The Water-Method Man

(He chomps the splice lever down again)

CUT.

(Sync sound. A dazzling series of stage lights are set up outside the closed bathroom door in Tulpen's apartment. Inside the bathroom a toilet flushes. Kent moves into frame, waiting in ambush at the bathroom door with a big microphone in his hand. Bogus opens the door, zips up his fly, looks up surprised into camera. He is angry; he bats Kent aside and glares at camera)

BOGUS (Yelling, his face distorted): Would you fuck off, Ralph!

24

How Far Can You Get with an Arrow in Your Tit?

IT WARMED HIS heart to find Overturf still listed in the phone book at the same address, with the same number. But when he tried to call from the lobby of the Taschy, there was a strange whirring cry over the phone, some sort of signal. He asked Frau Taschy, who informed him that the noise meant that the number was no longer in service. Then he realized that the phone book was more than five years old, and that his own name was listed in it - at the same address, with the same number.

Trumper walked to Schwindgasse 15, apartment 2. A brass nameplate on the door said: A. PLOT.

Rather like Merrill, Bogus thought. Beating on the door, he heard scuffles, perhaps a growl. He pushed and the door opened, but only so far as the ball-and-chain device would let it. It was fortunate that it didn't open further, because the large German shepherd inside the apartment was only able to get the tip of his snarling muzzle in the crack of the door. Trumper jumped back unbitten, and a woman - blond, her hair in curlers, her eyes angry or frightened or both - asked him what in hell he meant by trying to sneak into her apartment.

'Merrill Overturf?' he said to her, standing well back on the landing in case she let her German shepherd out.

'You're not Merrill Overturf,' she told him.

'No, of course I'm not,' he said, but she closed the door. 'Wait!' he cried after her. 'I just wanted to know where he was ...' But he heard her voice speaking low, presumably on the phone, and left quickly.

Out on the Schwindgasse, he looked up at what had once been Overturf s famous window box. Merrill had grown pot in it. But now the window box contained only some purplish dead plants poking out through a dusting of snow.

A child wheeled her tricycle up to the lobby door and got off to open it. Bogus helped her.

'Does Merrill Overturf live in this building?' he asked her. She either caught his accent or had been told never to speak to strangers, because she looked at him as if she had no intention of answering.

'Where do you think Herr Overturf went?' he asked her gently, helping her get her trike inside. But the little girl just stared at him. 'Herr Overturf?' he said to her slowly. 'Do you remember? He had a funny car, he wore funny hats ...' The little girl didn't appear to know anything. Upstairs the big dog barked. 'What happened to Herr Overturf?' Bogus tried once more.

The little girl was edging her tricycle away from him. 'Dead?' she asked him; it was a guess, he felt sure. Then she ran away, streaking toward the stairs, leaving him with a chill equaled only by the one he felt when he heard a door open above, heard the woman with the hair curlers yelling at the child, heard the clatter of what had to be the big dog's toenails coming downstairs.

Trumper fled. The little girl didn't know anything anyway; that was clear. With some astonishment, he realized that the father of the child must be named A. Plot.

With a bag of sidewalk-roasted chestnuts, Bogus slouches in the general direction of the Michaelerplatz, where there's a grotesque statue he remembers. A Zeus-like giant of a man, or a god, is struggling with sea monsters, snakes, birds of prey, lions and young nymphets; they are dragging him down to the main spigot of a fountain that splashes his chest; his mouth gapes in strain - or perhaps he is thirsty. The whole work is so overwrought that it's hard to tell whether Zeus is in control, or whether the creatures draped around him are wrestling him down or trying to lift him up.

Bogus recalls weaving through the Michaelerplatz one night, drunk with Biggie. They had just swiped some huge white radishes as long as carrots off a horsecart. Passing by this monstrous eternal struggle in the fountain, Bogus boosted Biggie up and she placed a radish in the gaping god's mouth. For energy, she said.

Thinking he'll feed the wrestler a chestnut, Trumper is surprised to find the fountain shut off. Or the spigot has frozen; it spouts a thick, blunt phallus, a rigid, wax-gobbed candle, and the Zeus figure's chest is layered with ice. Somehow, though the pose is the same, the struggle appears to be over. He's dead, thinks Bogus, and there's no point in feeding chestnuts to the dead. He regrets the demise of the god, finally conquered by the snakes and sea monsters, lions and nymphets. Trumper knows: It was the nymphets who finally got to him.

Surely Biggie would be miserable to hear the news. Surely she is miserable.

Biggie, it may be hard for you to believe this, but ... when you go duck hunting, you wear a condom. It's an old sportsman's trick against the cold. You see, all the duck hunters slip on a condom before they go retrieving fallen birds from icy waters - when they don't have dogs, which we didn't. It works on the same principle as a wet-suit ...

Or - wandering now through the Habsburgs' courtyard, the Plaza of Heroes - the reason I was wearing that unmentionable rubber, which I neglected to remove, was because of my new part-time job as a demonstration model for the Student Health Service's class for freshmen in Sex Education. I was too embarrassed to tell you about it. They hadn't told me there would be a session on contraception. 0f course the class was surprised.

But Bogus feels the cold eyes of the stony cupids on him; passing under these Baroque cherubs and the pigeons perched on the formidable palace buildings, he knows that Biggie is no sucker. She is already too familiar with the improbability of me.

He watches the Strassenbahnen tilting along the Burg Ring, their sharp bells gonging at the intersections. Inside, the streetcar passengers steam and smear the windows, and the men look like overcoats hung on a clothes rack with people in them. They jostle and sway with every lurch of the tram; their hands on the overhead rails are above the windows, and Bogus can see only that their arms are raised, like children in school, like soldiers at a rally.

Wanting to kill the afternoon, Trumper reads his way around a tattered kiosk. The afternoon, he feels, would die most painlessly at some Sunday matinee for kids, and miraculously he finds one, up Stadiongasse and behind the Parliament building.

There are many short subjects and an American Western. Trumper travels to Ireland, sees the happy peasants. In Java the travel guide tells the audience about the national pastime: boxing with your feet. But Bogus and the children are restless; they want the Western. And here it comes at last! Jimmy Stewart, speaking German, almost in time with the dubbed-in German voice. The Indians did not want the railroad. That was the plot.

Jimmy Stewart pumped a carbine from his hip, and it might have been a pre-ravaged Shelley Winters with an arrow sunk in her ample bosom. Whoever she was, she rolled off the caboose, down a gully, into a creek where she was trampled by wild horses - just passing by - and lecherously mauled by an Indian who was too chicken to attack the train. She was forced to endure all these things until she could locate the derringer stuffed in her bleeding cleavage, with which she blew a large hole through the Indian's throat. Not until then did she stand upright and sodden, all the creek-and blood-soaked parts of her garments clinging to her, and yell, 'Hilfe!' - all this while wrenching away at the arrow stuck in her heaving tit.

Stopping for a greasy sausage and a glass of new wine, Trumper sat in the Augustiner Keller listening to an ancient string quartet and reflecting that Hollywood stunt women would be very interesting to meet, but that he hoped not all of them had hair in their cleavage.