“Kill her. Strangle her. Get away. Get that boa constrictor in the kitchen and run us home with the automatic dishwasher, right? That what she said, the dishwasher? You know how to use a dishwasher?”
“Dad . . .”
“Don’t call me that. What’s she doing with your belt? Pay attention to me, will you? Get control. Pull your pants back up, damn it all to hell! Hers, too! What’s she doing with your belt? Your mother never did this with my belt. Mel, if you don’t stop this and get us out of here, I’m going to give you a headache you’ll never forget.”
Suddenly, Nora jerked backward, toppling the chair, with me on top of her. “There’s a finger in the air,” she shrieked. “It’s pointing at me!”
16. Planting My Flag
“Please, Dad, get back in here,” I said out loud.
“Don’t call me that,” he said, inside me. He was out, though, from the tip of his right forefinger almost to the knuckle. It was hairy near the bottom. It was heavily callused, a workman’s finger.
The finger did not come out of my head. If you followed it back from the edge of the nail, across the lunule, the joints, and the knuckle, it didn’t terminate anywhere; you just eventually found that you were looking past it toward something else. It wasn’t distinctly placed in three-dimensional space, but hovered somehow against it, solid, yet incommensurable. Gone Joe’s finger was not coming out of my head. It was coming out of my mind.
“Gypsy, what is this?” Nora squirmed under me on the floor.
Gypsy poked his head out the kitchen door, the human head, the one with eyes and whiskers. “It’s Gone Joe!” he said. Gypsy pushed through the kitchen door. It snapped and swung on sprung hinges, creaking as he strode to us. “God damn Izzy! He really botched it. A guy’s leaking out of the kid’s mind.”
“Mel, Mel,” Nora said. She held my face between her two hands. “Make love to me, Mel. Make love to me now.” The finger was playing mumblety-peg around her head. She turned to avoid it, back and forth. “You don’t need Gone Joe, Mel. You don’t need Izzy. You don’t need anybody. Take me, Mel.”
“Yeah,” said Gypsy. “You’re the only Earther for half a billion miles. Plant your flag, Mel.”
Gone Joe’s wrist showed, his forearm, his elbow, one shoulder, then his neck, chin, face?scrunched like a newborn’s?and the watchcap, drenched with my thoughts. “Run!”
Holding me on top of her, Nora nudged the chair away with her hips. Gone Joe was someplace indeterminably near, in our way, but not fatally so. I had to have air. My senses burned and beat as if on smelling salts. I wanted to toss like a netted fish. When I arched up to take in more air, I saw the window above our table fill with rosy, supernal light.
“Shit,” Gypsy barked. “It’s Shaman.”
17. Smiling and Serving
Shaman had a voice like incense. It permeated us. His words were not the main thing. The words were trails in a cloud chamber. It was something else that moved us, the things that made the trails, powerful, terrifying, small. Waves of meaning effulged from Shaman. Striking our minds, they crystallized into words:
“He’s mine. You know that.”
Gone Joe was out up to his navel. “Run!” Both arms were pushing against the edge of my mind, the meaty part of him making no way, but the part still cerebral gaining purchase and levering his body still farther out.
Gypsy pranced idiotically from table to table, reaching high and low, trying?impossibly?to place himself between my eyes and Gone Joe. Where Gypsy stretched, an occasional crack formed, revealing the slither inside his clothes and skin. But he didn’t want me to be distracted by Gone Joe. He wanted me to concentrate on Nora.
“You love me, don’t you?” Nora bumped her pelvis up against mine.
“Yes!” Despite everything, I started humping. The floor was cold, hard linoleum. My knees hurt from pressing and jamming with Nora.
Shaman thickened among us. “Stop this,” he said.
Gone Joe said, “Stop this!” too. He was out up to his knees. He was wearing his blue mechanics’ overalls with the embroidered tag on the breast pocket. In the middle the tag said, “JOE,” and around the perimeter, “SMILING AND SERVING!” There was a Niagara Falls souvenir pen behind it. It had an illusionary moving picture of the Horseshoe Falls on the barrel.