Tuesday nights at Folk City were always slow, unless someone with a bigger name than Andrea Bentham was playing. Andrea had enough of an in-group following among Village freaks to draw full houses on weekends, but she had yet to cut her first record, which made it unlikely that people would come streaming in from the suburbs-or even down from East 72nd Street-to hear her. On this particular Tuesday the crowd consisted of three sailors who had surely gone astray on their way to a topless go-go bar up the street, two leftover Fifties hippies named Raoul and Harvey who showed up every night to decorate their beards with beer-foam in hopes of hearing the next Bob Dylan before he was discovered by the Philistine's, and three painfully clean-cut college sophomore types with their equally clean-cut dates who Andrea pegged as refugees from Rutgers in the city for a big night with a little money. Halfway through the first set a pair of attractive but besotted middle-aged ladies stuck their heads in the door, started to turn away, were promptly goosed from the sidewalk by a grinning old wino, and fell all over themselves lurching inside. The wino lingered on the sidewalk leering at them through the window and they ordered drinks. Andrea did a few old Joan Baez-Judy Collins songs and they stayed, maybe because they were too drunk to move. The songs were so familiar that Andrea did them well enough without thinking. She spent most of the time wondering how long she'd be stuck singing worn-out songs to limpid audiences and exactly what weird things were going on in her head to make her ask such questions.
Just before the end of the set Sean walked in. When she was done Andrea joined him at a table.
"Jesus," he gasped with an exhausted look, "I killed twenty-seven people tonight. That's got to be a record."
"Ah, bullshit. I bet lots of writers kill fifty or sixty every morning before breakfast."
"Yeah, but they blow them up or gas them or mow them down with machine guns. I mean, with this hand-to-hand stuff, you really have to work for every corpse. Knife Slashes to Adams Apples… Elephant Kicks to groins… Monkey Blows to chins… I tell you, it isn't easy. I'm beat. I've got to get off this Kung Fu shit. Eagle Beaks to eyeballs… Christ. I'm going back to fuck books."
"Not a bad idea. Why don't you do one about me?"
"Don't think I haven't thought of it. I bet I could whip it out pretty fast… "
"Not here, if you don't mind."
"Don't they have a back room?"
"Yeah, sure, but I'm hungry. I've got to get some supper before the next set."
"Right. I remember. We're going to some Chinese place. What's it called?"
"The Little Chink in the Great Wall."
"Oh come on… give me a break."
"No, really. You'll see. Come on. It's just around the block on Bleecker."
The restaurant was named in honor of a mural covering one wall which depicted nothing other than a huge cunt between masses of white-wash flesh. Right in its center was a hole about the size of a quarter and into it a two-foot-high statue of an aging Chinaman in long robes was sticking his erect member.
"See? The Little Chink in the Great Wall."
"Momma. Reminds me of the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dike. Or was it dyke?"
The restaurant was almost empty. As they sat down the door from the kitchen swung open and a Chinese of about twenty in a tight white coat shuffled toward them with an artificially inscrutable grin plastered to his face. He bowed low and presented them with menus. He spoke with exaggerated gravity. "Onolable guests most welcome in humble establishment of Joe Lee."
"Oh, cut it out, Joe," Andrea giggled.
"Oh, yes m'am, yes m'am," Joe said, and picked up a knife from their table. He pointed it at his crotch. "Onolable madam want whole thing, balls and all, or just tenderloin? You my best customa! Eat almost every night at Little Chink. I be happy to cut it out for you. You want it flied, boiled, bloiled, or baked?"
"Fuck you… I'll take it raw!"
"Oh… so solly… that against state law."
"Well then we'll just have to look at the menu."
"Very vine. Velly vine."
"And by the way, your Chinese accent shits."
Joe dropped the knife back onto the table and shook his head. "Can I help it if I was born in Brooklyn and raised by Ukranians?" He sat down for a few minutes and shot the shit with them while they ordered. Half an hour later Sean and Andrea were musing about the status of life and the universe over tea and fortune cookies.
"These damned things are always so stupid," Andrea said as she cracked open a cookie and removed the tiny slip of paper from it. "They always hit you with some ridiculous platitude in pigdin English. You know, somebody could really have fun… "
She opened up the slim strip of paper and read it. An expression of vague interest crossed her face and she turned it over and read something on the other side. She turned it back and read the first side and frowned. She turned it again. "Weird." She handed it to Sean.
"Let's see. It says, 'Statement on other side of this paper indubitably false.'" He turned it over. "'Statement on other side of this paper indubitably false.'" He thought for a second. "Well, they're both false, right? I mean, nothing's indubitably false. Or is it?"
"If they're both fake then they're both true too."
"So they're both true and false. Only at different times. They sort of take turns. Or are they both false and true at the same time?"
"What's false and true at the same time? Think about it. Can it be true and false at the same time that I'm a woman, or that two and two are four?"
"Sounds sort of fishy." Sean thought some more. "Well… they're neither true nor false. That's the answer. They don't say anything."
"They look like they say something to me. What do you mean? They don't mean anything? They're not language? Hell, they're sentences, aren't they? Statements? I mean, they even say they're statements."
"Yeah, but their saying so doesn't make it so."
"Right. In which case they're saying that they are statements and they're lying there. Which makes them both false. And therefore both true. Get it?"
"No."
"Neither do I. I'm confused to shit."
"Let's see what's in mine." Sean cracked open his cookie and fished the strip of paper out. "It says, The Nothing Nothings. Isn't That Something? Momma! Somebody's gone bazooney in the fortune cookie factory!"
Andrea stopped him. "Hey, I remember that from someplace. The Nothing Nothings." She turned and called to the kitchen. "Hey Joe, get your buns out here for a second! What're you doing, playing with our heads?"
Joe sauntered out. "What's up?"
"These fortune cookies. As if you didn't know."
"They say you're going to marry an Irish guy with a beard or that you must be a singer or something, right? People always call me out when things like this…"
"No. Take a look." Andrea smiled blandly at him as though she knew he wouldn't be able to keep a straight face. Then she remembered about the saying she'd heard before. "The Nothing Nothings," she said reflectively. "That sounds familiar."
Joe's eyebrows went up as he read the fortunes. "Yeah. The Nothing Nothings. Martin Heidegger." He mused and stroked his chin. "Pretty fucking high-powered fortune cookie. This is really bizarre. I've never seen a fortune like this before." If he was acting he was doing a fantastic job of it. "And I know the guy who makes these cookies. He gets the fortunes printed on big sheets from Hong Kong. They've been the same doggerel crap for years. Nobody over there's ever heard of Heidegger."
Sean eyed Joe suspiciously. "How the hell do you know that's Heidegger?"
Joe grinned. "I only look like a dumb cook. I'm writing my dissertation for a PhD. in philosophy at NYU"
Sean's jaw dropped.
Joe turned to Andrea. "This other one… it's a version of the liar Paradox. In fact it's the version Bertrand Russell gives in his autobiography. The original was cooked up by Epimenides the Cretan who said all Cretans were liars. You get the same thing if you just say, 'I'm lying.' You are if you aren't playing around with antinomies like this for more than two thousand years."
"Antino who's" Sean asked.
"Antinomies. Irreconcilable contradictions. Recently they've come up in connection with set theory. Recently like around the turn of the century." Sean seemed interested and Joe went on. "The idea of a set is basic to mathematics. It seems like a perfectly clear idea. It's just the idea of a group or a collection-like a flock of birds or a bunch of bananas. The trouble is that some sets are members of themselves. Like the word "noun" is a noun, the idea of an idea is an idea, the set of all sets that have more than ten members has more than ten sets as members. It's like a bunch of bananas being another banana. But some sets are like this-members of themselves-and some aren't. So you gather up all the ones that aren't-and that's going to be a lot, because the set of all men isn't a man, and so on-and call that a set, which according to the first rules of set theory you were allowed to do. So then you ask whether this set is a member of itself. Turns out that it is if it isn't and it isn't if it is."
"Whew!" Sean gasped, wiping his hand across his brow. "I don't know if I… "
"Yeah; when Bertie Russell wrote a letter to a guy who had just invented mathematical logic and told him that by the rules he was playing with he'd run into this problem and that meant his most basic idea was nonsense it shocked the guy more than it shocks you. But what I'm wondering is how the hell this and that other one got into a fortune cookie. I'm going to get the box and see what other goodies it has."
"Come on, Joe," Andrea coaxed as he went for the kitchen, "You had your fun, but let's not get carried away."
He turned back to her. "I'm telling you, I didn't do it. What did I do? I steamed the cookies open, right?" He disappeared and emerged in a second with a huge box of cookies. "I picked those two cookies at random out of this box myself. Maybe the guy started getting his fortunes from some hippie freak-how do I know?" He sat the box down on the table and started breaking cookies open.
"Bird in hand worth two in bush."
"Husband: he who always get next to last word."
"Penny saved, penny earned."
And so on through three dozen cookies.
"Isn't that a bitch? The same old crap." He could see Sean and Andrea were still suspicious. "Look, do you think I'd waste all these damned cookies on a silly goof like that?" He laughed. "Hell, I don't care if you believe me or not. But I guess it's better that the rest are the same old shit. If people started getting cookies that confused them they'd start going to some other restaurant. Who the hell wants to drink their tea and wonder about The Nothing Nothings. Isn't That Something? Honest to god… I'd never sell another spare rib."
Andrea glanced at the clock on the wall. Time for me to get back."
As they strolled quickly back to the bar through the crowded Village Streets, dodging pan-handlers and stepping over an occasional nodding junkie or wiped-out wino, Andrea badgered Sean about the cookies. "Listen," she insisted, "that's just too bizarre to be true. I mean, weird things have been happening lately. They've been really nice, but sort of spooky at the same time. Like me greeting you in the nude for our first date singing Rock of Ages. I still don't have any idea what made me do that. And then… " She was tempted to mention the episode with the storm but decided Sean would probably laugh it off. "Well anyhow, I just have this funny feeling about those cookies. 'Statement on other side of this paper indubitably false.' And then the same thing on the other side. That makes as little sense as you and I getting those two heavy cookies in the first place."
They reached Folk City and Sean opened the door for her. "I think you had it right in the first place. It's just Joe fucking around."
"Maybe. But my instinct says no. If he really did it and then acted the way he did, he's suddenly gone weird. I mean, I've known him for a while. Either way, something's weird."
"Maybe the world is lying."
Andrea laughed and picked her way to the stage through a crowd that had filled out considerably. That was normal for the ten o'clock show. It was just as well, because having an audience to sing to might level out her head a little bit.
An audience? An audience of who? Everyone and no one?
She'd written out the songs she wanted to do for the second set and dropped the list into her guitar case but now she couldn't find it. That panicked her a little because sometimes when she went onstage without a list she blanked out and couldn't remember a single song she knew. But the audience was restless and suddenly she found the chorus to a song running around in her head…
Ripple in still waters Where there is no pebble tossed Or wind to blow
She knew it was the damned fortune cookies that had done it to her. She'd never done "Ripple"-not once. She knew the words but she didn't know the chords. She'd have to fake them; work them out as she went through. And she was supposed to use a flat pick or finger picks?
Suddenly she saw the whole chord-pattern laid out in her head. GCG… etc. The finger-picks put themselves onto her fingers and she turned to the microphone, tested the volume, and set off on an intro.
The audience was charmed.
They were more charmed when she'd finished.
She didn't know what she was supposed to do next but she found herself doing "The Circle Game" for the first time in four years. Her voice was clear and strong and haunting. It danced from note to note like a carefree child jumping from rock to rock across a stream.
As the next song came to her she realized that she felt more stoned than she'd ever been on dope. She'd always been a meticulous performer. She'd never done a song in public that she hadn't done at least fifty times to her own satisfaction at home. And now-the name of the song hit her like a safe dropped from a ten-story building-she was going to do 'Into The Mystic,' a Van Morrison creation that she'd heard exactly once while stoned on mescaline.
"We were born before the wind
"Also younger than the sun… "
Her voice filled the room with an eerie, erotic, lyre-like sound.
"As we sailed into the mystic… "
Her fingers tripped over the guitar strings in elegant and intricate patterns. She felt the vibrations in the guitar's sound-box penetrating her stomach and harmonizing with those sent through her body by her voice. She felt the images stirred up by the song harmonizing with the music, as though the music produced the sound-track one would hear in the world of the song's story;
"Hark now, hear the sailor's cry Touch the sea and feel the sky Let your soul and spirits fly Into the mystic… "
There was no doubt about it. This was the best she'd ever sung. She was like a new singer. She could feel it in the reverent silence of the audience. It was…
The door burst open and Andrea could have sworn a dozen voices joined her for the last chorus. She could have sworn she heard it because she did hear it.
"I want to rock your gypsie soul Just like way back in the days of old And together we will fold Into the mystic!"
Cymbals clanged and tambourines rattled and on the word "mystic" a siren-wail shook the rafters.
The singers were a procession that wound its way through the litter of chairs and tables and bodies.
The girlfriend of the of the Rutgers types fainted into her sloe gin fizz. Raoul and Harvey cracked their heads together in a gawking competition. People gaped and muttered and fell off bar stools. The middle-aged ladies stirred from their communal stupor and frowned in studied disbelief.
It was an orgy.
It was a sacrament.
It was ridiculous.
A gaggle of barely and oddly clad teeny-boppers careened and caroused in spirals toward the bandstand. There was one dripping with strings of animal fur-and nothing else-whose pendulous breasts flopped out and brushed against leopard and bearskin. There was one in a pair of coveralls that had been attacked with a paper-punch until she looked as if she was wearing a blue cloth colander. Her pubic hair stuck out of the holes in tufts. One monstrous redhead was made up like a clown. All in all the gyrating lovelies were dressed and painted to make the Hari Krishna chanters look like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
As they surged up and spread out in front of the bandstand Andrea, holding her guitar limply and staring in a dazed stupor, caught sight up two bare-chested wrestlers. They were carrying the front end of something. Something covered with a canopy of red silk. A sedan chair. And two more hulks had the back end. Behind them came two silent, ravishingly beautiful women dressed as haremites. One was oriental, the other black. They seemed to be presiding over the flight from rationality of the babbling teeny-boppers under their charge.
Andrea couldn't see past the bobbing of tanned limbs and the shaking of fringe, feathers, baubles, boobies and beads into the sedan chair. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Sean taking in a pair of coltish haunches that pranced into the corner of his eye-nearly taking off his nose. He shrugged his shoulders with the equanimity of a hardened New Yorker.
The girls burbled incomprehensively syllables and receded, allowing the wrestlers bearing the sedan-chair-which Andrea could now see was fully curtained-to bring it to within three feet of the bandstand and turn it sideways. Through a small rift in the curtain Andrea caught sight of a pair of pale, knobby knees against the background of gold cushions. There was a shifting and a crotch rather inadequately covered with a lavender loincloth jerked forward and then settled back. Whoever was inside was readjusting his position.
The wrestlers held the chair stiffly.
The knees inside shifted again.
From all over the bar people crowded around-some of them angry that the show had been interrupted, some fascinated, some insensed and indignant at the displays of indecency. But all of them were captivated by the act-many thought Andrea had planned it-and shussshed each other to catch any sounds that might come from beneath the curtain.
The silence was deafening.
And then, finally, the awaited-for pronouncement and clue and proverb and adverb came forth: "All right you dumb fuckers, put me down already!"
The apes obeyed sheepishly. Everyone guffawed and tittered and slapped the best thighs they could find. When the uproar quieted the voice took stern control:
"Okay! Let's get this landing over with! We're coming in at ten thousand feet bombed out of our minds in a heavy fog with no radar but the clarity of clairvoyance, right?"
"RIGHT!" the chorus responded.
"Now the first thing I do is call the control tower. Okay. Wait a second till I get the radio cranked up."
There was a guttural noise like static from under the canopy. A skinny flat-chested girl in a pink 36-D bra and a man's Speedo tank suit (green) stepped to the fore and, like a second-grader reciting a poem about her dog, chanted.
"Ra-di-o,
Ho Ho Ho,
Wa-vies come and Wa-vies Go… " six times, rolling her head around as though she had a ball-bearing in her neck.
"Hey! Control tower! Cheatahoutafishwiferakaho-medadough! National security business! Orders to secure a beachhead in the first lady's underwear! Acknowledge incoherence!"
The voice modulated to a good imitation of a tinny one coming from a faraway control tower via drunken radio waves. "Cheatahoutafishwiferakahomedadough! What the fuck are you doing around here? I thought I threw you out in 7-come-ll BC!"
"The eternal recurrence is a heterosexual obligation. I told you I'd be back. Got to pick up a singer for my cruise. Therefore the bold intrusion."
"Control tower to Cheatahoutafishwiferakahomeda-dough! Is that your name, for shitsake?"
Brief silence.
"Are we playing that the name is the key?"
"That rule is suspended."
"Good. Try Baalow Nee."
"You're in."
"Far out. I've been knocking for a long time. Listen-may I activate the electronic canopy removal mechanisms?"
"Go ahead, clamcake! You're the control tower now!"
Suddenly Andrea realized something that nearly made her piss in her pants, although if it had she wouldn't have known why. She understood all this. She didn't know how, but somehow she understood it.
There was a tiny electric hum. The canopy and curtains of the sedan chair started to recede. They folded into a compartment on the chair's far side like the top of a convertible. Their departure revealed, in order, a flat stomach above the still-lumpy loincloth; a somewhat sunken chest with a diffused patch of salt-and-pepper hair centered on the breastbone; the tip of a long wispy beard a few shades darker than the chest hair; shoulder-length tresses to match; a birdlike neck with prominent Adam's apple; and finally a perplexing face of indeterminate age dominated by a pair of pale sky-blue eyes that looked at once entirely voracious and totally pacific. Andrea could not decide whether the face was handsome or not. Random guesses at age ran through her head. The nose was a little hooked. Fifty-five? But the cheeks were soft and smooth and unlined. Forty-five? The hair and the beard… they concealed a lot but didn't tell much. Salt-and-pepper… if he'd started to go gray early he could be as young as… flirty-five?
Or maybe he was a hundred and seven.
Was he made up? He could easily be seventy…
The body had a kind of stubborn hardness under its dark tan that likewise made it hard to tell much about its age.
The intruder's lips were curved upward in a Cheshire Cat smile.
Andrea cocked her head, grinned uncertainly back, wondered whether someone had slipped LSD into her world, and waited.
"Well for Christ's sake… Buddha's… Confucius'… Joe the Barber's… whosoever you want… don't you recognize me?" The occupant of the chair was indignant. His voice squeaked like a rusty hinge in a high wind.
"Should I?"
The voice fell two octaves and intoned, "Should you? Should you? We met on the plains of Thermopylae after the Russian Whipped Cream Invasion. There were no cherries left on the Sundae when we were done. You fell into my arms hindmost in the Procreation Period. I know all about you. You recently earned a black belt in Ostentatious Eroticism."
"Motherfucker," Andrea gasped.
"That and that alone is true." The voice modulated again, this time to an easy cocktail-tone. "Anyhow, will you come?"
"Huh?" Andrea shook her head as though something had suddenly come loose inside it. Sean pushed his way through the crowd and joined her.
"Haven't you been listening to me?" the visitor wailed plaintively.
"All I've heard is a lot of noise." Andrea looked apprehensively at Sean.
"Dig it," he whispered, "this guy doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I mean, maybe he's off his nut. You think he might be dangerous?"
"Ha!" the man cried. "You may not believe I heard you, but I did! And I'll tell you! Making sense is what I do. For a living. I manufacture it!" He paused as though checking some mathematical computation. "That's wrong. Manufacturing implies mass production; interchangeable parts. Nowadays. But every bit of sense I make is original; unique! I create! Sense?" He looked up at them as though surely they would understand. When it was obvious they didn't he became long-suffering and patient. "It's just because it's original that you can't understand it. A new bit of sense… it's not that easy to grasp, you know. Don't blame yourself."
Sean scratched his ass, then his head, and Andrea, having nothing better to do, helped him.
"I've been on television," the visitor announced as though it would be helpful. "You should at least know me that way." There was a titter or two from the crowd that grew to a significant buzzing. "Don't you read the papers? Don't you read Playboy? December? 'The Guru Who Gets Off?' The one with the bunny blowing Santa Claus?"
Andrea grabbed Sean's arm excitedly. "Hooooo… it's coming through! This is that crazy guru! The one I told you about. Remember? The No Touch Shot?"
"Holy shit."
The Guru grimaced as though he'd bitten into a chocolate-covered dog-turd. "Ugh. The No Touch Shot. Crude Americanism. In the more esoteric circles of mysticism we call it Thinking Off."
Sean gagged.
Andrea's eyes opened wide.
"Anyhow, have you got the message yet?"
"What message?"
"Aha! You've got it!"
He turned and raised his arms like a choir director. "Okay. A-one and-a-two and-a-three-"
"The Round Square is Completely Bare The Circle Jerk can Wear No Clothes The Smelly Sock can Have No Nose And Where It Stops the Guru Shows!"
"That's for sure," Sean sighed as the chant ended.
The Guru was petulantly bewildered. "Don't you get the gist of my motherfucking invitation?"
"I'm afraid not," Andrea admitted. "What gist? What invitation."
"The gist that came out of the gist-mill! Boy, are you slow! Didn't you hear me tell the control tower why I'd come?"
"What?"
"Why I requested permission to land, dammit! If I may be granted the privilege of quoting myself, I said, 'Got to pick up a singer for my cruise.'"
"Oh yeah. I remember something like that."
"If you'd been smart that's all you would have remembered." His voice softened and went gushy. "The essence of profundity lies in sorting the meaningful from the meaningless. Separating the wheat from the chaff. It's all there-there's just too much of it. You know what I mean? Getting around the bullshit. That's what it comes down to."
He stopped abruptly and stroked his beard. He leapt off the chair, postured extravagantly, and whirled around. "I can see," he proclaimed to all and sundry, but most especially to the two ravishing chaperon figures who stood across the room near the door, "That the landing pattern dictated by the Cosmic Essence of the Unknowable and the Federal Aeronautics Assholiation for this girl-strip is not optimal. Bring the pinstripe suit. White carnation. Black oxfords. Hold the ox."
The black woman, her healthy hips swaying under a tinsel skirt, her Afro bobbing like a weather balloon, turned to a chest that had somehow found its way to her side, and the oriental leaned over it with her. In seconds the Guru was decked out in an immaculate pinstripe suit, starched shirt (ruffled), bow tie, bowler hat, and black oxfords with spats. "Bring the cane!" he cried. "You know I can't do this bit without a cane!" A Bat Masterson cane poked out of the crowd. He grabbed it, rapped it smartly on the floor nine times, turned to Andrea, and bowed. "Do I not seem to be the essence of the solicitor? Don't answer that. I am the Guru Baalow Nee. Pronounced Baylow Nay. Spelled B-a-a-l-o-w-N-e-e." He halted reflectively. "You will notice the subtleties in its pronunciation. It is necessary to roll the tongue on the "buh" sound… " His voice trailed off, then came back decisively. "It is subtle of pronunciation because its roots lie in a conglomeration of languages saturated with religious mysticism. Incidentally, I am the only one who can pronounce it correctly. If you could pronounce it correctly you would have true enlightenment. But of course this is true of any name. If you could pronounce your own name correctly you would have true enlightenment." He looked up at Andrea with the expression of a puppy-dog who is certain that this time he has pleased his master, but all she could do was return a frank admission of confusion.
"I can see you are not getting the point." He folded his arms in a dignified manner. "Let me summarize what I just said. My private cruise ship, the True Enlightenment, leaves tomorrow at eight o'clock in the morning with a full booking of 982 passengers for a three-week Caribbean cruise. An hour ago I learned that Lawrence Welk had cancelled his contract to provide the entertainment because the hot air might adversely effect his champagne bubbles. Or maybe it was his adenoids. If he has any. Whatever they are. Anyhow, since I'd met you before under… shall we say, intimate?… circumstances, I thought I'd drop by and offer you an irresistible $3,000 to replace Welk and his goofers as the resident entertainment. All expenses paid. Eight Now. Three weeks. Good summary? So, as I said before, will you come?"
"Huh?" Andrea's brow furrowed with perplexity.
Sean sidled over to her. "You know, your brow's furrowed with perplexity."
"Listen," the Guru said indulgently, "I didn't expect you to take a freak show like this on faith." He clapped his hands. One of the wrestlers hurried to his side. "Oh for Christ's sake. Et Cetera. I told you that when I clapped that meant to bring the money!" He turned apologetically to Sean and Andrea. "Sorry. This is only a dress rehearsal. Of course there's never any real show… "
The ape lumbered off and returned with a pair of saddle-bags draped over his arm like a towel. The Guru took them, smelled the leather, commented on the demise of its vivacious fecundity, and then opened them up. He fished out a sheaf of bills. "$3,000. In hundreds. Cash. As real as any money. You could turn it into francs, pounds, deutschmarks, yen… back and forth around in a circle. Not counterfeit. Except in so far as it's money, which is counterfeit for happiness." He sneezed. "I've got to get rid of that line. It's trite. Juvenalia. Anyhow, to make a long story short, that's what I'll pay you if you pack up and make it down to Pier 52 before eight-thirty in the morning."
Andrea swayed uncertainly. "What… what do you mean, we've met before under intimate circumstances?"
"The plains of Thermopylae?"
"Huh? Oh yeah. Bullshit."
"Except for one thing I forgot to mention. It was raining. Very hard. Just like earlier tonight." Andrea's head spun. The storm. The feeling there was someone, something, somewhere, watching her… with her… And then the fortune cookies. Rock of Ages. Everything. She stared at him for a long moment but his vibrant blue eyes revealed nothing but blank innocence-as though all he'd done was make a business offer and wait for a response. Finally she leaned forward and whispered, "The Nothing Nothings. Isn't That Something?"
The Guru giggled as though taking pleasure once more in an old, old joke. "I doubt it. At least, nothing like a hot dog. But I'd relish your company."
Sean hopped down from the stage to examine the sheaf of money at close range. He'd never seen so much money before. He wasn't sure he remembered what a hundred dollar bill was supposed to look like. Was it really Franklin's picture that was supposed to be on it? It looked awfully good. He turned to the Guru. "Is this on the level? $3,000 for a three-week cruise?"
"I can't promise it'll all be on the level. Ships roll, you know, despite gyroscopic stabilizers, and I have minimal influence with tropical storms. But if you think the bread's going to go poof, why don't you take your peter out of the oven?"
"Yeah. Sure. Do you always talk in riddles?"
"Never. That's the problem. Anyhow, make up her mind, if that's your job, because I've got an appointment with the Fairy Godmother of the Eternal Equinox in three and a half minutes. Got to figure out how to paint shuffle board courts on the rear smokestack."
"Naturally."
Sean leapt back up onto the bandstand and he and Andrea retreated into conference. "Look," he began, "this is the weirdest thing I've ever heard of… shit, life is flying off its hinges lately… but if this guy's really who he says he is… Baalow Nee?"
"It's him," Andrea assured him. "Now that I look closely I recognize him from his picture."
"Well shit then, he's got to be on the level. Some level. Because he's an established phenomenon. A going concern. He's got a reputation to protect. Something. Right? Anyhow, three grand isn't to be sneezed at."
"Yeah, but the whole idea tickles my nose."
Sean laughed. Andrea got more serious. "Look, do you think I ought to do it-whatever it is?"
"I'd really hate to see you split for three weeks just when we… well, I guess it's pretty obvious what we… but shit, why not?"
Andrea couldn't resist. A leap into the unpredictable. A fat hop into a zany zoo. There was no way she was going to let that Guru out of her sight until she got some questions answered. There had to be rational answers, but she wanted them. So it all boiled down to… what the fuck? But she'd only do it on one condition. She turned to Sean. "Will you go?"
"I wasn't invited."
"So-hell invite you or I won't go."
Before Sean could answer the Guru bellowed, "Bring anyone you want! I don't care! Bring your mother, your uncle, your cook, your skuncle, your favorite schnook… just make up whatever there is of your mind! You're getting a five-room suite, for Christsake!"
"Son of a bitch, that guy really does hear everything," Andrea muttered. She paused while Sean thought it over. The Guru sure talked funny. Your uncle, your cook, your skuncle… Your cook! "Hey," she said, "I'm going to ask Joe Lee if he wants to go."
Sean was still musing. "I guess it doesn't make much difference if I finish up my book at home or on a boat. Besides, when I was done I could start a fuck-book about you. There'd be lots of weird shit I could throw in."
Andrea turned to Baalow Nee but he beat her to the punch. "I see you've decided." He threw the sheaf of money onto the stage. "Pier 52. Any time before 8:30 in the morning. I'll sent a couple of my girls with you to help you pack." He flopped down into his sedan chair and motioned for his attendants. "Let's blow this fire trap before it burns down!"
He surveyed his bevy of dithering pulchritude. "Princess Summerfallwinterspring!" A petite, dark-eyed girl slithered out of the crowd. A few feathers floated down off her gaudy headdress and her doeskin dress climbed halfway up her bare ass as she bowed. "Take Virginia Vagina with you and help these freaks get their shit together."
A tall blonde, slender but ostentatiously buxom, her blue gauze dress revealing about all there was to be revealed, joined the Princess and blinked at Sean in a manner meant to be seductive. The Guru grinned his satisfaction as the apes jerked his sedan chair aloft. The chorus took up the chant,
"The Is Is Not, "The Not Is Is, "The No Touch Shot "Will Never Fizz!"
and the procession receded onto the street like an ebbing tidal wave of Fellini extras.