It was the name of a cut on The Dead Beats’ forthcoming Beat It ‘Til It’s Dead album, the only cut which had seemed to Tell and Jannings remotely like single material.
‘Shit!’
‘Indeed it is, but I have a crazy idea it’s gonna go top ten. Have you seen the video?’
‘No.’
‘What a scream. It’s mostly Ginger, the chick in the group, playing mud-honey in some generic bayou with a guy who looks like Donald Trump in overalls. It sends what my intellectual friends like to call ‘mixed cultural messages’.’ And Jannings laughed so hard Tell had to hold the phone away from his ear.
When Jannings had himself under control again, he said, ‘Anyway, it probably means the album’ll go top ten, too. A platinum-plated dog-turd is still a dog-turd, but a platinum reference is platinum all the way through — you understand dis t’ing, Bwana?’
‘Indeed I do,’ Tell said, pulling open his desk drawer to make sure his Dead Beats cassette, unplayed since Jannings had given it to him on the last day of the mix, was still there.
‘So what are you doing?’ Jannings asked him.
‘Looking for a job.’
‘You want to work with me again? I’m doing Roger Daltrey’s new album. Starts in two weeks.’
‘Christ, yes!’
The money would be good, but it was more than that; following The Dead Beats and six weeks of Karate Masters of Massacre, working with the ex-lead singer of The Who would be like coming into a warm place on a cold night. Whatever he might turn out to be like personally, the man could sing. And working with Jannings again would be good, too. ‘Where?’
‘Same old stand. Tabori at Music City.’
‘I’m there.’
Roger Daltrey not only could sing, he turned out to be a tolerably nice guy in the bargain. Tell thought the next three or four weeks would be good ones. He had a job, he had a production credit on an album that had popped onto the Billboard charts at number forty-one (and the single was up to number seventeen and still climbing), and he felt safe about the rent for the first time since he had come to New York from Pennsylvania four years ago.
It was June, trees were in full leaf, girls were wearing short skirts again, and the world seemed a fine place to be. Tell felt this way on his first day back at work for Paul Jannings until approximately 11.45 P.M. Then he walked into the third-floor bathroom, saw the same once-white sneakers under the door of stall one, and all his good feelings suddenly collapsed.
They are not the same. Can’t be the same.
They were, though. That single empty eyelet was the clearest point of identification, but everything else about them was also the same. Exactly the same, and that included their positions. There was only one real difference that Tell could see: there were more dead flies around them now.
He went slowly into the third stall, ‘his’ stall, lowered his pants, and sat down. He wasn’t surprised to find that the urge which had brought him here had entirely departed. He sat still for a little while just the same, however, listening for sounds. The rattle of a newspaper. The clearing of a throat. Hell, even a fart.
No sounds came.
That’s because I’m in here alone, Tell thought. Except, that is, for the dead guy in the first stall.
The bathroom’s outer door banged briskly open. Tell almost screamed. Someone hummed his way over to the urinals, and as water began to splash out there, an explanation occurred to Tell and he relaxed. It was so simple it was absurd . . . and undoubtedly correct. He glanced at his watch and saw it was 1:47.
A regular man is a happy man, his father used to say. Tell’s dad had been a taciturn fellow, and that saying (along with Clean your hands before you clean your plate} had been one of his few aphorisms. If regularity really did mean happiness, then Tell supposed he was a happy man.
His need to visit the bathroom came on at about the same time every day, and he supposed the same must be true of his pal Sneakers, who favored Stall #i just as Tell himself favored Stall #3.
If you needed to pass the stalls to get to the urinals, you would have seen that stall empty lots of times, or with different shoes under it. After all, what are the chances a body could stay undiscovered in a men’s-room toilet-stall for . . .
He worked out in his mind the time he’d last been there.
. . . four months, give or take?
No chance at all was the answer to that one. He could believe the janitors weren’t too fussy about cleaning the stalls — all those dead flies — but they would have to check on the toilet-paper supply every day or two, right? And even if you left those things out, dead people started to smell after awhile, right? God knew this wasn’t the sweetest-smelling place on earth — and following a visit from the fat guy who worked down the hall at Janus Music it was almost uninhabitable — but surely the stink of a dead body would be a lot louder. A lot gaudier.
Gaudy? Gaudy? Jesus, what a word. And how would you know? You never smelted a decomposing body in your life.
True, but he was pretty sure he’d know what he was smelling if he did. Logic was logic and regularity was regularity and that was the end of it. The guy was probably a pencil-pusher from Janus or a writer for Snappy Kards, on the other side of the floor. For all John Tell knew, the guy was in there composing greeting-card verse right now:
Roses are red and violets are blue,
You thought I was dead but that wasn’t true;
I just deliver my mail at the same time as you!
That sucks, Tell thought, and uttered a wild little laugh. The fellow who had banged the door open, almost startling him into a scream, had progressed to the wash-basins. Now the splashing-lathering sound of him washing his hands stopped briefly. Tell could imagine the newcomer listening, wondering who was laughing behind one of the closed stall doors, wondering if it was a joke, a dirty picture, or if the man was just crazy. There were, after all, lots of crazy people in New York. You saw them all the time, talking to themselves and laughing for no appreciable reason . . . the way Tell had just now.
Tell tried to imagine Sneakers also listening and couldn’t.
Suddenly he didn’t feel like laughing any more.
Suddenly he just felt like getting out of there.
He didn’t want the man at the basin to see him, though. The man would look at him. Just for a moment, but that would be enough to know what he was thinking. People who laughed behind closed toilet-stall doors were not to be trusted.
Click-clack of shoes on the old white hexagonal bathroom tiles, whooze of the door being opened, hisshh of it settling slowly back into place. You could bang it open but the pneumatic elbow-joint kept it from banging shut. That might upset the third-floor receptionist as he sat smoking Camels and reading the latest issue of Krrang!
God, it’s so silent in here! Why doesn’t the guy move? At least a little?
But there was just the silence, thick and smooth and total, the sort of silence the dead would hear in their coffins if they could still hear, and Tell again became convinced that Sneakers was dead, fuck logic, he was dead and had been dead for who knew how long, he was sitting in there and if you opened the door you would see some slumped mossy thing with its hands dangling between its thighs, you would see —
For a moment he was on the verge of calling, Hey, Sneaks! You all right?
But what if Sneakers answered, not in a questioning or irritated voice but in a froggy grinding croak? Wasn’t there something about waking the dead? About —
Suddenly Tell was up, up fast, flushing the toilet and buttoning his pants, out of the stall, zipping his fly as he headed for the door, aware that in a few seconds he was going to feel silly but not caring. Yet he could not forbear one glance under the first stall as he passed. Dirty white mislaced sneakers. And dead flies. Quite a few of them.
Weren’t any dead flies in my stall. And just how is it that all this time has gone by and he still hasn’t noticed that he missed one of the eyelets? Or does he wear em that way all the time, as some kind of artistic statement?
Tell hit the door pretty hard coming out. The receptionist just up the hall glanced at him with the cool curiosity he saved for beings merely mortal (as opposed to such deities in human form as Roger Daltrey).