you’re too smart to bother with the rest of us?’?
“By no means. The Convocation is open to anyone who takes a supervised test and scores suitably. Even those who fail are invited to join the forum discussions. You have nothing to worry about, Grant. Some of my best friends,” and Ray pats him reassuringly on the hand, pauses for a killing beat, “are…mediocre.”
The interviewer laughs explosively, slapping the table top. “You bastard! Okay, Shirl, let’s have the peaches for Christ’s sake.” He roars again, perfectly unruffled, confirmed in his impeccable self-worth by a million viewers.
1983: dropping in
The end of Joseph’s pot-holed streetlet is barred by an impressive piece of Contemporary Italian Pastrycake: all brown brick and bronze aluminum windows, row upon row of fat-calved white pillars on verandahs at multiple levels, no entrance way without its pair of barfing lions, pre-pubescent stone lads chubbily hovering over small fountains with urine only potentially cascading from their unnipped pizzles, for their water has been cut off along with the supply to the above-ground pool all crusted with tiny tiles in ornate patterns. The drought enforces equality of opportunity.
Shuddering, Brian Wagner hops from his parked car, pushes open the tired rusty gate. Joseph is not a keen gardener at the moistest of times; in this season of despair within and without, his poor array of shrubbery sags and browns, a vegetable Auschwitz.
On the verandah, out of the direct sun, Brian takes off his sunnies and considers plugging his nostrils with wads of Kleenex. The reek of unspayed tomcats cannot be ignored. He locates the electricity meter, watches the flat disc edging its round like the notorious mills of God. Running the fridge, presumably. If the telly were on for the afternoon soaps and quizzes, the thing would be whipping along at a hungrier pace.
Brian belts the door once or twice. He hardly expects Joseph to come rushing to answer his summons, but he opens the wire screen anyway and waits. Is there a flicker at his eye’s edge? The bedroom curtain pushed ever so slightly aside? He lowers his head, shoves his right index finger into the dull brass letterbox flap, looks into gloom. The stench is worse closer to the ground.
“Hey Joseph, it’s me. Put down that copy of Hustler at once and clean yourself up.” No response. A cat mews. Another scampers, a gray flash across the end of the hallway extending down the middle of the house. Well, if they’re still here and being fed, he must be alive. Brian shudders at his own instant vile conjecture: unless they are eating poor old Joseph’s decaying bod.
“Wake up, you bastard. It’s Wagner.”
Now even the cats are silent. Could he be out? After all, he has to do his shopping some time. Still, the laws of chance deny that Joseph could have been so consistently about his own business during all three of Brian’s visits to date. He must be lurking in there, feeling sorry for himself, drooping and getting drunk and reading old quipu, his obsessional anodyne when he gets into these self-destructive moods.
“Listen, did you get that SMART GENES I sent round?”
That ought to galvanize any clever dick of spirit. It fails to do so. Wagner puts his mouth to the propped-open letter slot and speaks with exaggerated care.
“I will go, Joseph, if that is what you wish me to do. However, I must leave you with one heart-warming item. The other night, I took Kathy to dinner at the Finlays’.”
This is untrue and preposterous, on at least three counts: Ray and Marjory are still holidaying in trendy Pearl Beach, a thousand kilometers to the north; it is unlikely that Marj would have him in the house on so intimate a basis as dinner for four; and Kathy Schutz is deeply entranced by Jim Westcott, a part-time savate instructor. These elements of confusion and mystery may embed themselves in Joseph’s unconscious, with any luck, and fester there. Anything to
“By no means. The Convocation is open to anyone who takes a supervised test and scores suitably. Even those who fail are invited to join the forum discussions. You have nothing to worry about, Grant. Some of my best friends,” and Ray pats him reassuringly on the hand, pauses for a killing beat, “are…mediocre.”
The interviewer laughs explosively, slapping the table top. “You bastard! Okay, Shirl, let’s have the peaches for Christ’s sake.” He roars again, perfectly unruffled, confirmed in his impeccable self-worth by a million viewers.
1983: dropping in
The end of Joseph’s pot-holed streetlet is barred by an impressive piece of Contemporary Italian Pastrycake: all brown brick and bronze aluminum windows, row upon row of fat-calved white pillars on verandahs at multiple levels, no entrance way without its pair of barfing lions, pre-pubescent stone lads chubbily hovering over small fountains with urine only potentially cascading from their unnipped pizzles, for their water has been cut off along with the supply to the above-ground pool all crusted with tiny tiles in ornate patterns. The drought enforces equality of opportunity.
Shuddering, Brian Wagner hops from his parked car, pushes open the tired rusty gate. Joseph is not a keen gardener at the moistest of times; in this season of despair within and without, his poor array of shrubbery sags and browns, a vegetable Auschwitz.
On the verandah, out of the direct sun, Brian takes off his sunnies and considers plugging his nostrils with wads of Kleenex. The reek of unspayed tomcats cannot be ignored. He locates the electricity meter, watches the flat disc edging its round like the notorious mills of God. Running the fridge, presumably. If the telly were on for the afternoon soaps and quizzes, the thing would be whipping along at a hungrier pace.
Brian belts the door once or twice. He hardly expects Joseph to come rushing to answer his summons, but he opens the wire screen anyway and waits. Is there a flicker at his eye’s edge? The bedroom curtain pushed ever so slightly aside? He lowers his head, shoves his right index finger into the dull brass letterbox flap, looks into gloom. The stench is worse closer to the ground.
“Hey Joseph, it’s me. Put down that copy of Hustler at once and clean yourself up.” No response. A cat mews. Another scampers, a gray flash across the end of the hallway extending down the middle of the house. Well, if they’re still here and being fed, he must be alive. Brian shudders at his own instant vile conjecture: unless they are eating poor old Joseph’s decaying bod.
“Wake up, you bastard. It’s Wagner.”
Now even the cats are silent. Could he be out? After all, he has to do his shopping some time. Still, the laws of chance deny that Joseph could have been so consistently about his own business during all three of Brian’s visits to date. He must be lurking in there, feeling sorry for himself, drooping and getting drunk and reading old quipu, his obsessional anodyne when he gets into these self-destructive moods.
“Listen, did you get that SMART GENES I sent round?”
That ought to galvanize any clever dick of spirit. It fails to do so. Wagner puts his mouth to the propped-open letter slot and speaks with exaggerated care.
“I will go, Joseph, if that is what you wish me to do. However, I must leave you with one heart-warming item. The other night, I took Kathy to dinner at the Finlays’.”
This is untrue and preposterous, on at least three counts: Ray and Marjory are still holidaying in trendy Pearl Beach, a thousand kilometers to the north; it is unlikely that Marj would have him in the house on so intimate a basis as dinner for four; and Kathy Schutz is deeply entranced by Jim Westcott, a part-time savate instructor. These elements of confusion and mystery may embed themselves in Joseph’s unconscious, with any luck, and fester there. Anything to
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