Deathbird Stories

Neon

Truly concerned whether or not he would live, the surgeons labored for many hours over Roger Charna. They cryogenically removed the pain areas in his anterior hypothalamic nucleus, and froze parts of him to be worked on later. Finally, it seemed they would be successful, and he would live. They bestowed on him three special gifts to this end: a collapsible metal finger, the little finger of the left hand; a vortex spiral of neon tubing in his chest, it glowed bright red when activated; and a right eye that came equipped with sensors that fed informational load from both the infrared and ultraviolet ends of the spectrum.

He was discharged from the hospital and tried to reestablish the life-pattern he’d known before the accident, but it was useless. Ruth’s family had sent her abroad, and he had the feeling she had been more than anxious to go. She could not have helped seeing the Sunday supplement piece on the operation. His employers at the apartment house had been pleasant, but they made good sense when they said as a doorman he was useless to them. They gave him a month’s termination wages.

He had no difficulty getting another job, happily enough. The proprietors of a bookstore on Times Square felt he was a marvelous publicity item, and they hired him on the spot. He worked the seven o’clock to three A.M. shift, selling paperbacks and souvenirs to tourists and the theater crowd.

The first message he had from her was in the lightflesh of the Newsweek sign on the other side of 46th Street. He was sweeping out the front of the bookstore when he looked up and saw ROGER! UP HERE! ROGER! spelled out in the rapidly changing lights. It spasmed and changed and became an advertisement for timely news. He blinked and shook his head. Then he saw the crimson spiral shining through his shirt, flickering on and off. There was a soft cotton candy feeling in his stomach. He swept the cigarette butts and dustballs furiously…out onto the sidewalk and across the sidewalk and into the gutter. He walked back to the bookstore, looking up and over his shoulder only as he stepped through the doorway. The sign was as he had always seen it before. Nothing strange there.

At his dinner break, he walked to the papaya stand near the corner of 42nd and Broadway and stood at the counter chatting with Caruso (which was not his name, but because he wanted to become an opera singer and went into the basement of the juice stand and sang arias from Il Trovatore and I Pagliacci, that was the name by which he was known).

“How do you feel?” Caruso asked him.

“Oh, I’m okay. I’m a little tired.”

“You been to the doctor?”

“No. They said I didn’t need to come around unless I hurt or something seemed wrong.”

“You got to take care of yourself. You can’t fool around with your health, yeah?” He was genuinely concerned.

“How’re you?” Roger Charna asked. Caruso wrapped the semitransparent square of serrated-edged paper around the hot dog and handed the bunned frank to him. Charna reached for the plastic squeeze-bottle of mustard.

“Couldn’t be better,” Caruso said. He drew off a large papaya juice and slid it across the counter. “I’m into Gilbert & Sullivan. Pirates of Penzance. I hear there’s a big Gilbert & Sullivan revival coming on.”

Roger Charna ate without making a reply. He felt very sorry for Caruso. When he had first met him, the boy was not quite twenty, working at the stand, high hopes for a singing career. Now he was going to fat, his hair was thinning prematurely, and the dreams were only warm-bed whispers to impress the girls Caruso hustled off Times Square. It would come to nothing. Ten years from now, should Roger come back, he knew Caruso would still be there, singing in the basement, pulling 35¢ slices of pizza (that would probably cost $1.25) from the big Grimaldi oven, filling the sugar jars, carrying cases of Coke syrup downstairs to be stored, the dreams losing their color, gravity pulling it all down.

Then he realized he might still be on Times Square, ten years from now. The pity backed up in its channel and washed over him.

The 7-Up sign winked once and began pulsing. His chest spiral picked up the beat. Pain hit him. Roger looked up and the sign was flickering on and off. His chest spiral had changed color, now pulsed deep blue in sync with the 7-Up sign, right through his shirt. The girl on the sign moved smoothly and directly to stare down at him. Her mouth began moving. Roger Charna could not read lips.

“Caruso.” The counterman turned from reloading the hot dog broiler and smiled. “Huh?” Roger pointed across the street, up at the 7-Up sign. “Take a look over there and tell me what you see.” Caruso moved to the end of the counter and stared up. “What?” Roger pointed to the sign. “The sign, the 7-Up sign.” Caruso looked again. “What am I supposed to see?” Roger sighed and finished his hot dog. “I think I’ll go see the doctor tomorrow morning.”

“You got to take care of yourself. You been a very sick guy, yeah?”

Roger nodded and laid out the coins in payment for the dog and papaya. Caruso pushed them back with the heel of his hand. “Iss onna house.” Roger found himself still nodding.

The coins back in his pants pocket, he walked up Broadway to the bookstore, wishing the New York Times still had its neon newsservice on the island at 42nd Street.

It might all come clear if whoever was trying to reach him had free access to unlimited language.

By this time Roger knew either someone was trying to talk to him, or he was going insane. Odds were bad.

He was invited to a party. He went because they asked him. He paid a dollar at the door: a woman who had had her left breast removed for what he found out later were non-carcinogenic reasons, took the money. She was topless; she smiled a great deal. He also discovered, later in the evening, that these people had answered an advertisement in an underground newspaper. It had been headed with a photograph from Tod Browning’s Freaks—pinhead twins joined at the rump. Roger did not feel at ease with them.

In the group was a man who sought carnal knowledge of blimps. He had been arrested three times for trying to fuck the Goodyear dirigible. Even among his own kind he was looked on with distaste; unable to find the species of sex partners his pathology demanded, he had grown steadily more perverted and had taken to attacking helicopters; the mere mention of an autogyro gave him a noticeable erection.

He was offered a sloe gin fizz in a pink frosted glass by a young woman who removed her glass eye and sucked on it while discussing the moral imperatives of the sponge boycott in Brooksville, Florida. She rolled the eye around on her tongue and Roger walked away quickly.

“The dollar was for the spaghetti,” explained a man with a prosthetic arm and a leather cone where his nose should have been. “My wife would have told you about that when she invited you, because you’re a celebrity and we certainly don’t want to charge you, but if we made an exception, well, everyone would want the dollar back. But you can have as much spaghetti as you want.” He pulled the cone forward on its elastic band and scratched at the raw, red scar-tissue beneath. “Actually, I’ll tell you what: come on in the bathroom for a couple of minutes and I can slip the buck back to you, they’ll never know.” Roger slipped sidewise around a bookcase and left the man scratching.

The room was rather nice, large and airy, filled with kinetic sculptures and found object constructs that covered the walls and dominated the floor space. There were half a hundred light paintings of bent neon tubing and fluorescent designs. They looked expensive. Roger wondered why his dollar was necessary.

Seven people were seated at the feet of a moon-faced woman perched on a three-legged aluminum stool. The entire left side of her face was blotched with a huge strawberry birthmark. She had a coatimundi on her shoulder; it was nibbling leaves of lettuce she had safety-pinned to her dress like epaulets.

A man who bore a startling resemblance to a plucked carrion bird snagged Roger’s arm as he moved toward the front door. He stammered hideously. “Uh…uh…uh…” he babbled, till something snapped in his right cheek and he launched into a convoluted diatribe that began with a confession of his having been defrocked as a molecular biologist, veered insanely through a recitation of the man’s affection for Bermuda shorts, and reached a far horizon at which he said, with eyes rolling: “Now everybody doesn’t know this,” and he pulled Roger closer, “but the universe, the entire frigging universe is going to collapse around everyone’s ears in just seventy-two billion years. I smoke a lot.”

Roger skinned loose, and turning, thumped against a dwarf who had been surreptitiously trying to look up the skirt of a young woman with a harelip. “Excuse me,” Roger said, assisting the dwarf to his feet. He brushed him off and started to move, but the dwarf had thrown both arms around Roger’s leg. “They remaindered me,” the dwarf said, rather pathetically. “Before, I swear before the damned book had a chance, they remaindered me. Can you perceive the pain, the exquisite pain of being carried into Marboro’s on Third and seeing a stack, a virtual, a veritable, I mean motherGod a phallic Annapuroa mountain of copies of the finest, what I mean the sincerest study of the anopheles mosquito ever written. That book was a work of love, excuse me for using the word but I mean to say ardor; and those butchers at Doubleday, those mau-maus, my God. they’re vivisectionists, for Pete’s sake…if he were alive today, Ferdinand de Lesseps would absolutely whirl in his grave.”

“I have to go to the bathroom,” Roger said, trying to pry his leg loose. The dwarf unwound and sat there looking frayed. Roger smiled self-consciously and moved away. He started back for the door.

Everything dropped into the ultraviolet.

The little finger of his left hand began to resonate with the tinny voice of Times Square Caruso hashing out “I’m Called Little Buttercup” as the neon spiral in his chest gave him a shock and began flickering in gradually bloodier shades of crimson. Caruso segued into Kurt Weill’s “Pirate Jenny,” a tune Roger was certain the papaya juice stand attendant had never heard.

The ultraviolet smelled purple; it sounded like the nine-pound hammers of Chinese laborers striking the rails of the Union Pacific Railroad; it sprang out as auras and halos and nimbuses around everyone in the room; Roger clutched his chest.

His eyes rolled up in his head and the images bummed there like the braziers of Torquemada’s dungeons. He blinked and his eyes rolled down again bringing with them images as bumming bright as the crosses of Ku Klux Klansmen in Selma, Alabama: it was all in his right eye. He feared what lay ahead in the infrared. But that never happened; it was all in the ultraviolet.

The room bummed around the edges, deep purple and a kind of red that he realized—with some embarrassment—matched up only with the red just inside the slit in the head of his penis during his recurring bouts with prostatitis. Every neon sculpture and fluorescent painting in the room was jangling at him. A half a hundred roadsigns from someone who was trying to talk to him. I believe I’m a closet psychotic. he thought, but nothing stopped.

The neon tubes on the walls writhed with the burning edges of the soft-boiled sun as it bubbled down into the black horizon. They re-formed and slopped color words of pink and vermilion across the airy walls.

ROGER, YOU’RE MAKING IT MURDER TO GET THROUGH TO YOU.

He tried running, but all the movement was inside his skin; none of it got to the outside.

I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU PREFER THE COMPANY OF THESE DISGUSTING PERVERTS. LOOK, I LOVE YOU, THAT’S THE LONG, THE SHORT AND THE COLOR OF IT, ROGER. WHAT SA Y?

His metal little finger was singing the bell song from Lakmé and he hated it. His chest spiral was bubbling and he had the immediate fear his shirt would catch fire. All the women in the room were frozen in place, their hair vibrating like cilia, each strand standing up and away individually, emitting purple sparks like St. Elmo’s fire. The men looked like X-rays of rickets cases.

“Who are you?” Roger said in a choked voice.

I THOUGHT YOU’D NEVER ASK. I’M THE RIGHT WOMAN FOR YOU. GOD KNOWS YOU’VE HAD A CRUMMY TIME OF IT, AND I’M SENT TO MAKE IT EASIER FOR YOU. IT’S THE REAL LOVE YOU’VE BEEN WAITING FOR, ROGER.

“Where are you?”

RIGHT HERE. IN THE LIGHTS.

“I’m going to be sick.”

RIGHT HERE, COME ON, ROGER, JUST FIRM UP NOW!

“Haven’t I suffered enough already?”

ROGER, SELF-PITY JUST WON’T GET IT. IT’S TRUE YOU’VE SUFFERED, AND THAT’S WHY YOU WIN THE LOTTERY OF LOVE WITH ME, BUT YOU’VE GOT TO STOP BEING MAUDLIN ABOUT IT.

“Not only am I a put-together thing, a righteous freak, but now I’m going completely insane. “

ROGER, WILL YOU HAVE A LITTLE TRUST, FOR GOD’S SAKE? I’M PART OF THE REPAYMENT FOR WHAT’S HAPPENED TO YOU. ALL IT TAKES IS BELIEF AND A COUPLE OF STEPS.

He felt his right hand groping in the empty air around his right side—while his left hand sang “Pace, Pace, Mio Dio,” from La Forza del Destino—and he came up with an aquamarine Italian marble egg.

“Listen, I think you’re terrific,” Roger said, playing for time.

YOU’RE PLAYING FOR TIME.

She’s on to me, Roger thought desperately. He flung the Italian marble egg at the neon wall sculptures, it struck, geysers of sparks erupted, a curtain caught fire, a woman’s dress went up in a puff of Gucci, people began shrieking, the ultraviolet dissipated in an instant, everything returned to normal, Roger was scared out of his mind…and he ran out of there as fast as he could.

His finger had grown hoarse, and finally shut up.

Roger called in sick and begged off work for a few days. They were understanding, but the big Labor Day weekend was coming up, they’d laid in a large stock of Sicilian switchblades and copies of the steamier works of Akbar del Piombo and Anonymous in the Travelers’ Companion series, and they expected him—neon coil, weird eye and metal finger included—on the ready line when the marks, kadodies and reubens fresh from Michigan’s Ionia State Fair descended on sinful Times Square. Roger mumbled various okays and went for extended walks along the night-hot Hudson River Drive.

The big Spry sign blinking across the Hudson from Jersey caught his eye.

YOU ARE THE DAMNEDEST, MOST OBSTINATE HUMAN BEING I HAVE EVER ENCOUNTERED, said the Spry sign, forming words it was clearly incapable of forming.

Roger began running…blindly along the breakwater. The sign gave him no peace. It continued jabbering at him. ROGER! FOR CRINE OUT LOUD, ROGER, WILL YOU STOP JUST A MOMENT AND LISTEN TO ME!

He ran up West 114th Street, stumbling over a gentleman of the evening who was lying half in, half out of the doorway of an apartment building. Roger excused himself and would have waited for a response to make sure he had not damaged the fellow, but the man had somehow gotten his tongue stuck deep inside the neck of an empty Boone’s Farm Apple Wine bottle, and speech was beyond him.

Roger grabbed an IRT express downtown, and sitting in the clattering hell of the subway car he tried to ignore the overhead fluorescents that babbled I’M TRYING TO SAVE YOUR SOUL, YOU CLOWN. I’M IN LOVE WITH YOU. ARE YOU BEING ASSAULTED BY LOVE EVERY DA Y SO MUCH YOU CAN TURN DOWN A TERRIFIC OFFER LIKE THIS?

Roger closed his eyes. It didn’t help. His chest coil was obviously activated and it was pulsing in time with the overheads. He opened his eyes and with a sudden weariness that had swept over him like a sea of sand he opened his mouth and gave a primal scream. No one in the subway car noticed.

He got out on Times Square and, of course, she was everywhere. In the signs of the sea food restaurant on the other side of 42nd Street, in the marquees of the skin flick theaters, in the neon of the pornobook shops, in every flashing, bubbling, flickering, hallucinating light that made up the visual pollution by which Times Square proclaimed its wares and snagged its victims.

“Okay!” he howled, standing in the middle of the sidewalk as the mobs split around him. “Okay! I quit! I’ve had enough! I give up! Name it, just name it, I’ll do it! I’ve had the course! I’m only human and I’ve had it!”

TERRIFIC! AT LONG LAST! said the neon come-ons. THERE’S A LADDER OVER THERE BY THAT MOVIE, SEE IT?

Roger looked and, yes, there was a twenty-foot ladder up under the marquee of a movie house playing a double bill comprising Leather Lovers and Rebecca of Sinnybrook Farm. “Now what?” Roger said, softly.

I CAN’T HEAR YOU, the neon replied.

“I said: What the hell now, you goddam pain in the ass!” he screamed, at the highest decibel count he had ever achieved, his throat going raw. People shied away.

CLIMB UP THE LADDER, YOU SWEET THING.

“Oh, God,” Roger mumbled, “this is just terrible; just terrible. I hate this a lot. “

But he climbed the ladder, just as the assistant manager of the theater—a zit-laden young man in a soiled tuxedo and argyle socks—emerged from the lobby carrying the heavy boxes of marquee letters to change the bill. “Hey! Hey, you! Weirdo, what the gahdam flop hell you think you’re doin’? Get offa there you freako-pervo-devo!”

Roger went up and up, and when he was standing at the top he was on a level with the neon theater name. It said, very suddenly, TAKE ME! TAKE ME NOW!

And for no particular reason Roger could name, he reached out with both hands, swung himself onto the marquee, and—ripping open his shirt so his coil was exposed—he slammed himself against the love-message.

There was a blinding flash of light that pulsed and continued flashing like endless novae, over and over and over resembling—said a narcotics squad cop who had worked on the ski patrol at Stowe, Vermont—who happened to be emerging from the theater handcuffed to two Queens junkies he’d caught scoring in the highest row of the balcony—resembling nothing so much as the sunlight glass flashing off the thin crust of ice-over-powder at the summit of a snow-covered mountain.

Someone else said it was the exact color of tuna fish salad.

But when the light faded, Roger Chama was gone, all save the little finger of his left hand, lying on the sidewalk humming a medley of tunes from The Student Prince, Blossom Time and The Desert Song, a very peculiar eyeball that seemed to have developed a terrible case of glaucoma, and a dollar and thirty-five cents in change.

Someone else said it was the exact color of the cardboard they used to reinforce his shirts when they came from the Chinese hand laundry.

And one thing more.

Every neon sign in Times Square had a new color added to its spectrum. It seemed to reside somewhere between silver and orange, bled off into the ultraviolet and the infrared at one and the same time, had tinges of vermilion at the top and jade at the bottom, and resembled no other color ever seen by human eyes. The color sounded like a Louisville Slugger connecting solidly with a hardball in that special certain way that produces a line drive high into the right center bleachers. It smelled like a forest of silver pines just after the rain, with scents of camomile, juniper, melissa and mountain gentian thrown in. It felt like the flesh of a three-week-old baby’s instep. It tasted like lithograph ink, but there are people who like the taste of lithograph ink.

Someone said it was the exact color of caring.

On another plane of existence, where things were vastly different from those in the world that had given Roger Charna his neon chest spiral, observations were made and the new color was seen.

“There it is,” they said.

“Yep, there it is,” they said.

“Took them long enough,” they said.

“Well, now that they’re ready we can go and show them how to do it,” they said.

“They’re going to like this,” they said.

“A lot,” they said.

And they set out immediately, and it took no time at all to get there, and when they arrived they changed everything and everyone enjoyed it a lot.

And everyone said the angels were the exact color of charna, which wasn’t a bad name for it at all.