I had had the wildest dream and was still partly inside it when I heard the first clink. There was a puddle, and the sun making the puddle dazzle, and a cat hissing at a bird that was whistling a German lullaby, and a gigantic Pam Grier in black spandex and pleated mini skirt clasping me by the head with her massive breasts. But then I heard a further clink and a swish like a blade being sharpened and I was wide awake. But what I saw was far weirder than anything in my dream. I saw a man in a fin de siècle bathing suit, the kind that begins at the knees and ends just under the neck, striped red and white, very tight, with that bulge in the middle. He was sitting in a wicker chair, beaming at me and whetting a huge saber. He was pale and thin a sat very straight. He had a thin handlebar black mustache and big bright blue eyes that blinked at me intensely. And behind this strange figure, a wide-screen TV was blinking a muted film, a girl screaming as a mummy came at her with a butcher knife.
I tried sitting up and failed--partly because my hands were tied. A thick, itchy yarn. The man started laughing. He had a high-pitched shrieking laugh, like a girl. I said, "What--?" That's all I managed. I repeated it. "What--?"
"Vat!" he said, mimicking me, except he had a strange accent. "Vat! That's all these guys can say. It makes me crazy-angry, yah, all that shtraight talk. Vat! Vat! Vat! Ach, vatever! I am Zed. Nice meeting--vatever. Happy if I can help, ven I can help, yah, but these guys, shtupid shtraight guys, they can't tell the difference between helping and helping. Vatever, man. I'm vid it. I dig it. I'm a cat, I'm a shputnik, I'm the real deal, yah? Yah, I am a man, I am Zed, vatever, dude. I'm here, I'm very very here, catch my drift? Vatever. Easy as five six seven, get it? Ach, these guys aren't very funny at all. I mean very fun. Vatever. I shan't vaste my breath vid them. See my shtekl? I am a Samurai. A real Samurai, yah? I ain't making shit up, man, see? Vatever. I am a man, dude. I have a very big shtekl. They say I'm a girl. But vy? Can't they see my shtekl? I am as much a man as these shtupid he-men guys vid their shtupid shtraight talk. I am Zed and I am killing shtupid guys vid my very big shtekl."
I didn't quite get what he was driving at. I said, "Excuse me, mister--Zed, is it?--but I can't get up because my hands are tied, and I haven't the faintest idea why--" With a brusque gesture he dismissed all this. But I insisted, please, did he very much mind untying me?
"Yah, yah, untie me please," he said, mimicking me but with that bizarre accent. "Ach, but that's the thing, my shplendid little helpless balding man. A guy tied up is a guy's best freund. Ha! Ha! I kill myself I am such a funnyman, yah? Ha! But really, my freund, my pal, in all sincerity, let's talk business, shan't we? This isn't just fun and games, yah? I have an assignment, yah? Zed gets paid, yah? Zed isn't a call girl. Zed isn't a shtrumpet. Zed is a man and Zed has an assignment, and guess vat is Zed's assignment?"
"Man," I said. I still didn't get what he was saying. "Please, help me cut this--"
"Guess!" he shrieked.
"Huh?" I said.
"Yah, tell me," he said, and tapped his saber at the tip, which went pling. "Pling! Vat is my assignment? Vat is Zed's assignment?"
"I haven't the faintest idea," I said.
"Guess," he said. "I like playing guessing games."
I said I didn't feel like guessing and I didn't feel like playing games because my hands were tied and getting up wasn't feasible and peeing was imperative.
"Ach!" he cried. "These shtupid guys aren't any fun! Vatever. Fine, I'll reveal my assignment. My assignment is killing shtupid guys tied up that can't play games. Dig? Yah? Vatever."
But he was such a freak, with his skinny limbs and his silly accent and swimming trunks and saber, that I didn't believe him. I started laughing.
"Ah, they all alvays laugh when I say that," he said, delighted, clapping. "I find it very funny that they find it all very funny. Ha! And I alvays say, yah, in all sincerity I am a hired killer, yah? And they just keep laughing, these shtupid guys."
This time I wasn't laughing.
He jumped up and began swishing his saber, practicing several thrusting techniques. "Guess vat?" he said. "I like cutting guys' ears. As practice, yah?" He drew nearer and nearer, swishing his saber in my face.
"Please--!" I cried.
"Please please please," he said. "They all say please please please! Vatever. I have an assignment. I get paid. I must kill this guy and that guy. It's just business, yah?"
"Please--!" I cried again.
Suddenly he drew back, walked all the way back, and leaned against the wall. Then he drew his saber and began fighting against the air, thrusting, parrying, feinting, lunging, side-stepping, check-stepping, slaying invisible adversaries. Then he paused, turned, and heaving a shriek, he came at me with that saber. They say that in circumstances such as these, when death is imminent, the near-dead sees his entire life racing by like a time-lapse picture. But I didn't see any such thing. All I saw, but I saw it in minute detail, amplified, in 3D, was a stuffed bunny I had cherished as a child, white and fluffy, ears flapping, amber stud eyes, with a tag in its ass which, when pulled, released a bunny-like squeak. I called it Bubbles, sex undetermined. I still have it, in the attic in a trunk with similar sentimental items. Zelda played with Bubbles as well, ten years after me, but she never cherished it as I had; she had Baker, till she ripped him apart and flushed him away. And yet, years later, decades later, after a devastating breakup (a guy called Julian--I'd never even met him), she reclaimed Bubbles as her security bunny, as she called him (Bubbles was masculine in Zelda's mind). He helped her manage her pain, she said; and in fact she didn't get as drunk and she didn't guzzle as many drugs as she usually did after devastating breakups. It was during these five weeks she stayed with me and slept with Bubbles that my sister started believing in blindness. She'd shut her eyes and talk and talk. The guy Julian never came up; the devastating breakup never came up; actual events and actual individuals were replaced with general ideas, the particular with the abstract. She was inventing a new creed; what did she care if a particular guy named Julian was left behind? Her creed ran thus. Humans were blind, and walked in straight parallel independent paths, happy independent paths, until Fate, an all-seeing and all-scheming deity, made certain paths twist and turn and meander like snakes till, bang, parallel line A and parallel line B were all tangled up--tangled up because, by crashing, they were given sight: B saw A, A saw B. Man's natural state was blindness. His struggle: untangling himself and resuming his blind happy path, straight and independent.
Well, I didn't see it all happen because I saw Bubbles, and Zelda with Bubbles praising blindness, but I did see that as Zed came at me with his saber, he slipped and he fell, and the saber flew in the air like a sputnik, and the next thing I knew, Zed was impaled and bleeding, and dead. The saber had entered and exited his thin neck, inextricably binding him and the rug, where his vital fluids were making a puddle.
Getting up wasn't easy, since, as I said, my hands were tied, but after fussing and fidgeting and twisting, I made my way Zedward and, rubbing my yarn-shackles against the saber stuck in his neck, I snapped myself free, free at last. And free at last, I was mad as all hell. Where was that strumpet shrink that had seduced me and then let me be slaughtered by this bizarre individual? Had she sent him? But why?
Suddenly, thunder! I heard a wild, ear-piercing fart. It was Zed's carcass; dead Zed was shitting himself. Heaven preserve us, it stank like a hundred septic tanks. "Screw this," I said, I screamed, imagining Dana still in the apartment. "I'm leaving! Hear that? Fucking slut!"
I was making my exit as declared, when a certain item arrested my interest. It was a gun. I needed a gun. Bill's gun, which I had snatched up--yesterday, was it?--had been taken away. I examined this gun. It wasn't a regular gun; it was weird, it was fake. It was a clay gun, and it had a tag attached by a thin wire. The tag read: LUGER P08 1942 SMITHS. INST. 209 WH ST. NYC ZELDA MARCUS. There she was again, my blind sister, implicated in every damn thing. I studied the gun. It was definitely clay; it had a crackly greenish glaze and a little swastika beside the rear sight. Well, this was a fine antique. Had my sister swindled the Nazi Museum as well? I held the clay gun by the tag, letting it swing this way and that, as I planned my next step: decipher what WH meant, where 209 WH Street was, and hurry there. Well--what did I expect? things keep breaking--as the gun was swinging this way and that, the wire snapped and the gun fell. And the strangest thing happened. It didn't break immediately, but a minute later a thick crack appeared, a fissure starting at the butt and ending at the barrel, and the gun split in half. Well? There was a Big Mac wrapper by dead Zed's feet. I wrapped the cracked clay gun in it and left that shtupid apartment.
