While
Tremolo the Tale-Teller talked with the woman by the window, the usual nighttime
crowd trickled through Under Grounds. Five or six people, all carrying
instruments and chattering intently amongst themselves, filtered in from the
back entrance and started setting up on the slightly raised performance stage at
the room’s far end. Tremolo watched with some curiosity as a redheaded woman in
orange and white helped a fedora-clad fellow set up his drum set at the back.
The bass drum was the first to go up, a sort of caricatured smiling image of an
orange glowing from the center, blue-eyed with long lashes. Tremolo sighed.
He
turned heavily to the woman seated beside him, stroking his beard thoughtfully, while she sipped her coffee and drew on her reserves of silence. He waited a moment, then
asked, “So?”
She
smiled a little too quickly, tilting her head with an innocent air, “So?”
“So,
you keep telling Tremolo that you’ll tell him what the crying was all about,
but you never seem to do any actual
telling. This worries Tremolo a little bit.”
She
stared out the windowpane as an ambulance rushed passed with its siren running
on full, “Well, Tremolo, it’s just that I worry you’ll think it’s kind of
silly. It has to do with my eyes, you see, I think—”
“Excuse
me?” came a sudden, slightly gravelly voice from off to Tremolo’s left, “Do you
know if there’s a pay phone anywhere near here?”
“A pay
phone? Tremolo hasn’t seen one in years!” Tremolo answered with an acerbic
laugh while turning to face the sudden intruder.
She was
a tallish woman, about sixty by the look of her, and wearing a ragged brown
trench coat that looked at least about two sizes too big. She wore thick
glasses that reflected the light and made it very difficult to make out her
eyes behind the lenses. Her stance, heavily favoring the right leg, was rather
crooked—a fact that rather prejudiced Tremolo in her favor.
“I
think there’s a pay phone over at the hospital,” said the woman at Tremolo’s right,
setting her coffee beside a few pamphlets, “It’s just a few blocks down the
road.”
At the
center of the room, speaking unnecessarily loudly to a young woman in blue, a
kid with a sissy haircut broke into pontificating, “Well, I can’t help but see
that as another point of similarity. This country has no shortage of cynicism if
you know where to—”
“Look,”
said the old woman, “I can’t go to the hospital. They won’t even let me into
the hospital. I’ve been to every hospital in town, looking for treatment. For
my leg, you see. I have to talk to my sister in Omaha, she’s the only one who
can help me, I haven’t seen her for years but I just know she’s the only one who can help me.”
“Why
won’t they treat you?” Tremolo asked.
“Because
they’re in on it,” she answered placidly, and Tremolo wished ardently that he
could get a clear view of her eyes, “It’s part of a test they’re running, don’t
you see? A test they’re running on all of us. It might be the army that’s
running it, or the FBI, but all of us know about it, under the overpasses and
on the park benches at night, we talk about it. The hospitals are in on it, and
that’s why they won’t treat us. And they’re testing it on us first, we know, we
all know, because they know that even if we tell anybody nobody will—“
“—believe
it? Let me give you an example, then: go to any decent-sized American
university and you’ll find at least one professor of a type I like to call the
Dissident in Residence. Noam Chomsky, over at MIT, is probably the most
well-known of the bunch, but you’ll find them anywhere you look. They call
themselves Critical Theorists, and ostensibly they’re out to critique the
existing system—”
“—methodical
about it. They’ll only get five or six of us at a time, and then wait and watch
for results. We’re not too sure what it is, because none of us have ever seen
them up close, only far away in the dead of night. We think it’s a ray that
shoots radioactive radiation, because the burns are consistent with what I’ve
read about radiation burns.”
She
fell silent and appeared rather embarrassed at the raised eyebrows and polite
smiles she was receiving from her two listeners. With a self-effacing smile and
almost thespian bow she continued, “You’d probably be surprised to hear that I
was a psychologist before I got into this situation. They drove me out of
practice, you see, out of house and home and everything, everything, away from my family, my children, my grandchildren. I
don’t know if I’ll ever see them again, do you understand me? I lost
everything, and now my leg’s slowly eating away at itself, all because I found
out the—”
“—terrible
pose, really, using rage against the existing order as a way of reinforcing it
and perfecting the existing power structure. Really, much more insidious than
standing before the crowds of the oppressed and telling them, ‘I am the good
shepherd,’ don’t you think? But then cynicism is so rampant these days I think
we all have the hardest time telling the difference between right and—”
“—left to
do but try to find my sister. I mean, it’s not my fault I found out… All I ever
wanted to do was find the truth, because I loved the truth. If only it hadn’t
turned out to be so… so unspeakable!
So that’s why I’ve just got to find a pay phone, that’s why I’ve got to get out
of here, away from this city. Before it’s too late. There’s got to be
somewhere, there’s just got to be
somewhere where it’s still possible to live a—”
“—human
life, you know? It’s just the nature of the beast. One thing lives only by
eating another thing, and that’s a terrible fact to face.”
“Couldn’t
you just use my cell phone?” asked the woman drinking her coffee on Tremolo’s
right, holding out her phone to the spectacled apparition.
The
woman in the trench coat visibly recoiled, “No, no, I can’t. They would know,
you see, they would know you helped
me. And I wouldn’t dare to drag anyone else into this, this horror.”
“Tremolo
is very sorry,” Tremolo said, though he didn’t sound sorry, “But he doesn’t
know where you could find a pay phone around here. Tremolo wishes you the best
of luck, though.”
The
woman in the trench coat trembled, her breath ragged and uneven. With a few
fidgety movements she placed her hands in her pockets, nodded solemnly, and
walked out the door.
Silence
fell more or less unanimously across the room. On the far side, the band
members appeared to be finished setting up, interrupting the quiet
intermittently with the pings and prickings of tuning their instruments.
Tremolo turned abruptly to face the dark-eyed lady beside him and said, “Tremolo
has found that you run into some of the oddest kooks at coffee shops, late at
night.”
She
nodded cautiously, said nothing. With distant eyes she sipped at her coffee.
Tremolo
the Tale-Teller opened his mouth and began, “So about the tree—”
Suddenly
the speakers burst to life and the whole room turned to face the stage at the
far end. “Ladies and gentlemen, thank you all for coming out to see us tonight,”
cooed the redhead, posing carelessly in orange and white, “We’re proud to
present: Citric Angel.”
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