandates all private residents contribute to their room and board. You can either sign up to do volunteer work or you can do what most of the other residents do.” She handed me a key and began to leave.

“What do most of the other residents do?”

She turned, smiling as if playing coy with me. “Pay.”

“I'm broke.”

“You'll be on the Welfare soon enough. But don't worry, you and I can work something out in the meantime.” She winked again. My testicles instinctively sucked up deep into my stomach. “Everyone here is on the Welfare. Whatever you do, you have until tonight to make arrangements. You can't keep the room unless you pay your fair share.” She pulled the door shut.

My fare share? The Fed just took millions of my dollars, and it wasn't about to let me have any back. I sat on my new cot, taking a bottle of Rye from my coat. I decided to fall back on my Trust education and wash their stinking dishes. What choice did I have? The Rye burned, immediately made me want to throw it back up, but I kept it down. It wouldn't do me any good in my shoes. I wanted Blaze, but Blaze was too expensive. Besides, drunkenness seemed easier here among the sweaty, vomiting, stinking bums and the infected prostitutes, easier than it was in the finest private suites of the Fritz. In the gutter, there were no formalities, no appearances, no protocol. Addicts were addicts. Whores were whores. Everyone supported some kind of addiction.

After self-medicating, I set about taking a shower. Locking my room, I wandered down to the communal bathroom. It was big for such a run-down building, and not in bad condition, all things considered. I looked around; it was empty. There was a walled partition in the center, three sinks on either side. To the left were four toilet stalls, to the right a doorway that led to a small dressing area. The showers were to the right of that. Curtains hung in there, spotted black with mildew. No one was around, so I took off my clothes and stepped under a shower. The water was gloriously hot. I had no soap, so I just stood there soaking. My friend Rye was sinking into my brain just about then, so I didn't pay much attention to the noise and voices out there in the dressing room. I was nearly in a daze under that water when someone ripped open the curtain. I jumped, covering myself. It was a woman, and behind her was another woman, and another and another. There were about seven, all standing there squawking and laughing in their bathrobes.

“What he think he's doing in here now?” one demanded in the back, a thin, mean looking woman. “They already had their turn.”

“He's new,” another said, looking me over slowly. She was tall, with red hair and bony arms, her eyes green and crazy.

“Can't you read, honey?” one said, pushing around the one with the eyes. She was a huge black woman, about twenty years older than me. “Get out the way, Camella. He ain't got no money in here.” She looked down at my hands, clutching myself. They all did. I eased around them, back into the dressing room. With one hand I took down my clothes and held them in front of myself. I could suddenly talk.

“I can't read,” I said. “This is the time for girls?”

“Women!” the lean, nasty one barked.

“Women. Sorry. I can leave now?” I slipped out into the hall without thinking, hurrying all the way down to my room with my dripping rear end hanging out. The bums in the hall were awake now; as I passed, they reached up and groped me, making all kinds of interesting comments.

“Enjoy the shower, Romeo?”

“Hope they didn't break you. There's a crap game tonight.”

“Sleep with your door locked, sweet cheeks.”

In my room I dried and dressed in damp clothes while the bums outside hooted, laughing and pounding on my door, grateful to start their day with ridicule. I never felt so depressed, so full of remorse and shame. After a healthy dose of self-pity and Rye, I pulled open my door. As soon as I came out, one of the bums reached up and grabbed me in the crotch, laughing and babbling like a fool. I jumped back, looking down on the toothless old scum-bag, and before I knew what I was doing, I let lose a vicious kick to his face. That shut him up, and before he could cry out, I let lose three more kicks to his face, squashing his nose and bloodying his mouth. The hall fell silent as the old man slumped to the floor. The other three bums sat up, looking at me with shock and hatred. I looked at each one in turn, no expression on my face whatsoever. Nothing. I turned, locked my door and passed them by. No one had any cute little comments now. No one touched me. At the end of the hall, I looked back on them.

“He should be more careful,” I grinned. “Accidents happen.”

I don't know what came over me. It felt good, doing that kind of thing. I went down those stairs with more spring in my step than I felt in a good long time, down to the street I bounced out into the city. With new vitality I planned my day. I needed money. I didn't much like begging, and in retrospective contemplation of my former hall-mates a new approach to raising funds occurred to me. I wandered out in the crowds, looking for a little fly. After about an hour (during which time I probably would have begged only about two dollars) I saw an old man sitting by a restaurant, hat in hand, pathetically playing on the patrons' stuffed bellies and guilty sense of civic duty for a bit of drink money. When no one was coming in or out, I walked over, reached down and snatched the bills out of the old man's hat. The flash of silver was so sudden, so jarring, so vicious, I barely registered what the old man had done. I staggered back, clutching my face, my hands, arms, chest, neck quickly becoming slick with blood. The old man slowly rose, his beady eyes set on mine.

“You think you can just waltz up and steal from me, you evil-eyed freak?” he spat, spittle spraying from his slick, drunken lips. “You think it's so easy to roll an old man? I'll cut your guts out, you little--” He lunged at me again and I jumped backwards down the alley alongside the restaurant. Amazingly, he followed me further and further into the alley. All I wanted to do was get away, but there was no way out except past the filthy old man. “I'm sick to death of you punks walking around out here acting like you're gods. You're nothing but a bunch of sociopaths. It was different before the war, when people were civil to each other. But now there's nothing but a bunch of crazy killers out in the streets. Thirty million of you, all sociopaths.” He was the one getting crazier and crazier. “The only way to get rid of you is to kill you!” The burning in my face was spreading down my chest. I looked down. Blood. Blood everywhere. The little filthy beggar slashed my face! He lunged at me, feebly stroking his knife at my face again. I hit him in the arm so hard I think I broke it. He staggered to his knees and I fell on him, punching his face as hard as I could. For an old guy, he was tough, wrenching and fighting to get away from me. Somehow the knife was in my hand, and before I knew what I was doing, I rammed it into the old man's chest. He punched me in the face, right in the wound. It hurt, so I stabbed him again, and again and again, over and over I drove the knife into his chest and throat. He stopped struggling. All he did was twitch and hiss blood bubbles out the holes I slashed in his neck. His eyes rolled up in his face, his flesh turned gray.

I don't know what happened next. Everywhere I looked there were people splattered with blood. Blood everywhere. In my hand I held three bloody dollars. The old man slashed me, he slashed my face for three crummy dollars! I ran for my life. The whole morning slipped into a surreal glaze. I remember running through the crowd, and people screaming and someone chasing me, but not much else. By the time I got back to the shelter the gash on my cheek crusted over, the blood on my hands dried into shinny red gloves.

The Super greeted me at the door, smiling as if greeting a wild child, a prodigal son, and took me back to the nurse's office. They dabbed and poked at my face, finally stitching it up. I told them I got in a fight in a bar down the street. They believed me. Why wouldn't they? They gave me a little bottle of pills for the pain, took my three dollars and sent me out the door. I climbed the stairs, heading for my room. Tired to death, I was relieved to find the hall clear. I staggered to my door, unlocked my room and collapsed on my bed. No money. No Rye. No Blaze. No hope. I popped the top of the bottle and dumped all the little pills down my throat. They tasted bitter without Rye. I didn't care. The room melted, I grew numb.

In the darkened room I heard the water in the pipes. They gurgled and hissed in the walls all around me. Several times I thought I saw the old man propped up in the corner of my room. I jumped to catch a glimpse of him, gurgling in the shadows, but he vanished. Later, in the dark, I heard him murmuring, chanting a little song he whistled through his opened throat.

“So off he went to see the world, so high and fast off flying,
never thinking once at all of danger or of dying.

Every night he'd buzz back to his beige bourgeois dung pile,
Where mother fly would serve him puss (in pearls and gracious smile).

Then every night she’d tuck him in with Drac (his wee pet flea),
And every night she’d offer him her worried mother’s plea.

“Naive fly,” she sighed “why do you fill my heart with griefs,
for stranger things are in the earth than dreamt in your beliefs.

Be careful, little fly of mine, you think you are so smart,
but there are stronger things out there than dwell inside your heart.

High up in those branches where you love to buzz around,
there lives an evil being who drinks blood with teeth stained brown.

Though I've never seen him, I know he loves the blood of flies,
wait watching from his cryptic veils with a thousand ebon eyes.

I know you think you are so smart that you can get right by him,
with your dreams of clement love, you're not the first to try him.

And so I warn you, here right now, slow down to catch your breath,
for many dreamers blindly follow visions to their death.

Thoughts move hands to shape the life you only once receive,
pause long enough to understand the things that you believe.”

“Pish paw, oh mother,” said the fly, “You can not frighten me,
I am too young and smart and fast, I'll live eternally!

And even if there is a monster living in my sky,
what on earth would old “It” want with such a little fly?”

So, he would sleep and dream at night about a world so free
that all the spiders, flies and frogs loved in equality....

? € ¥ $ ‰ £ ?

I awoke on my side. The room was dark. I felt my sore, throbbing face, tried to rise but slipped in something slippery on the edge on my bed. By the neon lights I found a gush of slick bright yellow cords, spotted with little white dots, down the side of the bed. I smiled. A day without vomiting was like a day without vomiting. Just as well, keeping them down wouldn't have done me any good. It wasn't like my Rye. I went to the bathroom, splashed water on my face and descended into the kitchen for work. No free rides.

No one spoke to me. I spoke to no one. I didn't even bother thinking as I did the work, putting my body on auto-pilot to do work I was painfully accustomed to doing. The hours passed quickly as my mind slowly came back to me. Before I broke a sweat, the work was done. I ate a plate of pork and beans, washed the last of the dishes and got ready to leave.

“Wait,” the fat little Super came up to me. “You look awful.”

“I feel awful.”

“Then why did you work a double tonight?”

“Excuse me? I only worked two hours.”

“Mr. Ix, we don't run a poorhouse here, and we don't believe in slave labor. The shift you're required to work is only one hour long. Apparently your relief saw that you were new and let you pull his shift. I'm sorry. We try not to let these things happen. It's not fair to the newcomers.”

I realized that newcomer was just another word for outsider, freak, mutant, retard. “Does he come and work for me tomorrow and I get the night off?”

She laughed. “Oh no, that's not fair either. For every shift worked over and above the minimum required everyday, the residents are paid by the Fed. Three dollars.”

She held out three dollars. They were stained with blood.

“Thank you,” I said, snapping up my three dollars. I wandered out into the evening air, turned left and walked two doors down to the liquor store. That three dollars wasn't enough for a bottle of Rye. All I could afford was the cheap stuff. I pointed out a quart bottle of Mad Dog to the clerk, handed him two bucks, took eighteen cents change and walked out with my date for the night. I hardly ever bought Mad Dog, only when I was absolutely broke. The few times I drank the stuff it made me crazy, hence the name. Besides, it gave me a bad headache the next morning.

I crossed the street and ducked down an alley, sliding down a wall near some trash cans. The Mad Dog was warm, thickly sweet, but it had a kick that could blind you. I don't know how long I sat there, but the bottle was about half empty when they staggered into the alley and tripped over my legs.

“Hey,” they laughed. “It's a body!”

“Take his shoes.” There were three of them, and even I could hear their drunkenness.

“I want his jacket!”

“No, look out, he's moving.”

“It's alive!”

They helped me up in the dark and we all slapped each other on the back, old friends, family.

“Wow,” one of the drunks said, looking closely at the bulge of bandages on my face. “What the heck did you do to yourself, son?”

“I cut myself shaving.” I shrugged my shoulders. “Accidents happen.”

They all stood stark still, staring at me. Without any warning all three of them attacked me. It was pathetic. A bunch of slobbering, drunken old men trying to roll a young guy like I me. I knocked one of them out with a single blow to the head with my bottle of Mad Dog. The bottle busted up that old guy pretty well, but it didn't break. He fell at my feet before the other two even got to me. One grabbed my at my hand with the bottle in it and the other tried to tackle me. I stuck out my leg and kicked the old tackle in the groin. He dropped and rolled around moaning. I stepped on his throat, flinging the other one against the wall. He slid down to meet his friends. I stood there for a few minutes, looking at them. After deciding none of them was going to die, I reached down to one who was still conscious and grabbed him by the neck.

“Think twice next time you try to rob someone half your age,” I said. “Maybe next time you wont be so lucky.”

“We weren't robbing you,” he moaned.

“What?”

“This is revenge.”

“Why?”

“Justice, for Sparky.”

“Who the hell is Sparky?”

“You busted him up this morning, you stinking punk. You put him in the hospital.”

I squeezed his neck shut before he could hiss another word. I stood over them, lying battered and bleeding in the alley. This was justice? Three piss-soaked old drunks trying to mug a penniless, retarded fool? “Listen, old man,” I said, leaning down so close I could smell his rotten gums. “If you come around here again, I'll put you and your friends in the morgue. Stay away from me.” I slammed his head against the street, then stalked out of the alley. Just as I crossed the street, I turned to see if they were following.

“Someday you'll get yours, pal,” a voice croaked from the darkness. “Justice.”

Justice is a word moaned in the dead of night, lost in the darkness of self-indulgence. I returned to my cot, joining the age of indifference.

? € ¥ $ ‰ £ ?

The next several months passed in just the same way. Rising early with a hangover, tramping down to the kitchen for breakfast prep. Wash dishes. Clean up. Two hours. I'd take my six dollars and go out in the street to play dice or cards with the other street people until midmorning, then back to the kitchen with my winnings or losses. Lunch prep. Wash dishes. Clean up. Six dollars and back into the streets. Watch the afternoon crowds shop, then back to the kitchen for dinner prep. Wash dishes. Clean up. Six dollars and back into the streets. It wasn't much, but it was useful labor. For this I was given a Welfare allowance of three hundred dollars a week, but I always used that for Blaze. It was quicker and easier to roll a drunk or mug a jogger in the park than to be on the Welfare and clean dishes, but I chose the work I knew, and I hated it. Always, when I was done for the night, I took my bloody six dollars and left my unbearable job and went back out into the intolerable streets to drink myself into a joyously excessive oblivion.

One night I decided to take my little party downtown. Ever since the night I kicked the old men, I was becoming more and more ornery. I don't know what was coming over me. All I wanted to do was fight, to hit, to destroy. I call this time in my life my Dangerous Stage. Walking down the street clogged with human refuse, prostitutes, drug addicts, pimps, bums, perverts, gang lords and criminals, I observed my fellow man in their splendor, reminding myself that Humanity was inherently good, but people were another matter entirely.

Somehow I found myself at the 30th Street exit, a huge off-ramp interchange leading to the busiest drug and prostitute markets in the city. Traffic zoomed through there endlessly, around the clock, taking people down from the impassive freeway into the major arteries of the city. I stood there, clutching my empty bottle of Rye, staring at the traffic lights. The place was devoid of streetwalkers, the cars never slowing long enough for begging or whoring. It was just me and my bottle. Death would have been easy, quick and painless. No one would even notice a little accident. No one would even slow down, thinking they merely hit the curb, or maybe crushed a dog. I fell into a trance, staring at the oncoming lights, breathing deeply the burning carbon-monoxide. Just as I stepped from the curb the whoosh of traffic was shattered by the screech of tires locking, followed by a loud, wet thump. I stopped, looking stupidly into the oncoming lights. The car swerved from hitting me, a long black limousine, and pulled to a stop with the rest of the traffic. I touched my chest, my face. I was still alive.

Across the exit a man jumped down from the cab of a huge truck, swearing his head off. Several other drivers were getting out of their cars, rushing over through the growing traffic jam. Drawn by the confusion, I went as well. A little crowd of people gathered around the front of the truck. I pushed through. Lying there in a mangled heap was a little body, one leg pointing off at an impossible angle, the other completely bent back underneath him. He wore ratty clothes smeared with filth; his head was so badly mangled and gored with blood, I couldn't tell if he was male or female. Desperation is androgynous. All I could tell was he was dying, laying there all alone, his head spattered and ripped, panting unevenly, blowing bloody bubbles. No one got too close, as if by touching him they would catch his mortality.

“It's just a transient,” someone said. “It's just a little tramp.”

Half the crowd immediately lost interest and turned away. I wanted to touch him. I wanted to feel his death. I moved closer, bent down, felt around his backside. He moaned. It was a man. His hip was shattered, soft and mushy, but there was no blood. I found his wallet and stood. Just as I saw his name, Charles something, the truck driver reached over and snatched it from my hands. I tried to snatch it back, but he bashed me in the face. I staggered back, mumbling that I just wanted to help. All the faces looked at me, hating, thinking I came all the way down there just to rob the dead.

“You scum bag,” a little man said, shaking his head. I said something in return, but I was drunk, so the words came out a thick, oozing mess. I moved off through the cars back from where I came. It was an awful mess now, the intersection. People were out of their cars, swearing at the delay. Some were driving around the other cars, up on the sidewalks, only to be cut off and stranded. Soon the whole place was covered with cars and incensed people.

I stood by the limo that almost hit me and looked back at the truck that splattered the little tramp. There were only a few people there now, smoking cigarettes, looking down impassively at the dying at their feet.

“Damn this mess,” came a voice from the limo, its long roof sliding back. “We're going to be late.” It was another drunk, a rich one. Several men laughed from inside the limo, and one stood up. He was a very thin man with very long hair draped over the shoulders of his tuxedo. “It looks like an accident,” he said, looking down into the laughter below. “I think someone got hit by a truck.”

Another tuxedoed man stood, but I recognized this one. I fell back against the wall. He was a huge man, square-ish head, dark hair cut short, huge paw hands. It was Stan Testostaronski.

“Hell,” he said. “We just ran out of champagne.” He stood and looked around at the mess. “Kujl is just gonna have to win that Teddy by herself.” His eyes met mine and he smiled. My heart nearly choked me. “Hey you,” he bellowed. “Is there a liquor store around here?”

Some of the other men stood in the roof opening, looking to see to whom Stan spoke. None of them wore jackets; one even seemed naked. When they caught sight of me, they laughed. “What are you asking him, for?”

“Gentlemen,” he said, raising his finger. “Who would know better where the local spirits are than a local drunk?” He snapped his fingers and one of the men handed him a wallet. He pulled out a wad of bills and turned to me. “You there, boy.” I pointed to myself. He nodded. “Yes you. Tell me. Where's the biggest bottle of champagne I can get around here?”

I shook my head. “I don't know sir. At a liquor store?” They laughed.

Stan turned to them. “Such a bright boy. Such an intelligent boy. Tell me, then,” he said, returning his attention to me. “How about a bottle of Rum? Scotch? Vodka? Bourbon? Wine?” As he spoke I realized he didn't recognize me, so I started to walk over to them. He held in his hand a wad of bills that could choke a horse. “Surely you know where to get wine?”

“Yes, I do.”

“And how about some herb,” another asked.

“Sure.”

“Blaze?” the half naked one asked. “Can you get Blaze?”

I smiled. “I can get you anything you want.”

Stan peeled off a bunch of bills and tossed them to the ground by my feet. “Run, boy. Get me the biggest, most expensive bottle of whatever you can as quickly as you can. And take a hundred for yourself.”

I stooped, scooping up the money. Turning away, I counted it quickly. He tossed me ten one hundred dollar bills. Such recklessness with my money. I taught him well. I waved over my shoulder and started off down the street. There was a liquor store about three blocks back, but I didn't go there. I rounded the corner and climbed into an abandoned building, up to the third floor and went to a window. I sat there, looking down on Stan looking at his watch while his boy toys fooled around in their limo, waiting for their liquor. I could hear the ambulance siren, and way up on the interstate I could see its lights flashing, stuck in traffic. Off across the other side of the intersection I could see the little tramp, wrapped in a blanket, his mangled head still bleeding. Death was here among us, in the intersection. The only one left standing over him was the truck driver, his killer, smoking a cigarette. And now Stan's boys were out of the limo, straggling off, looking around the corner where I had disappeared, then running, fighting playfully back to the limo.

“He's not coming back,” one said. They laughed.

Stan looked down into the limo. “I guess I lose the bet, Caesar,” he said, slowly sliding back down. “People really are scum.”

The trucker looked at his watch, dragged the tramp to the side of the road, got in his truck and eased back into traffic. Stan's limo moved off with the rest. The tramp died. I went home.

In my room, locked safely in, I laid the ten hundreds out on my cot. A number of irrational thoughts went through my throbbing head. That tramp's death made me a thousand dollars richer, probably more than he ever thought his life would be worth. But maybe he was worth millions just a few months ago? Who knew? Everything was meaningless. The drinking. The violence. The excess. Even my art, the reason for everything else, was just an escape from something greater. Reality was that little tramp, dead, disgraced, just like Livia.

Livia.

I lay in bed all night, alone, beaten and bruised, filthy, thinking of Livia. I could barely remember what she looked like, the finer details replaced by ideal generalities. Were her eyes gray, or green? What shade was her hair? Her hands, they were so fine, so small with sharp, little nails. She was nothing now, smoldering in the grave. Not even. It had been almost six years since she died. There was nothing left of Livia but what remained in my dreams.

I cried.

The next morning I was a mess, my head split as I crawled from my bed for work. I staggered to the showers and soaked undisturbed for twenty minutes, then walked back to my room and dressed painfully. I pulled the sheets up to make my bed and the ten hundreds fell to the floor like dry leaves. I stared at them, not remembering where they came from. Then I remembered. The whole pitiful night flooded back into my mind. I pushed it out as I sewed five hundred dollars into the lining of my jacket.

I sat on the edge of my cot right then and there and decided I had to get out of there. In the cold light of day I knew I didn't want to die. I decided to work in the kitchen down there only long enough for the Super to find me a job doing the same work out in the world. I wanted to live. I wanted to create again, not the twisted, neo-surrealistic impressionist blobs mirroring the misery of my loss, but something meaningful. I wanted to create something hopeful. Instead of destroying myself with Livia's loss, I wanted to do something good in her memory. I went out that morning and bought five hundred dollars worth of Blaze, and I got a job as a bus boy.

? € ¥ $ ‰ £ ?

I tried to keep the job a secret, even signing on with a fake name, Miguel Iglesia. I was the bus boy at Cappy Burgers, a little eatery just off The Trader's Circus, the center between the business and financial districts. It was the one place in the city where I figured I could get a leg up. If Maynard Ix was destined to be a nobody, then maybe Miguel Iglesia would have better luck.

The Super found out about my little vocational indiscretion immediately. She promised I could keep the job and stay on Welfare on one provision, increased relations with her. I didn't really like her, but she didn't repulse me either, as long as I smoked enough Blaze before our little rendezvous. Everything was capital in the streets of the Capitol, even bodies. The only subtly is pretending it never happens. What did it matter? That's the way things got done out there, between the cracks.

By my twenty-fourth birthday, I saved up enough to rent a little rat-hole not far from the restaurant. My work was far enough away from the YMCA that I had to move anyway. I began bathing before work, Blazing a little in the shower. And once I was really feeling pretty good about myself, I began bathing after work as well. After a few weeks of hard work, and getting to know my boss's family, I was given a wider range of responsibilities. I only had to work twelve hours a day to make my rent. The rest of the time I spent in my room, studying art books I took out of the library. I was really going somewhere.

One of the brightest moments of my life then was the discovery of Realism. I don't mean the dark, bleak, hopeless pseudo-realism of the Post-Modern industrial age. I stumbled across Classical Realism, discovering there were artists out there denying the dreary, gray, grinding monotony of our Utopia, interested in transfiguring it into a world of beauty and charm. They believed there was hope, not fixed on the communal uplifting of a homogenous all, but by the glorification of the ideal one. There were people out there who did not believe all people were scum bags. I stumbled on the pursuit of ideal beauty. Oh, another thing happened to me there.

One day, as I was slowly strolling around the tables, clearing and wiping and concentrating to the melodic perfection of the muzack drifting down from overhead, I felt a light tap on my shoulder. I stopped, half expecting my boss's wife to be standing there winking, when guess who was there instead, grinning as if the world were a perfect place?

Knuckles.

Actually, her knuckles were much smaller, and not nearly so red. But her breasts were larger. She was larger. She wasn't the gangly little kid with the bowl haircut I remembered. Her hair swept shoulder length auburn with bangs feathered to the side. She wore a dark emerald business suit, conservatively cut just half way up the thigh, a pearl necklace around her long, slender neck. Her face surprised me the most. Her cheekbones were high, her eyes clear hazel; I didn't remember them being so bright and intense. And her skin, it was tan and rich, she smelled of cinnamon. She was breathtaking. I smiled, not knowing what else to do.

“Hello, Maynard,” she smiled triumphantly.

“Hello, Virginia.”

“You never called me.”

“When?”

“After our date.”

“What date?”

“At The Fritz? We met at the lounge, had a few drinks... Champagne?”

I tried to think of what she was talking about, but it was a total blank. I smiled uneasily, shaking my head.

“I'm not too bright, you know, Virginia.”

She wrinkled her nose, shaking her head. “I know better, Maynard.” She suddenly noticed the scar running down my cheek and winced. “Ow,” she said, reaching up to touch it. “Maynard, what happened to you?”

“Oh, that. Let's just say modern living leaves much to be desired.”

“It makes you look like a pirate,” she smiled again, taking me by the arm, trying to lead me away from my cart. I clung to it.

“What are you doing?”

“Getting you out of this dump.”

“Virginia, I just can't up and leave. This dump is my job.”

She looked at me surprised, as if I hadn't figured out why she was there. “Don't be silly. What on earth are you doing here?”

“Where have you been, the moon?”

“No. I know about what happened to you.”

“Really?”

“I followed the trial every day,” she said, pulling me away from the cart again.

“Miguel!” We both jumped. My boss's wife came out from behind the counter and strode up to us. “Where do you think you're going?” she sneered. I had no idea she was the jealous type. “There's work to do here. You just don't walk off the job.”

“This job sucks,” Knuckles blurted.

The boss's wife looked her over, as if inspecting a wart. “Is that so? And who are you, his mother?”

“He quits.”

“Not until he pays me what he owes, he don't quit.”

“And what is that?”

I tried to step in, not wanting to be argued over like a little child. “I owe you nothing,” I interrupted. They ignored me.

“He owes me for food, and he slept here a few times, so he owes me for room as well.”

“Did he sleep alone?”

The boss's wife swung a jagged hand at Knuckles, who easily dodged, pushing the boss's wife down into a chair. Knuckles stepped over her so closely she could not wind up for another swipe. In one smooth movement Knuckles pulled out a fifty and tossed it down on the table.

“That should cover it.” With that, she turned and dragged me out. In the street, Knuckles looked disgustedly over her shoulder. “Thank goodness you're out of there, Maynard. That's the most disgusting place in the universe. Hell will freeze over before we go back in there again--”

“I try not to burn bridges,” I said offhandedly. “I've found that I need to keep my options open. Someday I may need to work and--”

She looked at me as if I was insane. “Work there? You? I wouldn't eat in there if I was forced to the ground by a man on each arm.” I didn't say anything.

Knuckles hailed a cab and we climbed in. “Where do you live?”

“Just up the street.” I told the driver the address and we edged down to my place. Once there, Knuckles told the man to wait and we went up to my studio. We packed my worldly belongings into a YMCA duffel I stole from the shelter and went back down without saying a word to each other. Once in the cab Knuckles gave the driver this uptown address and we were off.

“Is that where you live, uptown?”

“No. I live in a house out on White Plains.”

“White Plains?” I was shocked. White Plains was where the rich and famous lived. I almost bought a small five bedroom out there in my heyday. “How on earth could you afford a house out on White Plains, just six years out of the Trust? You must be what, two years out of University?”

“Just that. I was just a little law student when we bumped into each other at The Fritz.”

“At the Metro?”

“The Fritz. And you don't remember being there with me?”

“I lost a lot of brain cells in those days.”

“We were... intimate.”

I racked my brains. I was intimate with so many people back then. I shook my head, hoping it was one of my good nights instead of one of so many planned disasters. It was the second time she brought it up, so it must have left an impression on her.

“It doesn't matter,” she said, looking out the window. I decided to change the subject.

“So how did you swing a house out on White Plains?”

“It's part of a Federal Cooperative contract. I work for the Big Kahoona.”

“The Big Kahoona?”

“But that's not the half of it.” Knuckles reached over and touched my thigh. I jumped. “Maynard Ix, have I got a surprise for you.” The cab pulled up in front of this little boutique. “We're here,” she said excitedly, pushing me to open the door so we could get out together. I obliged. It was a rather small boutique, but it was in a nice part of town, just at the end of Constitution Avenue, the main Capitol thoroughfare. We went over to the window and looked in. I nearly swallowed my tongue. I was standing face to face with a bronze of “Love,” standing on a pedestal in the window. My heart nearly jumped out of my chest. I hurried inside, not believing my eyes. There were rows and rows of my sculptures. Sex. Pain. Work. Fair. Retard. Learn. ? € ¥ $ ‰ £ ? My eyes began to tear. And there, by the door, was a sign.

“Special Showing of the Works of Maynard Ix, Idiot-Savant.”

I walked around the store for a long time, looking at the pieces. It was like being reunited with murdered children. And there, above the register in its own sealed display case, hung “The Trust.”

“It's the original,” Knuckles whispered in my ear.

I wept at the sight of it. I thought it was cast into the fires by protesters. I pointed up at it, speechlessly shaking my head.

“We found it in an estate auction of a collector who shot himself after he lost everything on your work. That's where all the originals came from.”

“No one has come by to protest this store?” I grinned. “They hate me, you know.”

“No one hates you anymore, Maynard.”

“They burned my work, in public.”

“Like The Big Kahoona says, 'If the public were capable of remembering further back than their last meal, we'd all be out of our jobs.'“ She came over and took my arm reassuringly. “No one remembers you now.”

“Then why make a store of my stuff?” I snapped angrily. “For the money?”

“For the money?” She laughed.

“You want to make money off me, just like everyone else?”

Knuckles reeled back, as if punched in the mouth. “Maynard,” she said softly. “All I've done here is lose money on you. I put this store here not to make money off your genius, like all the others, but to make sure your genius survives.”

“Who says I want to survive?”

“If you didn't want to survive, I would have never been able to find you.” She took me by the hand and led me to the back, to a small room and shower. Lying on the bed was a set of clothes, the outsider artist type just like the kind I used to wear before my fall. “I hate to be the one to break the news, but you need a bath.”

“I--” caught myself before disagreeing. She was so clean and neat, she had to be right. She discreetly disappeared back out front, so I showered; she even thought to leave a razor. After cleaning up, I came back out to the front. Knuckles sat talking with a small woman, so small and round she seemed like a little butter ball. They both stood as I came out.

“Maynard. Do you remember Peggy Armendecki?”

Yes, I did. She was one of the Triad. But I hadn't thought about them in years. I held out my hand to shake Peggy's, but she just looked at me with annoyed anger. She hadn't changed at all.

“Excuse me if I can't shake, Maynard,” Peggy said, her voice deep and guttural. “I am unable.” She held up her right arm, buried beneath a thick, plaster cast.

“She was caught in a food riot last week,” Knuckles said. I nodded that I was sorry. “Peggy's made quite a name for herself producing television shows. If you're lucky, she may give you a talk show.”

“I made Minnie Weenie Donitello, you know.”

“No, I didn't know that.”

“Peggy's one of two main investors in the gallery,” Knuckles continued. “They're your silent partners.”

“Partners? That means I invested as well, but I can't. The Fed took everything I own.”

“You've invested enough. Believe me.”

“With any luck you can start producing again,” Peggy added. “We set up an art studio on the second floor.”

“Now you'll be able to cultivate your genius undisturbed, without all the distractions and self-destruction.”

“Who's the third investor?”

“Ester Ghen. Remember Ester?”

“Sure.” I looked at the two of them standing there, one beaming, as if bathing in the presence of a god. I knew that look. I had seen it before, when I traveled the art circuits. The other looked sour and dour. I would have to watch Peggy. “Yeah, well, the problem with genius is it burns too quickly. I really haven't been feeling too inspired lately.”

“Who could blame you, living in squalor like you have.”

“How do you know how I've been living?”

Knuckles blushed. “Like I said, I've been watching.” Some things never change.

? € ¥ $ ‰ £ ?

And so it began, the second phase of my artistic career. I call it, The Thoughtful Stage. I moved my things upstairs. It was just like they said, private. And I didn't have to sleep with anyone I didn't want in order to stay there. No little piggy Trustees or trollish Boss wives. They pretty much left me alone. The studio was a small room, about fifteen by twenty, with a tiny, windowless room for my bed off the back. The front wall of the studio was an expanse of windows, stretching from floor to ceiling, wall to wall. I looked out on an unobstructed view of the Capitol building a mile up Constitution Avenue. It really was a spectacular view. I could even see a little bit of the Rainbow House. The rent had to be pretty high, at least two thousand a month if it ran a dollar, not to mention taxes and utilities. Just the thought made me sick. How could I produce something that could make that much money? every month? Just last year my work was being burned!

I worked hard at being inspired. I usually stood in the center of the studio, staring down Constitution Avenue. I thought cold exposure to the world would help inspire me, kick start the artistic juices. But I just couldn't shake this weird feeling, like I was being watched. Every time I felt a little urge come pick up a brush or mold clay, I felt a heightened angst in the room, as if an audience grew in eager anticipation. This increase of energy inevitably made me collapse back into myself, standing there barren, looking down Constitution Avenue. So many questions. How could new University graduates afford this entrepreneurial extravagance? How could I ever repay them? I choked up there, all alone, surrounded by the materials of artistic conception, completely sterile.

On the second day I could take it no more. I got dressed in my old clothes and sneaked out the back. Out in the alley I felt better. I didn't want to walk with tourists and sightseers clogging the main street, and I did not want to be one of their Capitol Visit Memories. I walked over to a bar, The Regal Beagle, just around the corner from Constitution Avenue. It was a seedy little place, catering to the local vermin, a throwback to the days when the Capitol wasn't so nice and fair. The people there were as seedy as the upholstery, so I fit right in. I still had a few bucks left over from the cafe, so I bought a beer and a shot of Rye. It was good. Before I could order another, Knuckles walked in.

“Hey Maynard,” she said, surprised to bump into me. “What are you doing here?” She pulled up a stool next to me and waved a finger to the bartender. She looked out of place with her clean washed hair falling on her stately red square-shouldered dress and her long legs on spiked high heels.

“You mean here?”

“Yeah,” she said, shrugging casually, as if sitting in her own living room.

“You come in here?”

“It took months to get the gallery on its feet. Peggy and I spent quite a bit of time relaxing here.”

“And that's what you happen to be doing now?”

She grinned, looking down at her hands. “Well, not exactly. I saw you go out the back door--”

“And you followed me?”

“Yeah.”

I ordered another round and bought her a glass of wine.

“I just can't seem to get going. I keep having this feeling that someone is watching me.”

“Why's that? No one bothers you up there.”

“I don't know. Maybe it's the city, that huge row of windows just looking in on me.”

“We can cover them up.”

“Nah, that would be bad too. I'm used to looking out windows. It helped me at Hetta's.” Knuckles winced at the name. “Besides, it's not the windows. How much does that place run a month to rent? I feel awful to have that financial responsibility hanging over my head.”

Knuckles laughed. “We don't rent it, Maynard. We own it. The whole block was auctioned off to the highest bidder by The Big Kahoona as part of the City Renovation Project. It was a wreck when we got it, but we fixed it up. We own the gallery outright. Besides, you don't have to worry about money. It will come when it comes. We have strict confidence in you.”

“Who is this Big Kahoona guy, some cult figure?”

Knuckles laughed. “President Williams. I'm a sub-staff assistant to his Personal Aide's advisor.”

I tried to look interested, but she was losing me. Finally she just shook her head. “I'm a Flit for the Big Kahoona.”

“A Flit for the Big Kahoona? Sounds like bait for a big fish.”

Knuckles laughed, that sweet little giggle she had even as a child. “A Flit is insider lingo for political advisor, and he's not a fish. Kahoona is an honorary title bestowed on the sitting President upon the completion of his or her first humanitarian act in office.”

“What did Williams do?”

“He's your President.” She blinked at me in utter disbelief. “He instituted humanitarian programs at the Y? You know, Midnight Basket weaving? Guns for Blaze?” I shook my head. “Kahoona is the name of the god of fraternal love among the Island Districts west of the American continent. The title was adopted as an act of recognition of that culture's importance to the Federal Cooperative after their ecology was ruined by the Civil War.” She got this glazed over look in her eye as she sat there babbling about her fish god.

“Kahoona is not a name for a world leader. It's more like a name from a lounge singer.”

“That's not a very multi-culturally sensitive thing to say, Maynard. I'd be careful.” She looked around the room suspiciously. “Besides, Commander in Chief and Chief Executive are so... Whitemale. In the Federal Cooperative, we believe people are inherently good, but prolonged exposure to modern industrial society causes a breakdown of character, a psycho-social entropy culminating with a society dominated by the White Male Privileged Class controlling the means of production for their own profit and social empowerment while strangling all others, especially the underprivileged.” Yada yada yada. On and on she went, blathering all this political who-ha. I listened politely, sipping my drink, waiting for a chance to speak. Finally, she paused.

“Well, how about another round.” I finished my drink and was getting ready for another when she put her hand on mine.

“Maybe what's bothering you is the city itself. Why don't you take a little vacation?”

“Like?”

“We can go out to my house in the country.”

“Do you have a bar?”

We climbed into her little sports car in front of the Beagle and we were on our way. I didn't say a word all the way out of the city, watching the signs and landmarks, in case I had to come back alone. Knuckles babbled away about her job, about big government being the means to a more fair end. Clint Kennedy Williams III was the fourth of the Kennedy clan to hold the highest office in the land, the first President to be going on his sixth term of office, if they could only beat his opponent. On and on she went.

Before I knew it we were pulling into a driveway in what looked like a very ritzy neighborhood, runway lights lit up the driveway, one by one alongside the car. We got out and strode up the walk. At the door, Knuckles said, “Open.” The door clicked and swung wide. I looked for a butler, but the door just swung shut by itself.

The house was impressive. A marble foyer opened in three directions, a dinning room to the left, a central hall with fountain straight ahead and a living room to the right, all of which glowed dimly at our entrance. She motioned for me to wait there and wandered off down the hall. I stood looking at the opulence of the place. This must have been the home of the Assistant to the Presidential Assistant she worked for. In the dining room there was a long table with eight chairs, two large silver cabinets off to the sides filled with glittering platters and bone china. Just as I was about to look more closely, she tapped me on the shoulder.

“How do you like it?”

“A lot. Whose house is this?”

“Mine.” Before I could question her, she said, “Would you like a drink?”

“Of course.”

She mixed margaritas and we went out back to the pool. It was a gorgeous night, a warm breeze blowing down from the hills, the clouds drifting by under a full blue moon. Standing there by the water, looking up with a big, dumb smile on my face, I noticed it wasn't really a full moon at all, but just barely shy of being full. It almost reminded me of something. Off to the side of the pool there was a small gazebo, and inside was the hot tub. I smiled some more. It had been ages since I took a hot tub.

“I thought you might find this relaxing,” she said, unbuttoning my shirt. I stopped her.

“Do you have a pair of trunks here?”

“I'll go look. Why don't you just get in and if I find some I'll toss them to you.”

She turned and walked away. I stripped and climbed into the hot, bubbling water. I kept getting the feeling Knuckles was trying to get our relationship off the ground again, but there were just too many painful memories. I settled in, putting my head back, shutting my eyes. I could have fallen asleep, but her voice brought me back.

“Will these fit?” I looked up at Knuckles and jumped. She stood tall and slender, timidly, wearing only her black spiked heels, hips turned just a little to the side, left leg bent slightly across her right, face down, tilted to the side as she looked at me from the corner of her eye, her shoulders back, bare arms framing her full, tanned breasts as she held up a tiny pair of red briefs across her stomach, waiting for my approval. I was struck by her beauty, her slender, submissive femininity. She was no longer the child I knew. “These are all I could find,” she said, so softly I could barely hear her.

“I don't think they'll fit,” I heard myself say. I remembered her now, I remembered the Arboretum.

She dropped the briefs carelessly, exposing her flat, perfect stomach, and stepped regally toward the tub, balancing effortlessly on endless legs. She was tanned all over. “Would you like some company?” I nodded. She kicked off the spikes and slid into the water, sucking a lipsticked “Ooo” as the heat splashed up her thighs. “It's so hot,” she sighed.

“Uh huh.”

She fell into my arms; we kissed. There was no wrestling. There was no struggle at all. We spent that summer night together by the side of the pool, making love under that strange, barely elliptical moon. And when we awoke the next morning we kissed again, moved up to her suite of rooms and passed the day there in the same quiet revelry.

Later, she brought me coffee in bed and we sat enjoying each other in the sunlight. After eating we made love again, smothering each other in kisses and silk.

“I've wanted this for a long time,” she said, her head in my lap.

“How long?”

“Ever since that dragon chased me off in the infirmary.”

“I remember.”

“I had something to tell you then, but I couldn't. And when we met again at The Fritz, I thought it was the beginning for us again.” She reached up and rubbed my chest. “But that driver of yours, and those groupies took you away. They sucked you back into their web. All they wanted was to rape your mind and steal your money. They treated me like just another bimbo. “

“I remember.” I did. But it was different. It wasn't them who treated her like just another bimbo, it was me. I remembered The Fritz, it all came back to me while we made love. She was just another faceless bimbo to me back then. Worse; I meant for her to be hurt, only because she was the instrument I used to kill Livia. I wanted Knuckles to be crushed, a sacrifice for the damage I did to my true love. But somehow she thought I was the victim.

“Do you know what they did to me afterwards?”

“No.”

“The press hounded me. They added me to their long list of woman in your life. They splashed my body all over the tabloids. You never saw them?”

“I never look at those things. They're too disturbing.” Too boring.

“They printed nude pictures of me.”

“No one important ever reads those things.”

She scoffed. “I never felt the same. I was too ashamed.” She buried her face in my stomach and started to cry, her sobs falling hot and wet in my lap. I held her as she wept.

“They hurt me as well.”

She looked up at me, eyes red, then reached around my waist, pushing me down on my back. She climbed on my chest, running her finger along the scar on my face, then searching my eyes, she said, “You are my Ideal, Maynard Ix. We were meant to be together. I've known it ever since I met you that first day in the Trust.”

I laughed, thankful not to be talking about my heydays. “But, you attacked me that day.”

“I was young and stupid. When I saw you, when I saw your body, I wanted you. And when they made you kitchen staff, I was crushed. I thought we would never be together.”

“But--”

“And then you came to me anyway, even though they could have fired you. You took that chance to love me; I know it was meant to be. You felt the same way. It was all the others who got in the way. It was always the others: Livia, Hetta, Stan. Stan ran me out of The Fritz. He even told me you were his lover--”

“He just said that to get attention.”

“It doesn't matter. It took a year to find you, and we're together now and I won't let you go. I love you.” She hesitated, pressing herself to me, quietly waiting. She sighed. “I've always loved you, Maynard. I want us to be a family.”

I stopped cold. “Family?”

“Uh hun.”

“With kids?”

She looked at me uneasily, the sensuality of our mood quickly disappearing. “What's wrong with children?” she whispered.

“It's a little soon to be talking about children, don't you think? I mean, we're just getting reacquainted here.”

“Just getting reacquainted? We already have so much. What about The Trust?”

“That was a lifetime ago.”

She looked at me for a long time, searching my eyes and face to see what I was thinking, what I was feeling. “You don't want kids?”

“Sure. I mean, they're OK for someone else to have, but I can't see me as a father. It's just too soon.” I began rubbing her back and sides, kissing her neck. “Besides, what I have in mind for the rest of tonight has nothing to do with kids.”

She squeezed me tightly with her legs, so tight I had to hold my breath, then she rested limply against my body. After a few seconds, she started breathing deeply, asleep. I played with her shinning hair. So this was it, then? She did all this to trap me here, to be hers and hers alone forever and ever, man and art and all? I gazed at the unbroken tan that stretched down her slender back, the smooth, downy curves of her narrow behind, and further down her endless legs, her feet outstretched in folds of silk sheets. If she wanted to play house, I could hang around for a little while. At least until I got on my feet artistically. I woke her and we made gentle love; I moved in later that day.

? € ¥ $ ‰ £ ?

It really wasn't so bad, not nearly as bad as I had envisioned. Knuckles rose every morning at six, showered and left the house before I was even up. I ate, jogged, showered, read, napped, watched television (something I only just started doing), walked and often snacked before driving down to the city to work a few hours in the studio. Knuckles gave me this sporty little convertible, a Gnatley 240Q Spider X-19. Sometimes it took me hours to get to work, and by the time I was there, I was too tired to really do anything other than jot notes, smoke Blaze and do some sketching. I did all my smoking at the office, since Knuckles hated it. Then I would drive home, the long way, stop for a beer, watch a football game (something else I just started doing), and generally arrive in time to sit down and eat with Knuckles. Marital entertainment later in the evening was never optional.

Months passed like this before I got anxious. The sales down at the Gallery were nonexistent. At first Knuckles didn't say anything, just asking how work was and if I got anything accomplished. The answer was invariably “No.” She saw how annoyed I got at her asking, so she stopped. I don't know what was coming over me. I felt this great catharsis going on, something processing inside, not yet working its way to the surface. My trips to the studio were producing more and more notes, and no sketches at all. I was suddenly interested in writing. That was it. A book of stories. It was all there, the challenge, the novelty, the shear impossibility of a certified Fed sanctioned idiot writing philosophic fiction. And I knew just the kind of thing I wanted to write. I wanted to answer some of the statements made by Hetta and her shelves of bitter social commentary.

I poured over my notes and sketches and came up with an idea for a short story. It was a plucky little tome, sort of an eye-witness interpolation of Egalitarian “unalienable human rights,” such as Midnight Basket Weaving, Guns for Drugs, Welfare Babies, The ATF, Medicare, The Turnstile Justice System, Kindergarten Sex Education, Revisionist History, the WMPC, a Big Kahoona looking over his a big, fat compassionate government. My hero, Melvin, enters this system, immediately expedited by a voluptuous Trustee, who takes him to bed and offers him the world on a half shell. He accepts. The system seduces him, inflating his self-esteem with empty ideals, minimal standards and lofty rhetoric. He grows accustomed to the lifestyle supplied by the Fed, and has to become an agent of the system, seducing others, in order to maintain the life style he now requires as his bare minimum. So what does it matter that everywhere he turns there's crime, graft, sexual perversion and social aggression? Hey, Humanity is good, it's just the people who keep ruining it. I called it, “The Deviance Mandate.” I typed it up and signed the name Miguel Iglesia, made some copies and shipped them off to the local papers and magazines for publication, expecting to have to decide which offer to accept. No one ever replied.

I went out and bought a little computer and learned all about how to use it.

I smoked Blaze.

I was getting pretty discouraged, but I kept writing. I wrote stories with titles like:

“Cinderella's Liberty,” about an alien who crashes in the ghettos of SHE and assumes the shape of the first creature it encounters, a young prostitute, but it doesn't like that, so it decides to claw her way out of the ghetto by hiding behind a glaze of perfect make-up, fashionable clothing tautly wrapped around the perfect human sexual body form. At the end of the book, she's a movie sex-symbol named Madonna. No one ever replied.

“Indifference,” the story of alien invaders who take over this family in suburbia only to become trapped by this strange glowing box they find in the living room. Their backsides grow so entrenched in their easy-chairs as they stare at the glare box that the Fed comes in and hooks up vacuous machines to their reproductive parts, siphoning off genetic matter they sell to make-up companies. Everyone is happy in the end because the Fed is in control, industry is making money and the aliens can pursue the sheer pleasure derived from communing with their boxes. No one ever replied.

“Murder in the Age of Unmeaning,” the story of this petty accountant named I-- who's too shallow and self-absorbed with the linguistic jingoisms of his egalitarian society to notice that his wife is sleeping with this giant dung beetle. Great historical figures keep popping up to warn him that his whole reality is being consumed and redefined by ethical meaninglessness. No one ever replied.

Meanwhile, things at home were static. Now that I was working again Knuckles was happy. Her happiness made me irritable. I started to work down at the studio longer and longer, sometimes getting up and leaving before her, sometimes staying there all night. After about a month, Knuckles started to get inquisitive. She started pestering me about coming to visit, to see what I was doing. I refused. She began clinging to me, always huddling next to me so our bodies touched in some way, sitting next to me instead of across the dinner table, sleeping like spoons after our now ritualistic nightly jaunt.

One day I was working away in the studio, sitting on the floor, surrounded by books and notebooks, tapping away at my computer, when I heard a noise. I looked up and there was Knuckles, staring down on me with a huge smile.

“What are you doing?” she said in disbelief.

“Writing a book.” I wasn't too mad that she came down to sneak in and check up on me. She was paying the bills, and besides, she was dressed in spiked heels, a black leather mini skirt and a halter top that showed off her muscular stomach and spectacular posture.

“You know how to write books?”

“I'm learning.”

She walked around me and my pile of books, half dazed and shaking her head. “This is what you've been doing down here? All this time you've been reading and writing, and not once have you painted or sculpted?”

“I don't feel like painting or sculpting. Not right now, anyway. There are things I want to say... about what's happened to me here in New Gaia.”

“Maynard,” she said seriously, reaching down to help me up. “We have to talk.”

I knew that tone. It was the same one I used to give countless fans the brush off after showing them a good time. But I wasn't ready to be brushed off yet. I didn't want to go back down into the system yet. I still had too much to do. I tried to fight off the panic. “I don't like your tone of voice,” I said warily.

She smiled. “Oh, sweetheart, it's nothing like that.”

I sighed relief. “That's good, because I just finished this book I've been writing for a long time called The Fair Fascists--”

“The what?”

“The Fair Fascists. A new novel by Maynard Ix.”

She sat me down on the window sill, patting my hand. “Isn't that special!”

“Yeah. It's about this guy who... it's kind of this fusion of philosophy and fiction... it's like this coming together of philosophical ideals and literary characters on an allegorical plateau... it...” I felt really dumb, like I had written this great novel and I couldn't even explain what it was about. She sat there, holding my hand patiently, waiting for me to get over this latest silliness.

After I finally gave up trying to explain, she smiled. “Well, this really is a day for surprises.”

I looked at her for a second, trying to read what she meant. She looked worried, trying to seem casual but looking like she was hiding something. “What do you mean, 'surprises'?”

She took both my hands in hers and looked me in the eye. “Maynard Ix. Will you be the father my baby?”

I looked down at her knotted, muscular stomach. She couldn't be pregnant. It was so flat, so tanned and healthy. She touched my shoulder, saying my name. I looked up at her, confused. “You want to get pregnant?”

“I am pregnant.”

“By me?”

She slapped my arm playfully. “Of course by you.”

“Then why ask if I would be the father if I already am?”

She blushed, playing with my fingers. “Well, I thought maybe we could go away this weekend and, maybe, you know, maybe... we could go to the justice and...”

She was lovely the way she acted so naive and innocent. She probably planned this from the start. Sure she did. That was what she told me, way back when we got together, lying by the hot tub, and before, by the tennis courts. She always loved me. She always meant to trap me.

“Well,” I said standing, looking down on her. “I'm going to be a father, huh?” I wandered over to my pile of books, kicking at the cover of a large legal text. If I married her, I could write forever. “Sure,” I said, turning. “I'll marry you. When?”

She jumped up, throwing her arms around my neck. “This weekend! I already made reservations at Biopsy Falls. We can fly up there tomorrow and get married Saturday morning.”

We sent in our request into the IRS and once they gave permission we went up to this little neon clad wedding chalet at the Falls and stood with a dozen other people to get married. When the justice said, “Do you, state you name, promise to take, state the other's name, as your legally binding significant other, in operative times and inoperative times, in wellness and in physical maladjustment, in public assistance or in the highest tax bracket, and to make love to, be nice to and negotiate equally with until it becomes legally or personally advantageous for you to mutually severe marital ties and divide your estate? If so, say 'I do.'“

“I do,” she said.

“Sure,” I said. And all together we punched out the “Married” dot under the “Marital Status” column on the computer tax-status cards they gave us when we paid our two hundred dollar registration fee at the door. When we handed the receptionist our card she smiled and handed us another card. Without looking up, she explained in a practiced monotone that if we ever wanted to make any changes, all we had to do was fill in our name and address, tax ID number and who would be assuming taxation responsibilities for whatever progeny there happened to be left over, then punch the “Divorce” dot out, put the card in an envelope with the twenty dollar tax deductible handling fee and mail it in. Knuckles grabbed the card before I could get a glimpse and slipped it in her purse.

And so, we were married.