The Water-Method Man

'Well, did you?' the prophet asked impatiently. 'Merrill Overturf, you said, wasn't it? Weren't you looking for him? Did you find him?'

All the Hawelka waited for an answer. Bogus balked; he felt as if he were a reel of film being rewound before he was finished.

'Well?' said the neon-green girl softly. 'Did you find him?'

'I don't know,' Trumper said.

'You don't know?' the prophet boomed.

With a sickening sympathy in her voice, the neon-green girl begged him, 'Here, come and sit, you. You've got to get this off your mind, I think. I can tell ...'

But he whirled himself and his bulky suitcase toward the door, hitting the waiter in the groin with it and causing that natty, agile man to fold - maintaining, for just a moment, a neat balancing feat with the sliding coffees and beers on his tray.

The prophet made a grab for Bogus at the door, but Bogus slipped by him, hearing the prophet announce, 'He must be on something ...' Just before the door closed, he heard the prophet call, 'Ride it out. You'll come down ...'

Outside the Hawelka, someone in the shadows touched his hand with something like affection.

'Merrill?' Bogus asked in a whimper.

'Gra! Gra!' the man said, turning like a quarterback and thrusting a parcel, Whunk!, in Trumper's stomach. When he straightened up, the man was gone.

Stepping to the curb, he held the parcel up to the light; it was a firm, white-papered package, tied up with white butcher's string. He undid it. It looked like chocolate in that neon light, smooth and dark, queerly sticky to the touch; it gave off a minted smell. A mentholated slab of fudge? Queer gift. Then he bent closely over it, sniffed it deeply and touched it with his tongue. It was pure hashish, a perfectly cut rectangle slightly larger than a brick.

A clamor rose in his head as he tried to imagine what it was worth.

In the fogged-up window of the Hawelka, he saw a hand rub a peepsight out to the street. A voice inside announced, 'He's still there.'

So then he quickly wasn't. He didn't intend to go back out on the broad Graben; it was just the direction he happened to jog in that brought him out on to this glittery whoreful street. He crammed the hashish brick into his suitcase.

He didn't intend to speak to anyone, either; it was just that when he saw the lady in the fur coat with the matching muff, he saw she'd changed her clothes. No more fur coat, no more muff; she wore a spring suit, as if it were warm.

He asked her if she had the time.

27

How is Anything Related to Anything Else?

RALPH WAS ATTEMPTING to explain the structure of his film by comparing it to a contemporary novel, Helmbart's Vital Telegrams.

'The structure is everything,' he said. Then he quoted a blurb from the book jacket which said that Helmbart had achieved some kind of breakthrough. 'The transitions - all the associations, in fact - are syntactical, rhetorical, structural; it is almost a story of sentence structure rather than of characters; Helmbart complicates variations on forms of sentences rather than plot,' it read.

Kent nodded a lot, but Ralph was more anxious that Trumper and Tulpen understand him. The comparison to Helmbart's work was supposed to cast some needed light on Tulpen's editing and Trumper's sound tracking. 'Do you see?' Ralph asked Tulpen.

'Did you like that book, Ralph?' Tulpen asked.

'Not the point, not the point, not the fucking point!' said Ralph. 'I'm interested in it only as an example. Of course I didn't like it.'

'I thought it was awful,' Tulpen said.

'It was almost unreadable,' said Trumper, marching off to the bathroom with the book under his arm. In fact, he hadn't even looked at it yet.

He sat in the bathroom surrounded by messages, due to the fact that the phone was in the bathroom. Ralph had moved it there when he became suspicious of the number of long-distance calls, which none of them would admit to making. He was sure that people were dropping in off Christopher Street to make long-distance calls. They sneaked in, according to his theory, when he and Bogus and Tulpen and Kent were busy in the other rooms of the studio. But someone dropping in like that wouldn't dream of looking for the phone in the bathroom.

'Suppose they drop in to use the bathroom?' Trumper had asked.

But the phone was installed there, anyway. The walls, the flush-box lid, the mirror and the shelves were dotted with reminders, phone numbers, urgent requests and Kent's garbled translations of messages.

Taking the phone off the hook, Trumper opened Vital Telegrams. Ralph had remarked that the success of the structure made it possible to open the book at random and understand everything immediately, no matter where you began. Trumper opened it in the middle and read Chapter 77 from beginning to end.