Among the Tootalonians

Edward Falco

Val’s marriage was dead, his career was stalled, and his hair looked like shit. As if that weren’t enough, the outer world, the other world, the world of cities beyond the city where he lived, of children who were still children, unlike his own who had grown and left him years ago, that other surrounding world that came to him daily through television and computer images, in newsprint and slick magazine type and broadcast voices, that other world was descending once again into chaos and madness, the same chaos and madness unchanged, it seemed, since the beginning of time, only now the buildings that were falling were bigger, as were the numbers of people easily accessible for slaughter. Thus no one had time to worry about Val. No one called, although he was living entirely alone for the first time in his life, in the West, which was as foreign to him as the plains of Mars, in Boise, Idaho, for God’s sake. No one had time to call. Not his two sons from his first marriage, Jonathan and Mark, both of whom still lived in the beleaguered East, in the target city of New York, New York. Not the daughter from his second marriage, Alison, who had her own drug disaster going that precluded even the current world disaster. And certainly not his third and most recent ex, who had dragged him to Boise in the first place and then left him, but not for a younger man, which would have made too much sense given that Val was twenty-six years older than her, but for an even older man, a man of seventy plus years, a man some dozen years older than Val and not even as well-off, an artist of some kind, a sculptor who taught at the local university, a wizened, rickety creature who hung out at a local coffee shop where he was held in some kind of western art reverence by the Idaho intelligentsia.
    Val was not in a good place. He was not a happy man. The house where he lived echoed around him like the interior of an abandoned mall. He had moved to Boise because Bess, his ex, had been offered a good position at the same university where her current artist-lover reigned. She had selected the house. It was on the outskirts of Boise, with a view of burnt-out foothills sloping off into an endlessly browning distance. For reasons he could never truly grasp, she loved the vast, treeless openness of the view, which she considered a great find for a house so close to the city. He hadn’t argued. She was a still young woman with an active academic career, and if that career took her west, to Idaho, to a house with a view of burnt-out foothills, what choice did he have if he wanted to be with her—and he did want to be with her—than to follow? The requirements of his own career were indeterminate since he wasn’t really sure he actually had a career any longer. He seemed to be retired. He had been a historian, an author of books on the Civil War, the first of which, published at the relatively advanced age of forty-one, had earned him enough money—thanks largely to a TV miniseries—to live comfortably for decades; the next of which, after earning him another decades-sustaining advance, had sold miserably and been reviewed worse; and the last two of which were still residing quietly on the hard drives of his various computers. After those two full-length books that had taken a combined eleven years to write, after all that effort and energy and time invested in projects that no one felt were valuable enough to merit even publication, after all that, he didn’t have the heart to start again, to immerse himself one more time in one more project that editors and publishers would shrug off with attitudes that ranged from annoyance to disdain. Plus, in his heart, deep in his gut, he knew he’d rather rot in hell than ever have to deal with his agent again. And the only thing worse than dealing with his agent would be trying to find another one. So he found himself without work, with no idea what he was supposed to do, alone in Boise, where he knew no one at all other than Bess, a woman who had left him for a man who could be her great-grandfather, in a time when the world was a frightening and dangerous place where shadowy enemies were blowing up buildings and poisoning the air and food, and everyone was doing their bestial best to kill and maim and spread terror and agony. It was under those circumstances that he had gone downtown earlier in the day to have his hair dyed. He told the girl assigned to him, a seventeen-year-old, still in high school, to color it light brown, a shade he hadn’t seen in the more than ten years since his hair had turned completely gray. Nonetheless, when she was done, it looked a hell of a lot more blonde than it did brown.
    The decision to dye his hair had been pretty much spontaneous, though he had never liked being gray. In his fifties the gray annoyed him terribly because he felt it changed peoples’ attitudes toward him in subtle ways. It was as if others suddenly assumed he was a person who could no longer have potential in his life, that there could no longer be possibilities available to him, that suddenly he had to be at the end of his journey, either accomplished or failed, and he balked at that assumption, unwilling to give up his own image of himself as someone still searching, in his life and in his art, for new perceptions and new possibilities. Now, however, at age sixty-two, he had adjusted to the gray, to peoples’ shifting attitudes toward him, as he had adjusted in general to the facts of advancing age. People always made dumb assumptions about others based on appearances. It was nothing he couldn’t deal with. And so it was with a sense of surprise and slight unreality that he found himself sitting in a heavily padded chair facing a full-length mirror, talking to the image of seventeen-year-old Tiki, explaining that he wanted his hair dyed light brown, and pulling an old snapshot of himself out of his shirt pocket.
    Tiki, who was standing behind him looking him over in the mirror, ran her spread fingers through his hair, pulling it out from the sides of his head. She gazed at it for a long moment, with the look and attitude of a professional, and when she said, “This is going to make you look twenty years younger,” Val couldn’t keep himself from smiling like a thirteen-year-old boy who’d just been told he looked sexy. He closed his eyes and leaned back in Tiki’s chair and tried to ignore the sting of chemicals as she set to work. Even before she was done, however, long before she clicked off the blow-dryer and offered him the hand mirror so he could appraise the back of his head, he clearly saw the full extent of the disaster. It was hard to articulate just how utterly wrong this particular shade of color looked with his particular face. All the creases and wrinkles etched by sixty-two years of life suddenly seemed as garish and shocking as a field of scars. A countenance that had a short forty-five minutes earlier appeared authoritative now looked ridiculous. It wasn’t just that the hair color didn’t go well with his skin color, that it somehow gave his skin a slightly greenish hue; it was that the haircut she had given him along with the coloring egregiously aggravated the color problems. The girl obviously had little or no experience cutting men’s hair. She had cut it so short that his ears, which stuck out slightly, were absurdly accentuated, and she had trimmed the hair over his forehead in a near straight line, giving him some sort of demented medieval look. Val stared a long time in silence at the wondrously strange image looking back at him.
    Tiki said, “It looks kind of more blonde than I thought.”
    “You think?” Val said.
    She added, “We could like, you know, try to make it darker.”
    Val leaned back in the chair and gripped the armrests as he appraised himself thoughtfully in the mirror. “My wife left me for this really old guy,” he said. “He’s an artist. J. Jackson Wellington?”
    “Oh, I’ve heard of him,” Tiki said. “He’s pretty famous. He’s like in the newspaper a lot.”
    “He has a show opening downtown tonight. A retrospective.”
    “That’s right,” Tiki said. “That’s what I was thinking. There’s an article just in the paper today. It’s at that new gallery, Western Spaces or something.”
    “I’m invited,” he said. “I haven’t been out in a while. I thought I might go.”
    “Oh,” Tiki said, and she looked at his reflection again, worriedly. “You sure you don’t want to try to go a little darker?”
    Val shook his head. “No thanks,” he said. “What do I owe you?”

By the time Val’s taxi dropped him off outside Western Spaces, the brief but intense thunderstorm that had dropped a half-inch of rain on the city in less than an hour had long ago sailed far beyond the clustered humanity of Boise and off into the surrounding desert; so when Val stepped out of the cab and into a puddle that covered his foot up to the ankle, he was surprised and he wasn’t surprised. He thought, Where the hell’d this puddle come from? and Of course.
    The cabdriver, who looked like he couldn’t possibly be old enough to have a driver’s license, slid over toward the window. “You okay?” he said, lifting himself up, trying to get a look.
    “It’s nothing.” Val shook his leg and stamped his foot on the street.
    “Oh, hell,” he said, once he realized what had happened. “I’m very sorry, sir. Sir, I guess—I didn’t see it, sir. Sir, is there anything I can do?”
    Val said, “You can quit calling me sir.”
    The driver backed away from the window. He appeared hurt.
    “Look,” Val said. “It’s nothing. It’s okay.” He counted out the fare and placed it in the young man’s hand, adding a five-dollar tip to prove he was sincere.
    Once the cab had disappeared around a corner, he sat down on a street-side bench and took off his shoe and sock. He was wearing his best summer suit, a light brown, eighteen-hundred-dollar garment, along with a dark shirt and matching dark tie that had cost him more than he used to pay for rent back in the days before that first successful book-publishing deal. He dried his shoe as best he could with his handkerchief and wrung out his silk sock before trying to shake it dry. Down the street, a pair of bright red double doors opened, and a half-dozen people stepped out onto the sidewalk accompanied by the sounds of laughter and talking. They held wineglasses aloft, carried plates of food, and were all dressed neatly but casually. One guy was wearing jeans and a white shirt with one of those western string ties that Val had never actually seen anyone wear in the real world, only in movies and on television. He removed the invitation from the inside pocket of his suit jacket. As he feared, several lines down from Bess’s neatly handwritten Let’s not be enemies were the crisply printed words Casual Dress. Val spread his arms out along the back of the bench and looked up at the moon, which was so huge and bright it seemed as though it might have fallen out of its orbit and dropped down a few miles closer to the earth. He put the invitation back in his pocket, pulled on his wet sock and soaked shoe, tying the lace securely in a bow, and started toward the gallery and the partyers on the street. Alongside him, in his peripheral vision, he could see his reflection accompanying him in a long plate-glass window. Even without turning to look, he saw with a surprising degree of clarity that the brown suit he had chosen emphasized the new and still deepening blondness of his hair, so that it looked like a shock of flame arising from the wick of his neck above the dark candle of his body.
    Once off the street and past the sidewalk wine drinkers and actually inside the gallery, he found himself comfortably obscure in the midst of a crowd of milling, mostly young to middle-age people, though here and there were individuals and couples his age and older. What had he expected? That the crowd would fall back aghast, cover their mouths with one hand and point with the other at his hair? Actually—as he expected would happen or else he wouldn’t have ventured into the room—no one even noticed him. Or if they did, they weren’t being obvious about it. They continued with their conversations, which seemed mostly to be about bombs and war and bio-chemical attacks, while they sipped wine and ate hors d’oeuvres and moved from sculpture to sculpture or stood firmly planted in a comfortable group. To Val’s dismay, he found himself deeply impressed by Wellington’s sculptures. He had hoped to find giant silver eagles or bronzed Indian maidens, but instead he was surrounded by contemporary figures constructed out of bits and pieces of computer parts, as well as gears and ratchets and rusted tools and a thousand other things you might find in a mechanic’s garage or an old barn. The success of the pieces was not in the conceit but in the particulars of each construction, which seemed to speak simultaneously to the dehumanization of man and his irrepressible humanity. In some of them it was almost impossible to say where that spark of humanity was coming from, given how completely the figures were constructed of cogs and gears, computer chips and transistor boards. It was as if, somehow, there was a yearning human soul trapped within and looking out from these figures constructed from the inhuman stuff of our industrial-technological culture. After looking at only a few of the works, Val felt a deep, deep depression wrapping itself around him like a quilt. He could actually feel himself growing heavier.
    “This is just such amazing shit, isn’t it? Don’t you think? It’s just so, oh my God—”
    Val braced himself against the weight of a woman who was actually leaning on him as she spoke, as if she might fall to ground in a faint without his support.
    “It’s just so completely overwhelming, I could slit my wrists just—oh my God,” she said again and then covered her mouth with both hands and lay her head on Val’s shoulder.
    Val glanced around the room. He didn’t know exactly why he was looking, but it seemed possible that this person might have attendants searching for her. She was a slight woman who appeared to be in her late thirties to early forties, wearing white boots, black leather pants, and a red silk blouse with the top three buttons open so that any number of the most common movements left her small breasts momentarily exposed to view. Her hair was bright blonde with about two inches of black roots accented by the way she wore it pulled back, which was a current fashion, Val understood, and actually looked good on her, which he couldn’t say for the gold eyebrow ring or the small silver stud on the tip of her tongue.
    “They’re just so . . . eaten up,” she said and then pulled herself away from Val and looked him in the eyes for the first time. “I know you see it,” she said with an air of reprimand. “You looked like you were going to completely collapse a moment ago. My heart went out to you, really. I see it too. We’re simpatico. We can talk.” She made a sweeping gesture with her hand, indicating the scores of others chatting under the track lighting or shuffling over the bright hardwood floor, moving from sculpture to sculpture. “These others, they’re all tootalonians.”
    Though he was curious, Val decided not to ask her what she was talking about. Instead he asked politely, “Do we know each other? Have we ever met?”
    “Oh. Please don’t disappoint me,” she said.
    “I’ll try not to,” he said.
    “We’ve always known each other.” She sounded as if she were annoyed at having to answer his question but willing to do it for him, to get it out of the way. “We’ve known each other since the beginning of time.” She turned to the sculpture again. “Look at this,” she said, gesturing toward the distorted bust on a pedestal at eye level in front of them. “This is us in our world right now. Is it a man or a woman? It doesn’t matter. It’s completely misshapen and warped by its fight against the radio waves and television signals that are trying to control it, trying to make it into a monster instead of a human being. I know you see that,” she said. “I can see that you see it.”
    “Actually, you give me too much credit,” Val said. He looked around the room again and noticed that though he was alone with this woman with no one within ten feet of him, there were dozens of people clustered around every other sculpture in the gallery. He said, “That was just jealousy you saw.”
    “What was?”
    “My reaction. I was just jealous. That’s what you saw. Crushing jealousy.”
    The woman seemed to consider this for a moment. She put her hands on her hips and looked him over. “No,” she said, finally, as if satisfied and certain in her determination. “No, that’s not it,” she said. “You may have been jealous of Wellington’s talent, but what really got to you was his depiction of our universal, slow, cultural mass death, how we come into this world so beautiful only to be destroyed little by little, year by year, no matter how hard we struggle, till there’s so little left of the beautiful that it’s like this—” She gestured toward the bust. “Peeking out, buried, desperate not to die.”
    Val said, “You think so?”
    “Look at what’s happening right now,” she said. “Did you know they poisoned the city? Did you hear that on the news tonight? How can we stay beautiful? How can we not hate them when they’re trying to kill us so horribly, burning and crushing and poisoning our neighbors, our children? How can our hearts not turn into the hearts of monsters? You tell me.”
    Val said, “They poisoned the city? Boise?”
    “Read the papers,” she said, dismissing his question. She pointed at the bust again. “You know the only way it cannot die, what me and you see peeking out from behind that almost-monster’s eyes?”
    “No,” Val said. “How?”
    “There is no way,” she said and looked meaningfully at him. “It has to die. That’s the way it is. It’s just looking for someone who can touch it so that it can touch that someone in return. And then that someone’s not just someone anymore, and they’re together. That makes it better. Maybe that even makes it worthwhile.”
    “Really,” Val said. He thought he actually understood what she was talking about, which frightened him slightly, so he was immensely pleased when he saw Bess emerge from behind a crowd of people and cross the no-man’s-land that surrounded him and the crazy woman. She was beautiful in a simple black dress, with her hair up and a plain gold necklace accentuating her still youthful skin. “Bess,” he said, and he was surprised to find himself taking an excited step toward her, feeling a burst of energy at the sight of her pushing him forward.
    “Val,” she said and then addressed the woman. “This is a family emergency,” she said. “Please excuse us just one moment.”
    “My ex-wife,” Val said to the woman as Bess pulled him away through the chatter and laughter, past the perfumed and cologned bodies, away from the narrowing eyes of the woman in her black leather pants and silk blouse, and toward the red doors and the street.
    Once outside she said, furious, “Do you know that woman? Is she with you?”
    “Why?” Val said. He was taken aback by her anger.
    “Why? She’s nuts, that’s why. She’s insulted half the people in the gallery. Are you telling me she’s with you?”
    “Calm down,” Val said. “I never saw her before. You don’t know who she is?”
    “No one knows who she is. What’s she talking to you about? What’s she saying?”
    “Well . . .” He scratched behind his ear and looked off down the empty street while trying to find some coherent summary of their conversation. “Well,” he said again. “I think basically she’s been telling me how much she admires your—what do you call J? Lover? Significant other?”
    “I’d guess she admires J,” Bess said, sarcastic. “She offered him oral sex right in front of me.”
    “She what?”
    “I want to call the police, but J’s like—” Bess sighed. “J’s like the prototypical hippie: everything’s cool, no problem.”
    “She just came up to the both of you and offered—”
    “It was rhetorical,” Bess said. “She was, in her own insanely crude way, trying to tell him how much she liked his work.”
    “Oh,” Val said and laughed. “What did she say? She just walks up to the two of you and goes, ‘J, you’re such a great artist I’d like to—’”
    “You think that’s funny?” Bess put her hands on her hips and squared off in front of him. It was a posture Val had seen many times before.
    “Look,” he said. “I don’t know the woman.”
    “You never saw her before tonight?”
    “Never. Total stranger.”
    “Well how come she’s talking to you like you’re old friends?”
    “I don’t know,” Val said. “She says we’re simpatico.”
    This time Bess laughed.
    “What’s that mean?” Val said. He crossed his arms over his chest and leaned in toward her, which was a posture Bess undoubtedly also understood.
    “All right, listen,” she said. She looked up at the moon, which was almost directly overhead. “Moon’s unbelievable tonight, isn’t it?”
    “It’s incredible,” he said. “We should be bringing in the harvest.”
    Bess said, “I apologize for being so angry with you, especially since it’s been so long since we even talked.” She touched his arm.
    “That’s all right,” Val said. “How are you?”
    “Actually, I’m wonderful.” She smiled, and her eyes were bright and untroubled for a moment. “I’m happy.”
    “Okay.” Val nodded, his lips pressed together tightly. “I’m happy for you then.”
    “Thank you,” she said. “Look. Val. Can I ask you a huge favor?”
    “What? What can I do?”
    “Could you find a way to get her out of here, please? She seems to like you. Maybe you could just . . .”
    “What?” he said. “You want me to take her home with me?”
    “I didn’t say that. Take her for a cup of coffee. There’s an all-night diner a couple of blocks from here.”
    “Oh, come on, Bess.” He turned and looked away from her. “I don’t want to have coffee with this woman.”
    Bess stepped in front of him and took his arm in her hands. “Please, Val. As a favor. I put so much time into this opening, and she’s ruining the whole thing.”
    “Why? What’s she doing? Really.”
    “What’s she doing? She’s insulting people. She’s being rude. She keeps calling people tootalonians.”
    “What’s a tootalonian?”
    “How the hell would I know what a tootalonian is?” Bess said, letting go of his arm. “The woman’s mad!”
    “Bess . . .” Val took a few slow steps away from her, back toward the gallery. As he did so, the guy with the western string tie stepped out through the doors tapping a cigarette out of its red cardboard box. Directly behind him came an attractive older woman carrying two full wineglasses. “Excuse me, buddy,” Val said. “Do you mind if I hit you up for a cigarette?”
    The man looked askance at Val and seemed on the verge of telling him to go to hell before he noticed Bess standing rooted in place with her arms folded, watching them. He nodded to Bess, gave Val a cigarette, lit it for him, and then walked away several yards with the wineglass woman following him like a butler delivering his drinks.
    “That’s Harris Wills,” Bess said as Val joined her again, taking a long drag off his bummed cigarette. “When did you start smoking again?”
    “Just now,” he said. “Who’s Harris Wills?”
    “Rich guy. Look. I’ve got to get back inside. You don’t have to—I mean, I wouldn’t have even asked, it’s just—”
    “I’ll give it a shot,” he said. “As a favor to you. Let me finish this cigarette.”
    “Thank you, Val.” She touched his hand and hesitated, looking as if she were torn between getting back to the gallery and staying another moment.
    “Yes?” Val asked, squinting his eyes a little, comically. “Something else?”
    Bess pressed her palms together in prayer position, fingertips touching her chin. She said, “This is out of respect and affection I tell you this, Val. But your hair looks just completely ridiculous. Really. You need to know. My God, who gave you that cut? Did they use a garden shear? Who did the color, a grade-schooler with a yellow crayon? Really. It’s just outrageously— You look— You look . . . absurd.”
    Val said, “You think so?”
    “For heaven’s sake, Val. Everyone’s talking about it in there.”
    “Everyone’s talking about it? Everyone’s talking about my hair?”
    “Between you and the nutcase, this opening’s turning out to be Boise’s gossip event of the year.”
    Val ran his fingers through his hair. “You don’t think it makes me look youthful and suave?” he said, his tone dead serious.
    Bess was clearly confused by his response, and then angered. “Did you hear me?” she said. “It looks terrible. I didn’t even know it was you when I first saw—I thought, who’s that wacko? You look pathetic, Val. You look like an old man stupid enough to think blonde hair will make him look young. It’s embarrassing to me. You’re my ex, for Christ’s sake. You reflect on me.” She yanked the lapel of his jacket. “And didn’t you see the casual dress on the invitation? Are you trying to make me look bad?”
    “I don’t know what to tell you,” Val said. “I’m sorry, but I think the hair makes me look twenty years younger. I think it looks terrific.”
    Motionless, Bess looked him in the eyes a long moment and then turned without a word and went back into the gallery. Up the block, Val noticed Harris Wills and his companion sipping wine and watching him as if he were on stage in the midst of a performance. He half expected applause as the scene ended with Bess’s exit. He hesitated a moment longer on the street, where he stood entranced in a kind of stunned euphoria. He felt weightless and giddy, the world around him as inconsequential as a dream. He couldn’t care less what Harris Wills or Bess or anyone else thought of him. He found it all amusing: the scene, the moment, the people, the situation. He wished he had a mirror so that he could look at his hair. Fuck them. The more outrageous it looked, the better.
    “Excuse me. Harris.” He stopped on the way back into the gallery and crushed his cigarette into the pavement under his still-wet shoe. “Have you heard anything about someone poisoning Boise or anything like that?” When Harris didn’t answer but only looked back at him, shoulder to shoulder with his woman friend, Val moved in front of him. “It’s just, someone was saying something about poisoning Boise, and I thought—I mean, I don’t know whether she’s a nut or what.”
    “Actually,” Harris said, softly, in a voice not much above a whisper, “there appears to be evidence that someone may have tried to dust the city with toxic chemicals.”
    Val said, “That’s true? When did—I haven’t heard a thing.”
    “Breaking news.”
    “So, what? Are we in danger? I mean, should we—”
    “No,” Harris said, calmly. “It’s unlikely we’re in any danger. The city engineers are finding trace amounts of toxins spread throughout Boise, not enough to do any damage, but since these are not naturally occurring elements, the theory is that someone might have tried to poison the whole city.”
    “That’s just—” Val said. “Is there not going to be any end to all this?”
    “I wouldn’t worry about it,” Harris said. “If someone did try to poison the city, it didn’t work. Keep in mind there’s two documented cases of terrorists crop-dusting Tokyo with anthrax and not managing to give anybody as much as a cold.”
    Alongside him, Harris’s companion clutched her wineglass to her chest. “Terrorists crop-dusted Tokyo with anthrax?”
    “Twice,” he said. “That we know of.”
    “This world,” she said and turned to look again at Val. “It’s a sin.”
    Harris said to Val. “Are you a friend of Bess’s?”
    “She’s my ex,” Val said. “We were married eight years.”
    The woman said, “She was married to you?”
    “Eight years,” Val answered.
    Harris nodded. His companion watched Val, wide-eyed.
    “Poisoning Boise, Idaho,” Val said to himself, as he turned his back on the couple. “If that’s not the definition of insanity”
    Inside the gallery he found the woman alone in a corner, staring forlornly at one of Wellington’s pieces, a standing figure arrested at the moment of stepping back from something, fear palpable in every line and angle. “Hey,” he said, moving in front of her, blocking her view of the figure. “What’s your name?”
    “Alice,” she said. She sounded downright depressed compared to the enthusiasm of their earlier conversation.
    “Well, listen, Alice,” Val said. “Let’s get out of here.”
    “Want to go back to my place?” she asked, perking up. “I live right across the street.”
    “Really? You live right here?”
    “Plus,” she said, “I’ve got some kick-ass grass.”
    “Amen,” Val said. He offered her his arm, which she took with a smile.
    On the way out, he turned to look for Bess and found that half the gallery was watching. In a far corner, seated side by side in a pair of black, straight-back chairs like reigning monarchs, Bess and J were also watching. Two very young women, probably J’s students, knelt beside his throne, and a handsome, long-haired boy in blue jeans and a white cardigan held one of Bess’s hands in both of his. They were all transfixed, and for a serious moment Val considered bowing with an extravagant flourish before turning to leave, but instead he only laughed slightly, amusedly, winked at Bess, and then exited the gallery with Alice on his arm.
    Outside, Harris and his companion had disappeared. Alice said, “She never loved you, you know. I could see that instantly. You were just somebody to make her life better, just as Wellington is.” She let go of Val’s arm and maneuvered in front of him. “Older men,” she said. “You see a young woman, and you’re all—you’ll do anything. Suddenly you’re all fools.”
    Val said, “She thought I was somebody I turned out not to be.”
    “Say again?”
    “It’s not her fault,” he said. “She’s not a gold digger, a career advancer. It wasn’t like that.”
    “Oh my God,” Alice said. “You’re still crazy for her. That’s so damn sad. I’m so sorry. Honestly.”
    “It’s just—” Val said. “Look. Did you say you lived across the street?”
    Alice turned and pointed directly across the street at a two-story brick building, the bottom floor of which appeared to be an antiques shop.
    “When you say across the street,” Val said, “you mean across the street.”
    “I’m like that. So? Do you want to?” She pointed to her building.
    “Yes,” Val said. “Surely.”
    As they crossed the street on their way to an alley that led around behind Alice’s building to a flight of wooden stairs, Val noticed a white Lincoln Continental parked midway back in the alley, two wheels on the street and two on the sidewalk, a pair of empty wineglasses side by side on the dash. He imagined Harris and his companion scrunched down in the backseat, hoping not to be noticed, and he made a point of walking close to the car, actually brushing his leg against the back door as he passed. Climbing the stairs he asked Alice what a tootalonian was.
    “Word I made up.”
    “Really? What’s it mean?”
    “Did they tell you I was crazy?” she asked. “Because I’m not.” At the top of the stairs, she lifted an empty flowerpot from the railing, found a bright silver key, and went about unlocking unlocked her door. “I’m different,” she said. “I’ll grant them that. But not crazy. They’re the ones that are crazy.” She put the key back under the flowerpot, then grasped and turned the knob with her back to the door, looking at Val. “It’s the world’s crazy,” she said. “They’re the ones.”
    “Okay,” Val said. “I believe you. So what’s a tootalonian?”
    “I was at a party,” she said hurriedly, clearly not much interested in the explanation, “and this guy was off in a corner tooting coke all by himself, and it came to me: tootalonian. That’s what they are. All they care about’s themselves. See?” she said. “I told you. I’m not crazy.” She pushed the door open and gestured for Val to enter.
    Before she came in behind him and turned on the light, the first thing he saw were several glowing red points punctuating the darkness in a far room. He knew immediately that they were sticks of burning incense, since the odor was thick enough to choke on. At first he didn’t recognize the smell, but when she turned on the light, and he saw two Persian cats sitting on the sink counter amid what looked like a month’s worth of unwashed dishes, he pinned down the smell as a pungent mix of cat shit and incense. “Mind if I open a window?” he asked. “The odor’s kind of intense.”
    “Hi kitties,” she said, addressing the cats, who looked back at her imperiously. She closed the door and went directly to a kitchen drawer, which she pulled open and began rummaging through. “No,” she said to Val without looking up from her search. “Go ahead. I don’t mind.”
    In the darkened bedroom, which appeared to be the only other room in the apartment, Val walked over piles of clothes and garbage covering the floor and went directly to the incense sticks. He yanked each of them out of their holders, pulled open the window, and threw them into a half-inch deep puddle of black rainwater collected on a wide, tar-papered ledge. Across the street, in the gallery, which he could see into through a line of high windows, Bess stood in the center of the room and clapped her hands. She appeared to be calling the gallery to attention. Val watched her with interest but turned around when the lights went out behind him.
    In the moment or two he had to take in his surroundings while gathering up the incense, he had noticed that the walls were covered with newspaper clippings. There wasn’t enough light to make out what the clippings were about, but it was clear that there were scores of them, all attached to the walls with silvery duct tape, making the room look like the stereotypical serial-killer’s hideout, the place the cops always find near the end of the movie, just before the climactic rescue. When he turned away from the window and looked back again into the darkened bedroom, he saw Alice moving from place to place igniting one candle after the other by pulling the trigger of a red, rifle-shaped lighter.
    After she was done and the room glowed in the flickering light of a dozen burning candles, she cleared her bed of clutter, sat down on a mattress covered with a red silk sheet, and began to undress. Val sat back against the open window ledge and watched her, at first amused by how brazenly she was pulling off her clothes, unzipping and kicking off her boots, undoing the hook and zipper of her leather pants before casually unfastening the small, clear buttons at the sleeves of her blouse, yanking it out of her pants and opening the center buttons, and then taking it off with a shrug of her shoulders and tossing it onto the floor. But once her stomach was exposed, Val’s amusement disappeared. A jagged, lightning bolt scar descended from just below her right rib cage across her belly down almost to her navel. It was wide and ragged and ugly, not the kind of scar modern surgery might produce. When she stood up to take off her pants and her eyes met his for a moment, he had to look away. He noticed again the clippings taped to the wall and saw for the first time that many were very small, some only a few lines of newsprint, and he realized there may have been hundreds of them. In the candlelight he could see repeated in the headlines the words assault, battery, rape, murder. He looked again at Alice and saw that she had turned away from him in the process of stepping out of her pants. Across her bare back in a diagonal line running from her left shoulder to her waist were a series of three oblong scars that pointed to yet another similar scar on her buttock and two more on the back of her thigh. A queasy roiling started in the pit of his stomach. Around the edges of the scars, her light skin darkened and reddened. He guessed, from the look of them, that the wounds were very old, but as he stared at them, the roiling in his stomach progressed to nausea, and he had to turn away.
    As he looked out the window, he heard the mattress squeak followed by the crinkling of paper, and he imagined that she was sitting up on the bed, perhaps watching him as she went about rolling a joint. Across the street Bess and J stood in the center of the gallery, surrounded by a crowd that appeared incredibly young and immensely beautiful, flawless in the moment of celebration. Bess held up a wineglass as she spoke, and the crowd raised their glasses back to her. With his head out the window, breathing in the night air, Val’s sickness subsided. His forehead and upper lip were wet with a patina of sweat brought on by the nausea, and he cupped a handful of rainwater in his palms and brought it to his face. In his hands he saw his own reflection and was filled for a moment with an overwhelming tenderness toward the image looking back at him, as if he were some kind of aging, modern Narcissus, only it wasn’t his own beauty he loved but the lack of it. And it wasn’t love, it was tenderness toward the lined and creased face, the thinning, ridiculous hair, the dark circles under the ruined eyes. As the image spilled through his fingers, leaking back into a disturbed picture of the moon looming over ragged lines of buildings, he lifted it to his lips, as if in a kiss, and washed his face with the cool, dark water.
    Again, behind him, he heard paper rustling, but when he turned to look, instead of finding Alice rolling a joint, he found her sitting up on the red silk sheets, her legs crossed under her, reading the local newspaper. She seemed utterly comfortable, utterly nonchalant, as if she regularly read the newspaper naked in bed while a stranger watched. “Alice?” he said, approaching her. “What do you think of my hair?”
    “What about it?” she asked, looking carefully up at him for a moment before losing interest. She threw the newspaper over the side of the bed and then looked down after it. “It’s heartbreaking, isn’t it?” she said. “What’s happening? How the world is?”
    Val touched her leg. “Turn over,” he said. “I’ll give you a massage.”
    “Oooh,” she said, throwing herself onto her belly and stretching her arms out across the mattress. “A massage.”
    Val knelt over her thighs and touched her back softly at first, gently kneading the flesh of her neck and shoulders, before, encouraged by her sighs of pleasure, he pressed harder, absorbed in his efforts, working the skin of her back, massaging the wounds while her sighs grew into deep moans that rose up to the ceiling and circled about the room before wafting through the window and out into the moonlight over a poisoned world.

“Among the Tootalonians” appears in our Autumn 2003 issue.