Zodiac

13

WHEN I GOT HOME I washed my foot again, applied vodka (a particular brand that I keep around strictly as an organic solvent) and rebandaged. My dreams were hallucinatory nightmares about fleeing from oversized, heavily perfumed PR flacks with chrome revolvers. I got up three times during the night to vomit, and when my alarm went off I couldn't move my arm to hit the snooze button because all my joints had gone stiff. My vision was blurry and I had a 104° fever. My muscles and joints were all welded into a burning, smoking mass. I lay there and moaned "two hundred pounds of tainted meat" until Bart came in and brought me a Hefty. When I took enough nitrous to get to the bathroom and finish up with the vomiting and diarrhea, I looked in the mirror and found that my tongue was carpeted with whitish-brown fuzz.

Bart drove me to the big hospital downtown to see Dr. J., my old college roommate. He'd gotten his M.D. on the six-year shake-and-bake program, done an Ivy League residency, and now he worked ERs. Not very prestigious, but the pay is steady. A fine way to subsidize other life projects.

When I explained how I'd cut my foot, he looked at me as though I had just taken both barrels from a twelve-gauge.

"There's some very serious stuff out there in the Harbor, man. I'm not kidding. All those decay organisms? They work on your body too, S.T.," he said, shooting me up with some kind of stupendous antibiotic cocktail. He gave me more of the same in pill form, but in the end I was to take only about half the bottle. Whatever those antibiotics were, they just blew the shit out of whatever, was in my system. That included the natural bacteria in my colon, the E. cob, so I had continuing diarrhea. Life is too short to spend on a toilet, wondering if there's more, so I stopped taking the pills and let my own defenses handle the mop-up work. And yes, I got a tetanus shot.

"I ran into some people you'd like," I told Bart as he drove me home. "Poyzen Boyzen fans."

He sniffed the air and frowned slightly. Bartholomew was a sommelier of heavy metal. "Yeah. Not bad for a two-umlaut band. First album was so-so. Then they ran out of material- they write maybe two songs a year. Got into a black magic thing for their videos. Already passé."

"Isn't that the whole point of heavy metal?"

"Yeah. I'm the one who told you that," he reminded me. "Heavy metal will never leave you behind."

"Where are they from?"

"Long Island somewhere. Not the Brooklyn end." He looked at me. "Who were these dudes? How'd you know they were fans?"

"Instinct." I told him about the barge.

"Shitty bargainers," he said.

"What do you mean?"

"These people sold their souls to the Devil and all they got was a rusty old barge? I would've held out for something with a wet bar. Close to the T."

When we got home, he went to his racks of albums and tried to remember whether Poyzen Boyzen was filed under P or B. The answering machine was blinding, so I rewound it, listening to the message fast and backwards. And when you run it backwards, it's supposed to be gibberish. But this wasn't. It was a melody, a song with a strong beat that wascompressed into a tinny tik-tik-tik by the machine. And above that rhythm, a little high-pitched voice was babbling: "Satan is coming. Satan is coming."

When it rewound all the way, I played it forward. It was heavy-metal thrash. Bart came running in, amazed. "What the fuck?" he was saying. "That's on the machine?"

"Yeah."

"That's Poyzen Boyzen, man. Second album. It's called 'Hymn.'"

"Nice song."

They'd left the entire song for us. When it was over, there was about ten seconds of a woman screaming. And that was it.

It didn't sound like Debbie, really, but then I'd never heard Debbie scream. She wasn't the type. So I dialed her number and she answered the phone, sounding fine.

"I'd like to talk to you," she said, and I knew I was in trouble.

"You want to get together?" I said.

"If that's okay with you." Okay, so I was in trouble.

We had dinner at the Pearl. She let me twist for a long time before she got down to business.

"Are you still interested in seeing me?" she asked.

"Shit, of course I am. Jesus!"

She just fixed me with a big-eyed stare, penetratingly cute, yet one of keen intelligence.

"I'm sorry that I haven't been calling you enough," I said. "I realize that I don't call enough."

"How about if I just stopped calling you? Would that give you any more incentive?"

"Isn't that what you did?"

"Not like that, I didn't."

"You lost me, Debbie. Explain."

"I like you, S.T., arid I've tried, a few times, to reach out and get in touch with you. And now you're addicted to it."

"Howzat?" She was a speck on the horizon.

"We're getting into this shit now where you expect me to follow you around. To keep track of where you are, pick up the phone and call you, do the social organizing, set up our

dates. And then, when we're together, you give me this gruff shit."

"I do?"

"Yeah. You make me come on to you, and then you pretend you don't want it. I had to put up with that once or twice on the Canada trip and I'm never going to do it again. No way. You want something from me, call me up-you've got my fucking number-and ask for it."

After that, my eyes didn't blink for about half an hour. It reminded me a whole lot of being popped by that smart cop when Bart and I were having our boys' night out. You go around thinking you're cool, a veritable shadow in the night, and then you find out that someone's got your number.

Like the Poyzen Boyzen fans. A band of assholes I probably wouldn't even recognize in civilian dress.

"That reminds me of something," I said. "I'm being kind of threatened, kind of, by a bunch of Satan worshippers. I want you to look out."

"How the fuck..." she said, then got up and walked out of the restaurant.

I finished her five-spices chicken and doodled around with my nerd watch. After a major social fuck-up, it's good to have machinery to screw around with. I programmed the alarm to go off in ten days. When it did, I'd give her a call.

Between now and then I could drink a lot, meditate on my own unfitness to live, and get nice and shit-eatingly lonesome. And worry about the Poyzen Boyzen thing. When I got done wandering home slowly, I played the tape backwards again, listened to the backwards message, then erased it.

For cavemen, they were quick on their feet. Was I that easy to track down?

The thing of it was: nobody had my number. Six months ago I'd gotten another damn call at 3:00 A.M. from some GEE hanger-on who'd just landed at Logan and wanted to be picked up and given a free place to crash. That was enough of that, so I changed to an unlisted number and didn't tell anybody. Not even my employer. If GEE wanted to reach me, they had to get clever.

Which brought up another sore point. Usually they called

Debbie and got her to call me, and she had said a few things about not being a receptionist. Another relationship felony. Just another reason to get to drinking.

But I still didn't know how the crew from the island had tracked me down. Maybe one of them worked at the phone company or something. Maybe one of them knew someone who knew someone who knew Bart.

When my watch alarm went off, I called Debbie, and found out she was vacationing in Arizona for three weeks. So I set my alarm watch for three weeks later.

It went off around Labor Day, in the middle of the night. I was deep in a chemical factory in another state, nestled up against a fifty-five-gallon drum on a loading dock, doing a bag job for Cohen. Had to press the damn watch against my thigh to muffle the sound, unstrap the wristband, pry the back off with a screwdriver, and scramble the innards. That's the last digital watch I'll ever own.

Despite that, the job was a cakewalk. It was just like being a criminal, except it was all-pretend. If they caught you, you could just stand up and show them your warrant. They didn't.