Thrust Page 3

  "If you want to call it that, I'll go along. Be better with some Korean fingers working into your lower back, don't you think? Running deep into the hamstrings, with the incense rolling over you?"

  "I meant for sales."

  Timmy shrugged and gave the full wattage smile. "They were confused by you. They wanted to see if you had any answers on the page."

  "Jesus," Chase said, "now they'll really be flustered."

  "Maybe not. Your stuff is pretty accessible in your books. But the stage show? That's a little different."

  "Tonight anyway."

  "Yeah. So, you okay?"

  "I'm fine, Timmy."

  "You sure?"

  Chase looked at him. "You got a question you want to ask?"

  "No, not really. Well, maybe." Checking the bar to see if anybody needed a drink. "See, I watched your seams opening wide out there, like you were under a rib spreader."

  Damn, Chase thought. Nice image. He wanted to write it down.

  Timmy thumped his own chest for effect, the deep resounding thudding almost echoing in his muscles. "You just putting the crowd on?"

  "No."

  "It wasn't a gag?"

  Now they were at the point when Chase either lied, left it up in the air, or just kept repeating himself. He tried to put a glimmer of mischief in his eyes, make it seem like he knew what he was doing every second. He let his face glide into a grin. "I'm all right."

  "Ah, good, glad to hear it." With pursed lips, Timmy wagged his head. "Okay. Then. Let me give you a bit of advice. Don't play Shake. You aren't Shake and you shouldn't try to be. Do your own act."

  "Sure."

  "You know what I'm saying?"

  "Sure. They only want the words to absolve and redeem them."

  Chase still didn't know what the hell it meant, but it sounded like it should be profound, have some real significance.

  Timmy pulled a face as if he'd just been asked to perform some ungodly act on a lower life form. He hated cryptic shit like that too.

  The chatter ended and everybody except Jasper glanced over, waiting for the second act, some new kind of nuttiness. This was the crowd that didn't clap, the ones who threw a dare in the air. Who wanted to take him down because the words hurt too much, or not enough.

  The Proust guys crimped their faces and glared because Chase wasn't Proust and didn't want to be. He figured they'd hit the door in a minute, followed by Jasper, who idolized Chase in a strange fashion but was disappointed that he didn't wear tweed. Jasper's world was still soft. As a junior in college he was mixing up academia with the overwhelming grandeur of literature. It had happened to Chase too when he was twenty-one.

  Jasper's role at the Narrative Bone Palace was still hazy, but it would become clearer soon. Chase felt it as he watched the kid. There was something there. Sometimes you just know it. Jasper raised his glass in mock salute and stumbled into the Proust boys as they spun from their seats.

  The milieu shifted into one of delicate aggression.

  People always wanted to take you on because of what you'd written, or hadn't. The capacity to cause outrage kept Chase kind of high, and he didn't have to do a damn thing except—

  Well, except.

  It was true. They'd cut your carotid if you didn't cover enough ground. The puppies and mountains. The beauty of birth. Global warming and homosexual prejudice. Racism, fascism. The Holocaust. Viet Nam. If it wasn't sexy enough, if you didn't use the hammer words like cocksucker and cunt. If you didn't tell enough about yourself, if you gave them too much about your mama. You had to be ready for anything.

  He raised his eyebrows as his manner loosened and the heat began to flow. Timmy's teeth vanished. Chase moved a step closer, the rage where it was supposed to be. He knew the veins in his forehead were sticking out, like a shark's dorsal fin. It helped him slash through the nonsense and trash.

  The Proustians begged off, tossed a few bucks in front of their beer glasses and bee-lined for the street. Jasper wanted to say something more, maybe to Chase or maybe to one of the women, but couldn't quite get himself to do it. He looked like the towel boy at an orgy. He waggled his fingers goodnight and followed the boys out.

  Everybody had their talents. You locked into what you could do, no matter how unsound or unnecessary, and you did what you could to turn it into a strength. Package and sell it, condense it to diamond.

  The goth chicks stared at him wondering why he wasn't wearing a leather jacket in eighty degree weather, where his eye-liner was. They could smell death on him but couldn't figure out why he didn't have any tattoos of black roses or ravens.

  It happened like that from time to time.

  The muscles in Timmy's arms and neck rose as he tensed, in case he had to dive over the bar and get Chase in a full nelson. The fey girl was swishing her hips and taking a last pull of her drink. None of them had copies of his book on the bar.

  Chase made the effort to appear sheepish but it wasn't his strong suit anymore. He hoped he appeared disarming. He had seen photos of himself when he looked like a leering lunatic and couldn't recognize his own face. That sort of thing seemed to come and go.

  Timmy Wiggs took a chance and said, "Ladies, let me introduce you to the, ah, star of tonight's show. Grayson Chase."

  Oddly enough, there weren't any cheers or tears of joy.

  Nobody waved their hands about their face. No one offered a name. They said their hellos and stared at each other. He still hadn't met any of the founding members of the Grayson Chase Fan Club, and he'd been looking for years. It was starting to worry him.

  "You really don't have much talent," one of the leather-deather chicks told him.

  "You caught me," he said. "I've been waiting for somebody to finally nail my ass with the truth."

  "That game you played tonight, it didn't mean anything, now did it?"

  Asking for affirmation, as though he might hang his head and go, yup, ayup. He was fascinated by her black lips, outlined in brown pencil. The disgust twisting in her scowl, as if he represented everyone she'd ever hated.

  "It meant something," Chase said, letting the smile out inch by inch until it felt wrapped halfway around his head.

  "More than I could ever guess?" she asked.

  "You could guess if you cared to."

  "That's the point, isn't it? Getting strangers to care." Not so much mocking him as ignoring him even while she was watching him. He looked at the other girl and couldn't tell them apart. Twin week-old corpse babes, night of the living dead X-gens. He kept blinking as though they might refocus back into one person. It gave him the heebie jeebies.

  She turned her head and he heard the creaking of her leather bra beneath the black lace. "Sorry you hated the work."

  "I didn't. I love your poetry."

  They pulled this kind of reversal on him every once in a while. You had to go with it, wait it out. "Oh. Then thanks."

  "You just don't have a talent for performance art. That's not work, not the way you do it. Pretty stupid, really. Stay out of Shake's light. It takes a different kind of artist to hold a crowd in a barroom than it does to hold a reader to the page. You're the type that does better holed up in burning hot apartment, sweating your balls off, puking in your bathtub, then crawling back to write some more."

  She'd heard the stories about him, anyway, and those particular ones were true. She was interested enough to throw them back in his face.

  He said, "I don't drink anymore."

  "You should. It'll help keep you from cutting your own throat."

  He wanted to ask, yeah, but for how long?

  She turned away then, the two mirroring each other's gestures and expressions, proud of themselves. He wanted to explain that if they knew anything about death at all they wouldn't paint themselves black and white, dress up in satin, plastic, and gossamer tatters. You'd be naked, the color of flames, of pink water, of rotting back teeth, the color of your mother's colon cancer. Your father's brains on the carpet three weeks after he
was buried.

  You got up to the big edge and then you pranced around it, backed off, went on again. That's how you managed to get up in the morning, head to the job, answer the phone all day long.

  They all gave him the shoulder at the same instant. Sometimes it wasn't so easy. You'd be nose to nose with a gal who had that kind of attitude, and you'd either fall in love or they'd have to cart you off with handcuffs and a chain between your ankles.

  Again.

  The women went back to their conversations. Shake remained the star and they knew his poetry by heart, quoting lines out of context. Black urban child of the streets with four hundred years of slavery and pain in his veins, cries flowing from the very heart of the Congo itself.

  He'd lose most of his readership and all of his casual lovers if they ever found out his parents were cardiologists who summered in the Hamptons.

  "Isaac wants to talk to you," Timmy said. "I think he was a little, ah, unnerved by the proceedings tonight."

  "How about you?"

  Those teeth again, shining, as he prepared to let loose with canned laughter. "Oh, I held up all right."

  A half-dozen other slammers had gone on before him and Shake and several more were scheduled afterwards. Chase doubted that anyone really cared much about his antics. Other performers had done a lot worse on that stage. "Anybody ask for a refund?"

  "Not that I know of."

  "His nerves will steady up."

  The fey blonde blinked at him, beaming.

  A twinge of excitement went through Chase's belly, turned left and pulled like a screwhook. Dimples angled out at the flanks of her mouth. That nearly invisible down under her ears waved with his breath as he moved closer. Her cheeks had a rich pink gleam that somehow made him want her. She didn't appear to be much over eighteen and drank only raspberry juice. Her eyes changed color as he watched, caught staring: from blue to green and then back again.

  We all have our thing. Fey blondes with slightly erotic mouths painted with the gloss of berry juice was his.

  Timmy would never serve alcohol to anyone under twenty-one. He probably hadn't moved more than ten feet from her all night, checking, surveying. Timmy liked to keep close to the kids, knowing there were pervies like Chase in the crowd. It kept him busy.

  One of Chase's books hung halfway out of her handbag but she didn't ask him to sign it. So much for the natural next step. Now Chase had to wait, try to yank himself back, kick his interest down a gear. You had to watch every word you said. Every ounce of your blood and where it went.

  She swung around on the stool and gave him a dead-pan gaze—those eyes flashing green and blue, daring him to follow.

  "I'm Dawn Miller," she said.

  "Hello."

  There, he'd already run out of charm.

  "I want to ask you something. If you're not busy."

  "I'm not. I never am."

  This could be something right here. She maintained her intensity, not quite glaring but pretty close. A lot of first-timers had at the Palace, trying to be hip without appearing vulnerable.

  The verse started up at the back of his head, and he was about halfway through a love poem dedicated to her when she said, "Was it all a put-on?"

  "What's that?" He needed a little time to compose an answer. He still wasn't so sure himself.

  "When you were up there. I thought you were really coming unstrung, but now you're sturdy, controlled." She patted him softly on the belly, let her hand rest there. Arlo Barrack used to do the same thing before trying to drown Chase. Same as Jez before making love in the tub.

  "I am a performance artist, after all," he told her. Sounding more than a tad stupid.

  He really had to work on making that big first impression, and not always letting it slide.

  "Sure," she said. "I realize that, but which is the honest you? You know, deep inside where it counts the most. At the bone. Under your heart."

  He liked the way she talked, and it was almost enough to loosen the clawing rage between his shoulders. You never knew what would take you out of action, or toss you right back in. A teenager named Dawn. Hey.

  He didn't know who he was under his heart. Maybe it was all there, his whole history, real and unreal, jammed in beneath the aorta. One day it would bloom and tear through his chest and it would all end on the floor with a massive coronary. Dying, staring up at Shake's face, the audience applauding.

  Or maybe nothing about who he'd been and was now played any real part in who he was supposed to be. It didn't feel like that, most of the time. As if this was just a stop along the way until he could figure out his next move.

  He kept trying to get back to where he'd once been, even though he'd hated it there too. Three years ago. Five. Twenty. But maybe the beginning was still the place to start.

  So, be honest.

  He shrugged, cocked his head. It was his father's mannerism, the I totally give up sign.

  "Beats the hell out of me, Dawn," he said. "If I knew, I suppose I wouldn't need to put it on the page. Thrashing it out is the only way I can think of working through it."

  "Through what?"

  Her lovely eyes zapping him now, giving him little shocks, throwing green and blue sparks. What do you say? You couldn't sound hip anymore talking about the human condition, the state of mankind. "All my hallucinations."

  "Yeah?"

  "I'm schizophrenic."

  "Oh," she went. "Cool."

  Goth Chick #1 who knew he had no talent had been listening in. She turned on him, standing out in great contrast to Dawn—the black lips moving in, eye-shadow like Egyptian kohl, dyed hair in tight ebony knots. The forces of light and darkness clashing right in front of him.

  "The hell does that mean? You got other people living inside you? Fourteen different versions of yourself?"

  "No, see—"

  "You go on a rampage and kill somebody and you say Fred did it? You save a cat from a tree and it's because Cindy made you? You a transvestite too?"

  One of his symptoms was that he couldn't answer in the short form. He had to run the whole thing out. Every time. Always the same. Jez had given it to him the first week in the hospital, and now it was another trigger.

  He pulled it and the bullet came out the same way each time. "It's a disease of the mind characterized by a constellation of distinctive and often predictable symptoms. Those most commonly associated with the disease are called positive symptoms. These include thought disorder, delusions, and hallucinations."

  Now he had to pause and wait for the question he'd originally asked Jez, and it had to be played out the same way.

  Dawn said, "What's…?"

  Okay, now he could go again. "Thought disorder is the diminished ability to think clearly and logically. Often it is manifested by disconnected and nonsensical language that renders the patient incapable of participating in conversation, contributing to his alienation from his family, friends, and society. An affected person may believe that he is being conspired against, called paranoid delusion."

  Even as he spoke aloud he could hear Jez's voice saying the words, the room going white as the walls of the ward. "'Broadcasting' describes a type of delusion in which the individual with this illness believes that his thoughts can be heard by others. Hallucinations can be heard, seen, or even felt. Usually they take the form of voices heard only by the afflicted person. Such voices may describe the person's actions, warn him of danger or tell him what to do."

  Thank Christ, he was coming to the end of it, rattling faster and faster, trying not to take another breath because it would throw off his entire rhythm. "At times the individual may hear several voices carrying on a conversation. Less obvious than the 'positive symptoms' but equally serious are the 'negative symptoms' that represent the absence of normal behavior. These include flat or blunted affect, such as a lack of emotional expression, apathy, and social withdrawal."

  "Who were you just then?" the goth girl asked. "Fred or Cindy?"

  "A woman named
Jez."

  Dawn chuckled and the leather-deather spun away with a grimace. "Okay, you're coming into focus some. You're in touch with your feminine side. No wonder you write so well."

  "Not quite," he told her. "Jez is dead."

  "Well then," she said. "That must be good for your art too, right?" Her eyes calling to him. Telling him things.

  4

  Dawn still didn't draw out his book, just staring at him with a passionate but distant gaze. If she hung around long enough, she'd ask about his illness again, get totally freaked when he gave the same recitation, pausing in the same places.

  He kept looking at his book there, wedged in tight, the binding bent, corners starting to dog-ear. It had been a long time since he'd really cared about something like that—about the poetry, the need for contact with the reader—and it was such an unfamiliar feeling that his fingers grew itchy.

  He could tell she had a taste for the place already. The action of the club, the energy of the spoken word, and the dance of fools. It called to her. She probably had fifty notebooks at home filled with verse scribbled during study hall. She held Plath and Baudelaire close and wouldn't understand Eliot's "Prufrock" for another twenty years or so, when her beauty started to fade.

  The other ladies began discussing Shake and his charisma but Dawn kept after him. "So it's not an act like the rest of them. You've got reasons for writing the things you do. All that anger and weirdness. Talking about your mother and father, the friends you've lost. Jail." There, finally coming out and saying it. "It's always moody, sometimes a little ambiguous or baffling, but usually worth the effort."

  "You sound a lot older than you look."

  Those eyes flashing back and forth, blue and green and blue. "I'm almost twenty."

  "You've still got a while to go before the buzzards start circling."

  "Can I buy you a drink?"

  "No thanks."

  "That's right, you don't drink anymore. You write about that too."

  "I have to see the boss and find out if I still have a job."

  Timmy gave her another glass of raspberry juice and pointed to Isaac's office. "He's still here, Gray. Go clear the air if you can."