They were speeding away down the on ramp. The sun was so hot, everything was white. I didn’t know what to do. I just stood there. I stared at the place where Izzy had been, until my neck got sore. Then I headed back toward the vending machines and rest rooms.
9. Duck-Rabbit
They came back, not in person, but on the juke box. The juke box was in a cafй on the westbound side of the highway. Once I had urinated, there was nothing further to impel me in any direction whatever. So I wandered across the glass-shelled pedestrian overpass, still dizzied by the physical sensation of something (my piss) actually leaving my body; I had contained everything for nearly twelve hours.
There was a juke box at every table. I sat down at the nearest one and fished out a quarter I’d never had. I pushed my quarter into the slot and pressed A-1, “If You Want Some Food for Thought, Take a Bite of This,” by Johnnie Abilene and the Haymakers. Out came Izzy.
“Put your tongue back in your mouth, Mel, this is not a drug experience,” he said. Everyone kept right on eating, while Izzy’s voice spilled from the jukes. A lean, sunburned trucker with faded tattoos on each bicep was drinking coffee in front of me, staring meditatively into his own cigarette smoke. A few tables bubbled with tourist families, whom every twang and gewgaw set chattering. A very fat old hippie in tie-dyes and cut-offs walked in and leaned against the mother juke near the cashier; he scanned the listings, the families, the trucker, and me. Nobody but me heard Izzy.
“Can you hear me?” I whispered into the Wurlitzer.
“No,” he said, and laughed. From the left speaker?Izzy was in stereo?I heard an angry cadence, Sarvaduhka’s. “Okay, okay,” Izzy told him, “I’ll be nice. I couldn’t help myself.” Then to me: “The guy that just walked in, the zaftiger in flip-flops, he’s from Sanduleak, but he’s on our side. Just be careful about giving him anything of yours.” Static. “. . . in Memphis, I told you. Give me a break, Vaduhka; this is intergalactic stuff here for crissakes and after all you said and done, put me flat out on the run, now you think you got a mess of love to shove in my face?well, take a bite of this!” It was Johnny Abilene. Izzy’s voice was swallowed into the pedal string guitar. I seemed to get a whiff of Sarvaduhka’s jasmine, then nothing. The Haymakers.
The big man came to my table. “Mind if I sit down here?” I shrugged. He sat. Maneuvering into the chair, he had to push against the next table to accommodate his gut.
The table slid back into the tattooed trucker. “Hey!”?as his coffee splashed onto the table.
“Sorry,” my Sanduleak contact said, turning meekly.
“Just watch it, okay?” The trucker threw a napkin onto the spill, then lapsed back into samadhi.
“Sure. Sorry.” My hippie turned back to me. “What’s your name? I’m Gypsy. I’m waiting for my sister, is all. She’s in the head. She takes a long time, I don’t know why; she just always does. What did you say your name was?”
“Mel,” I said. There was a floating astigmatism, like a skyflower before me, the kind that is pushed away by one’s looking, so it’s never quite in focus. At first I thought it was in my field of vision, but the more I tried to sweep it to center stage, the more I realized it was a sort of thought. A name on the tip of one’s tongue. A half-remembered face. An inkling, an intimation, but of nothing.
It was Izzy’s temporary. My mind-tongue stroked and stroked it with instinctive curiosity, like leukocytes casing a virus, something hard and foreign patching my mind.
“You’re looking at my beard,” the Sandulean said. “Is there something stuck in it?”
Stroked and stroked it. My father was in there, Gone Joe. Stroking and stroking Izzy’s amalgam, it was Gone Joe’s fingers I stroked with. He was digging his fingers into Izzy’s bung, trying to flee my mind; the rest of him had vanished when I was two, left Mom and me at the gift shop in Niagara Falls. Only this shade remained behind, Gone Joe’s shade feeling guilty in the mind of his abandoned son.