Strange Trades Read online

  Ped Xing, in saffron robe: “Meditate on this koan, Rory. ‘If the universe is constantly expanding, where does it buy its suits?’”

  Beatbox, carrying a pot by its handle and stirring some strange mixture in it: “Taste this, man. Chocolate gazpacho, gonna set you straight.”

  And finally, Suki Netsuke, who simply stood before Honeyman, honest sympathy visible in her face, and said: “Sorry, Rory.” She stooped to give him a chaste kiss on his brow.

  Eventually everyone left Honeyman alone with his misery. He welcomed it. He wanted to wallow in some good old self-pity and personality bashing.

  His life was a failure. He had botched everything he ever tried. He was unloved and unlovable. Addie had left him because he was such a hopeless jerk. Who in their right mind would want to hook up with a guy approaching forty who was still running a sandwich shop, and who had allowed his one outstanding brainstorm—spondulix—to be misappropriated by a bunch of social misfits? All that talk in the note about still loving him had just been her way of trying to salve his feelings. She was too nice to say what she really thought of him. And the note had been too short. A list of his bad qualities would fill reams.

  No, it was plain as his disfigured portrait on the counterfeit spondulix: he was a lousy human being.

  He felt lower than a tube worm at the bottom of the Pacific, sheathed in a universe no wider than his own weary shoulders, everything black and under immense pressure.

  There really seemed little reason even to go on living.

  After a few hours, Honeyman got up from the couch in a corner where he had been sitting. He wandered aimlessly over to Vat Number One, and let himself in.

  Erlkonig, wearing a pair of headphones and studying a sheaf of papers, looked up absentmindedly at first, his eyes narrowing in calculation when he saw who it was.

  Doffing the ’phones, he said, “Sit down, moll, sit down. I heard what happened to you, and I been meaning to come around and see you. But the pressure, the details—keeping this whole mess afloat takes all my time.”

  Honeyman sat down, saying nothing. Erlkonig studied him for a few minutes, evidently coming to a certain decision. Then the Black man said: “Here’s something you’re gonna find interesting, moll, kinda take your mind off your grief. One thing always bugged me was, where did that word come from?”

  “What word?” asked Honeyman tonelessly.

  “What word! Spondulix, natch.”

  Honeyman felt the faintest tickle of interest. “Well?”

  “I made Fumento look it up at the library. It’s slang from the middle of the last century. Used to be spelled s-p-o-n-d-u-l-i-c-k-s. The derivation is from the Greek word spondolos, or shell. The idea seems to be that the Indians once used shells for money. Wampum, you know. So the word is real Native American, comes from the oppressed Red Man and all. I like that. How’d you learn it?”

  “I don’t know,” said Honeyman. “I don’t know anything anymore.”

  Erlkonig got up and put a hand on Honeyman’s shoulder. “You’re in a bad way, moll. You need some rest. Wait here a minute.” Erlkonig left and returned with a pill and a glass of water. “Here, take this, it’ll put you right under.”

  Honeyman swallowed the pill. Soon he felt sleep creeping up from his feet to his head like quicksand.

  Some time much later he woke up. Erlkonig was there with another pill. Honeyman took that one too. What did he care whether he ever woke up again or not?

  When he woke up a second time, it was to the sound of much activity. Erlkonig helped him to stand. Honeyman’s limbs felt rubbery.

  “C’mon, moll, it’s the house-warming party, you gotta mingle. It’ll do you good.”

  Honeyman let himself be led out of Vat Number One. The Brewery was packed with people, all having a raucous good time. Erlkonig got Honeyman a drink. “Here, man, you gotta wake up, or you’re gonna be too sleepy for the main event.”

  “What’s that?” asked Honeyman.

  “You’ll see,” said Erlkonig. “Wait here a minute, I gotta go check on some preparations.”

  Honeyman felt himself gradually waking up. He couldn’t decide if that was good or bad. The pain of Addie’s inexplicable departure was sharp as ever. He stood sipping his drink, which seemed to be plain ginger ale. Just as well. He was in no shape for alcohol.

  Erlkonig returned. He took Honeyman by the arm and led him away, off to one corner of the building. There was a new door in the wall. Erlkonig opened it. They stepped through, and were inside the Brewery’s tall smokestack.

  A spiral staircase, lit by bare bulbs strung on a wire, ran up and up and up.

  “C’mon, moll,” urged Erlkonig.

  They began to climb, Honeyman going first.

  At the top Honeyman halted unexpectedly, causing Erlkonig to ask, “What’s wrong?”

  “Where are we going, Earl? I’m dizzy.…”

  “Don’t worry, moll. It’s all level from here on.”

  Honeyman took Erlkonig at his word and mounted the last few steps, emerging headfirst through the floor into a small room. He realized dully that this must be Erlkonig’s penthouse, which had been pointed out to him some weeks ago.

  Erlkonig joined him. “Now out that door.”

  “Another door? Where else can we go…?”

  “You’ll see.”

  Honeyman opened the door and stepped out.

  He was on a small platform railed on two sides. Three hundred feet below him, the street outside the Brewery was filled with tiny people. They were all looking up at him, Honeyman suddenly realized. At that moment a spotlight flared on and pinned Honeyman to the platform, blinding him.

  Erlkonig’s amplified voice suddenly bellowed out. “Special, you moron—aim it lower!”

  Special Effects, stationed on the roof of an adjacent building, complied, and in a minute Honeyman could see again. It was then that he noticed the polycarbon cable. It stretched away across the Hudson, taut as an addict’s nerves, slim as a hair, guyed and anchored at its far end to some anonymous building around Twenty-third Street in Manhattan, half a mile away.

  “Here,” said Erlkonig. With the hand not holding the bullhorn, he wrestled with a traditional red-and-white-striped, fifteen-foot balancing pole that had been standing in one corner.

  Honeyman took the pole and hefted it. The fifty-pound weight awakened long-dormant kinesthetic memories.

  “Okay, let’s go, moll. They’re all waiting to see you perform.” Honeyman thought about it. The distance was impossible. He was completely out of training. The wind was brisk. The effects of the sleeping pill were still in his blood.…

  He kicked off his shoes and stood in his socks.

  Erlkonig smiled. “If you make it to the other side, you can tell the Feds anything you want.”

  Honeyman stepped forward and placed his right foot on the wire. It thrummed like something alive beneath his weight, it sang an old wordless circus song, it beckoned him on to his destiny.

  He stepped entirely on the cable, swaying slightly, old instincts keeping him balanced.

  Erlkonig spoke through the bullhorn to the spectators. “And now, as advertised, to mark the conquest of the outer world by spondulix, their inventor, Rory Honeyman, will symbolically traverse the watery gap between Hoboken, the world’s new fiscal capital, and Manhattan, the old.”

  Honeyman began his half-mile tightrope walk, the spotlight following him, trained on his back now.

  Right up to the halfway mark, he thought he might do it.

  But at that point in his passage a news copter, avid cameraman leaning out the cockpit, approached from inside the surrounding darkness, clattering, churning up crazy downdrafts.

  Honeyman sensed balance slipping from him. He swayed left and right, overcompensating, trapped in a deadly negative feedback loop. He lost his pole and it flipped end over end down into the night beneath his feet.

  Then he lost the wire.

  The wind whistled past Honeyman, chill and curiou
s. For a few seconds he fell formless and free. He swore he heard the roar of Olympic crowds in his ears. Without volition, not even thinking of saving himself, he entered into a classic swan dive.

  He was back in the past, on the last day in his life that he had felt completely certain about anything, the day when, full of a serene spiritual strength, he had taken the silver in Mexico City.

  He pierced the water cleanly—celestial judges flashed high numbers—but the impact was still tremendous. The transition felt like passing through a mile-thick wall of wet concrete instantaneously. He must have blacked out for a period, still plummeting downward under the Hudson now, because when he opened his eyes all was utterly black, and he seemed to sense the musty car-hulk-littered river bottom just below him.

  Unbroken empty blackness. Just give it up now, or what? So easy to breathe water, become sodden and sink, to lie among the other wrecks.…

  Except—wait a minute. Here was something of interest. A nonhuman figure of luminescent white was approaching. Closer, closer, closer—until it was revealed as a horse. A sea horse, hindquarters all flukes and fins.

  The Baroness von Hammer-Purgstall, returned transmogrified from the dead. First love come to resurrect him.

  Honeyman opened his mouth to speak. River water filled his throat and he began to choke.

  The Baroness nipped Honeyman’s shirt collar between her big teeth and began to surge powerfully upward, through the murky water.

  Honeyman’s head broke the surface right near a Coast Guard boat. Dazedly, he looked around for the Baroness. The horse was nowhere to be seen.

  Hands reached down for Honeyman. He reached up, and was hauled aboard.

  Lying flat on his back, his head cradled in a soft lap, he knew he was really dead.

  Addie was looking down at him and stroking his forehead.

  “Oh, Rory,” she said, “I’m so, so sorry. But you’re under arrest.”

  A man’s voice said, “That’s enough, Agent Swinburne, I’ll take over now.”

  They read Honeyman his rights while he was throwing up Hudson-flavored bile.

  Honeyman stepped out of the hospital. It was a glorious October day. The streets of Manhattan had been washed clean by a shower in the night. A maple sapling planted in a sidewalk plot was all aflame with colored leaves. The air smelled like the countryside.

  Addie stood by the tree. Honeyman walked over to her. She held out her hand tentatively. He took it, and they began to walk.

  After a few yards of silence, Addie said, “Erlkonig took the whole rap for you, Rory. He exonerated you completely.”

  “So I should forgive him for everything now, I suppose?”

  “That’s up to you. He did act like a bastard at the end. But basically I think he was just running scared. It was nothing personal.”

  “It felt personal enough at the time.”

  “Well, anyway, he’s only going to be tried on the charges connected with running the tightrope across the river. Public nuisance, property damage, obstructing air traffic, those kinds of things. The matter of spondulix has been officially dropped, in exchange for the closing of the mint. It seems, you see, that there weren’t really any relevant statutes to prosecute under. A whole squad of lawyers spent hundreds of man-hours trying to find something, and couldn’t. There’s just no legislation against what you guys were doing. And besides, the publicity connected with a trial would have given other people the same idea, if they hadn’t heard about it already. The people in charge have decided to adopt a policy of ignoring the spondulix already in circulation, as long as no more new ones are made. They figure the whole thing will fade away sooner or later.”

  “So I’m completely free?”

  “Yup.”

  “I can go back to running a sandwich shop in Hoboken?”

  “If you want to.”

  “Well now, that depends.”

  “On me?”

  “Yup.”

  Addie smiled. “Suppose I told you I don’t work for the Secret Service any more?”

  “I might believe you.”

  “And suppose I told you I still loved you very very much, and apologized real hard for ever lying to you about anything?”

  “I might say I loved you too.”

  They stopped to kiss then, and passersby smiled.

  Resuming their walk, Honeyman said, “You wouldn’t mind living on the proceeds of a little sandwich shop?”

  “Oh,” said Addie, “I don’t think it’ll ever come to that.”

  She opened her purse.

  Honeyman looked inside.

  It was full of spondulix.

  Although I did not know it at the time of its composition, this story was to be a trial run for my novel Ciphers. Mysterious organizations, false clues, hapless young slacker hero, alluring women, information theory, pop music, subways, synchronicities, smart but annoying girlfriends—all the components are here in embryo, waiting to be excessively recomplicated at novel length. If Ciphers is my Gravity’s Rainbow, then this story stands as my stab at The Crying of Lot 49.

  During the mid-eighties, I frequently ate in the McDonald’s in Union Square where Howie dined. But when the street people launched into their Tourette’s-like spew, I always moved away.

  Who knows where I’d be today if I had paid closer, more sympathetic attention to their rants?

  Conspiracy of Noise

  1.

  The facts are extremely complicated.

  —Mehmet Ali Agca

  The police were singing. sting’s dulcetly str dent voice wailed over and over, above the dissonant guitars:

  Too much information, runnin’ through my brain,

  Too much information, drivin’ me insane—

  Suddenly the music stopped.

  Howie looked up.

  Mr. Wargrave stood beside Howie’s desk. He had obviously reached down to Howie’s Walkman while Howie’s eyes had bee closed, and switched off the tape player. Now Mr. Wargrave waited—patiently, coolly, as imperturbably as an Easter Island statue—for Howie to give him his full attention.

  Howie carefully removed his headphones and laid them down on his desk. At one point in the headgear’s descending arc, the burnished metal strap reflected the harsh fluorescent office light directly into Mr. Wargrave’s eyes. The man did not blink. From the corner of the desk, Howie slowly lifted his red-sneakered feet and planted them firmly on the plastic runner beneath his swivel chair.

  Two weeks ago, Mr. Wargrave had still had the capacity to frighten Howie. The huge man, in his perpetually unwrinkled, knife-edged suit—every pinstripe of which seemed etched by laser—struck Howie at first as the archetypical Tyrannical Boss, a figure who would rule the office with shouts and humiliating put-downs. Mr. Wargrave’s knobby shaven skull and granitic gargoyle’s face did little to inspire confidence in his human kindness, either.

  But during the fortnight since Howie had been hired by The United Illuminating Company, he had come to lose the natural wariness and alarm, the chill feeling under his armpits and below his belt, that he had initially felt whenever his boss walked stiffly through the office. For one thing, Mr. Wargrave’s rather alarming features never changed. Such deadpan features might still have been frightening, had their possessor ever raised his voice or used his physical bulk to threaten. But Mr. Wargrave had done none of these things. Quite to the contrary, he kept his voice low and his body language minimally intrusive. Whenever he had talked to one of Howie’s fellow workers, in fact, he had always spoken so softly that Howie—no matter how he strained— had never been able to overhear what was being said.

  So after about ten workdays, Howie had lost all his natural suspicion of Mr. Wargrave.

  Contributing to Howie’s insouciance around his superior was boredom: an immense, almost unbearable, nearly physical boredom.

  Howie had been hired as a messenger. One day he had noticed a placard propped in the lobby window of a nondescript building he passed every morning after exiting th
e subway stop, on his way to hang out in Union Square. At first, confused by the smudges on the window glass and the distressed nature of the sign, Howie thought the faded card read:

  MESS DESIRED

  A WAR

  W ILL COME

  SECOND FLOOR

  Eventually, though, by puzzling out the barely legible missing letters, Howie discerned, he thought, the true message, which was:

  MESSENGER DESIRED

  APPLY WARGRAVE

  WALK UP TO THE UNITED ILLUMINATING COMPANY

  SECOND FLOOR

  Until that minute, Howie had had no intention of applying for any job whatsoever. He enjoyed being an aimless layabout too much. But something about the dual message hidden in the placard intrigued him, and he resolved to at least go up and find out what it was all about.

  On the second floor of the building, Howie inquired of a receptionist about the position. After a short wait he was led to the office of Mr. Wargrave. There the strange man, seated behind a big desk whose top bore a confusing array of papers, had simply looked him up and down before softly announcing, “You’re hired.”

  “Hey, wait a minute,” Howie had protested, faintly alarmed. “I never said anything about—”

  “The job entails a weekly salary of $750.”

  “Okay,” said Howie. “When do I start?”

  Howie had shown up for work that first day dressed like all the other messengers he had ever seen rushing about the city on bikes or afoot. A nice absorbent cotton shirt in anticipation of working up a sweat; loose green military pants with about two dozen pockets, the cuffs of which were tucked into white socks; and a pair of high-topped Pro-Keds. At his belt hung a Walkman, headphones draped around his neck.

  The receptionist—a pretty young blonde woman—conducted Howie into a big open room scattered with desks and lit with unrelenting fluorescent fixtures. At the desks sat a variety of people, shuffling crazily through heaps of papers mainly, although a few worked at terminals. This space—along with the receptionist’s anteroom and Mr. Wargrave’s office—seemed to comprise the whole physical structure of The United Illuminating Company.