Just a Couple of Days Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue: Logos Libido

  GLIDING WITH THE GLOW

  THE KALEIDOSCOPE COLLAPSES

  PRANCE OF THE PIED PIPER

  Epilogue: Supralingual Sex

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Sample Chapter of Nine Kinds of Naked

  Buy the Book

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2001 by Tony Vigorito

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhco.com

  Excerpt from Nine Kinds of Naked copyright © 2007 by Tony Vigorito

  First U.S. edition published by Bast Books, 2001.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Vigorito, Tony.

  Just a couple of days/Tony Vigorito.—1st Harvest ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Biological weapons—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3622.I48J87 2007

  813'.6—dc22 2006027199

  ISBN 978-0-15-603122-6

  eISBN 978-0-547-54109-9

  v2.0215

  For Jessica.

  Three words never seemed enough.

  Life is paradise, and we are all in paradise, but we refuse to see it. If we would, we should have heaven on earth the very next day.

  —Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Prologue: Logos Libido

  Why aren’t apples called reds? What a dumb question, I used to think, before a five-year-old named Dandelion taught me otherwise.

  Why aren’t apples called reds? One could just as easily ask, Why aren’t bananas called yellows, or why are oranges called oranges? These are essentially the same question, no matter the outfit in which we dress her.

  Why aren’t apples called reds? All questions are female. All answers are male. If you’re wondering why this might be the case, you are thinking with your feminine sensibilities. If you’re considering why this is the case, you are thinking with your masculine senses. Questions are creative, intimidating, and periodically irritating. We may think them docile, we may try to ignore or suppress them, but their destabilizing power persists, pushing us toward our proper destiny. Answers are protective, giving us some ground, however shaky, on which to stand. Answers are cool, logical, but they can also become stubborn know-it-alls, resisting the emergence of new questions and answers and deteriorating into conservative old farts. Truth is a precarious balance between poignancy and peace. Truth lies within the perpetual prance of yin and yang.

  Why aren’t apples called reds? Look at her. She blushes exactly like an apple in the harvest sunshine every time she’s pronounced. She is an honest question, unassuming and not at all arrogant. She is demure, to be sure, but her diffidence is her only defense to the endless parade of listless shrugs and wise-assed banalities that have been answering her every utterance since shortly after the dawn of time.

  Why aren’t apples called reds? She’s an old question, one of the oldest, in fact, and a bachelorette until Dandelion introduced her to her long-lost answer. The oldest question, that is to say, the first question borne on the vibrations of a monkey’s larynx, is of course Why are we here? After all, if we are to believe those rumors about Adam and Eve, this question surely occurred to them while they were still munching their apples of knowledge. It could not have been very long, perhaps while they were abashedly affixing fig leaf pasties over their genitalia, before one of them wondered why that stupid fruit was called an apple (or a pomegranate or whatever) in the first place.

  Why aren’t apples called reds? She does not mind these repetitious pronouncements of her essence. She used to fumble and fret, but now she pays her continued vocalizations only courteous heed. She found her answer, though most of us never received the wedding announcement. It was a wild party, some say the wildest the linguistic universe had ever seen. But the Logos, the realm of all questions and answers and the ultimate source of all knowledge, knows this to be an exaggeration. There is another question, the oldest question, whose impending union promises to be the highest time of all.

  Why are we here? Come on people now, let’s introduce them already. We know her answer. We’re just afraid to admit it.

  PART ONE:

  GLIDING WITH THE GLOW

  1 No event, no matter how preposterous, will fail to find itself indispensable to some future happenstance. Hence, as I sit here sipping instant coffee in my makeshift prison cell, I am led to wonder when the daily accidents of my existence began whispering among themselves and conspiring to place me, and perhaps humanity, in such a dire and peculiar predicament.

  This is nuts, really. This is some previously undiscovered variety of craziness. This is a singularity, something else entirely, and I just don’t get it. Everyone in town is laughing and dancing like there’s no tomorrow (and that cliché may well be a literality), and I’m left counting my fingers like some bewildered bumpkin. Consequently, it would be premature of me to assert what exactly this is, and so, borrowing an irritating habit from a very good friend of mine, I must leave this temporarily undefined.

  Here’s the thing. I could theoretically retrace the path of occurrences leading to this from the beginning of time (and perhaps I well should), but I cannot risk courting such infinite regress. It’s a long story, as they say, but not that long, and so instead I shall retreat to a much safer point of departure from which to commence my telling: the weather. Yes, let’s talk about the weather. Let us linger for a nostalgic moment in the safety of the humdrum, the shelter of the mundane, where the commonplace is common and not some misty reminiscence.

  The weather was awful. It was hot—sticky, stinky hot, hot like a smoggy sauna with an overdue litterbox stewing in the corner, and it stayed that way all summer. The season had been pranked by the El Niño weather devil in the Pacific Ocean. Dr. Blip Korterly, my best friend, says El Niño is Spanish for “global warming.” He’s joking. El Niño means “the child” (or more precisely, “the boy”), and indeed, the candy-brat climate was pegged on sugar and unable to simmer down. It was in this hyperactive atmosphere that Blip went mad. I hasten to add that he was not what you might term psychotic. Rather, he lost himself somewhere on the harmless side of lunacy, slightly south of innocuous but definitely north of demented.

  It is at least possible that the disagreeable climate had something to do with the blossoming of Blip’s eccentricity. He certainly wasn’t the only person in our big Ohio town acting suddenly screwy. Last summer it seemed as if everyone was rocking their chairs frightfully close to the tip of their arcs. But lest I scapegoat the prevailing meteorological milieu, the sweaty weather cannot be held solely responsible for toppling Blip off his rocker. He had, after all, recently lost his job, and before then he was already tempting the point of no return. Never much of a cheerleader for cognitive conformity in the first place, he charged instead through the brambles and brush on the margins of consensus reality in search of berries most people wouldn’t touch even if they could reach them. This past summer, however, Blip ate the wrong berry and lost sight of the beaten path altogether, and however hazy the line between innovation and insanity may be, he was unmistakably sipping iced tea with the hatters and the hares.

  Perhaps
it was appropriate, then, when he became the accidental and anonymous ringleader of what his wife once referred to as “mass meshugas.” As far as I can tell, or as far as I’m willing to see, events began their inexorable dance toward this with a mania-inspired misdemeanor committed by Blip, unemployed and unesteemed professor of sociology and nouveau graffiti artist. He found a canvas for his artistic expression on an overpass near campus, a bridge under which most of the city’s commuters had to pass every afternoon. After covering all the FUCKs and I LOVE YOU TRACYs on the bridge’s side with black paint early one morning, he replaced them with a simple, unexplained expression, written in dripless white: uh-oh. Then he called at 4:00 A.M. to tell me about it, justifying his vandalism as “freedom of landscape” and refusing to explain what it was supposed to mean. He made me promise not to tell anyone, not even his wife, but it matters not who knows any of these tres-passings and transgressions now.

  For a few weeks, countless drivers on their way home from work could not help but read Blip’s tag along with the dozens of billboards for a dazzling variety of consumer crap. As it happened, it piqued their collective curiosity and gave the urban workforce pause to think. Drive-time disc jockeys quickly assumed the role of moderator as commuters called in from their cellular phones to argue about the significance of the graffiti. Untold speculation abounded as the dreary, air-conditioned masses projected their own anxieties onto the bridge, and it very quickly became the favorite topic of idle chatter as coworkers gabbed about the vandalism during their cigarette and coffee breaks like it was last night’s popular sitcom. Blip’s graffiti gave people something in common, however bizarre, and an esprit de corps never before known settled over the city like an intoxicating cloud of good cheer.

  Then it happened, inevitably and yet wholly unexpectedly. Some bold soul responded, and an entire city was surprised and a little embarrassed that they had not thought of doing the same. It was simple. One day the bridge was broadcasting UH-OH, and the next day the graffiti had been replaced with an equally confounding message painted in a distinctly different style: WHEN? Blip nearly choked on his delight at this turn of events, and called me every hour to talk about it so he wouldn’t burst and tell someone else.

  “I’ll let it be for a while,” he resolved. “But I’m gonna have to respond.”

  “What will you say?”

  “How should I know? I don’t even know what we’re talking about.”

  This was not the case with everyone else, who now debated their personal takes on the graffiti exchange at every opportunity. Local religious zealots claimed it was an omen from on high or thereabouts, while employers pointed out that the number of sick days taken by their employees had plummeted since the enigmatic declarations had appeared. One local columnist offered his own wry observations, claiming to be surrounded by morons and casting himself above such desperate ridiculosity. He was relieved of his column following a torrent of angry letters from readers. Wise guy.

  And so it developed. Public enthusiasm for what came to be called “Graffiti Bridge” was overwhelming. Mayor Punchinello originally decried the graffiti as a blatant show of disrespect for the law and a scar upon the landscape, and vowed to put whomever was responsible behind bars. He toned down his rhetoric immediately, however, after a public outcry ensued when someone leaked to the press that he had ordered the bridge sandblasted. The mayor’s spokespersons immediately denied the rumor, what with an election in November, and the graffiti stayed.

  Then came Blip’s response, despite increased patrols around the bridge. Surprising everyone, he broke with the initial one-word pattern and wrote an entire phrase, taking the time to paint: just a couple of days. He resisted phoning me until the next evening to see what I thought.

  “It works,” I said, not wanting to encourage him.

  “My ass it works. That phrase has never worked a day in its life. It dances, man, it dances across the side of that bridge.”

  Working or dancing, the city was in a mild uproar for the next two days, eager to see what would happen. Strangers shared amiable smirks of solidarity with one another on the street, bars and coffeehouses made record business, and the traffic jams under the bridge took on a festive atmosphere no authority could or would suppress. Vendors set up tents and tables on the median, and picnics and Frisbees soon followed.

  Local ad guys were surely incensed. Some sloppy graffiti on a highway overpass was gaining the coveted attention they never received for their flashy billboards. To add insult to injury, a monkey-wrenching truck driver demolished a billboard near the bridge with a few pounds of dynamite. He was arrested and questioned about the bridge as well, but his travel log, stamped at truck stops around the country, provided a reasonable alibi. In the end, he received a nine-month jail sentence, but SALE EXTRAVAGANZA! had still been reduced to ZA!

  But two days passed, then three, then four, and nothing at all happened. Nevertheless, it was generally agreed that the meaning of couple was not to be taken literally, for if it was, the mysterious scribe would have written two days instead. couple was taken to mean a few, or several, or however long it took for something to happen or for another reply to appear. Granted, the traffic snarls around the bridge were no longer so lighthearted (or frequent, for that matter), but the local population enjoyed the saga too much to let semantics get in the way. Blip was thus granted poetic license. He had been worried when the initial excitement dissipated, fearing he had foolishly ruined all of the fun.

  “All right,” Blip breathed a sigh of relief one day in late September, after it was apparent that Graffiti Bridge had not waned in popularity. “It’s his turn. But God help him. This dialogue has outgrown us already, and there’s no telling where we’re headed now.”

  2 “What if this happened?” Blip halted our heretofore silent stroll across Tynee University, which despite its name was the largest campus in the country. I stopped reluctantly, sensing a stark-raving delusion on the swell. My intuition was confirmed when I turned around and found Blip standing motionless, staring into his Styrofoam cup of cranberry echinacea tea and muttering under his breath. “They’re putting,” he began aloud, “they’re putting poison in the teas. Small amounts of a mild toxin, so that anyone who drinks herbal tea for health will only get sicker, see?” He slapped my arm with the back of his hand.

  “What?” I looked past him at a small crowd of people gathering nearby in an attempt to hide my irritation at his increasingly fantastic paranoid fantasies.

  “Poison!” he emphasized. “Don’t you see? Any healing properties are canceled out then!”

  “Blip . . . ,” I began.

  “Who’s gonna drink tea that makes you feel sick, eh?” He heaved the tea out of his cup. The broken mass of liquid flew several feet to his side and splotched onto a squirrel, flattening its tail and making it look more like a rat as it raced madly up the nearest tree.

  “Christ, Blip! No one’s poisoning your tea!”

  “You heard it here first,” he persisted. “They’re poisoning the teas.” He shook his head in sorrow, and so did I. Blip was a professor of sociology, but his department was being combined with the Anthropology, Political Science, Psychology, History, English, and Philosophy departments. It was part of Tynee University’s downsizing and restructuring plan, combining all these departments into a single Humanities Department, which itself would be smaller than any one of the previous departments. Consequently, a good many Ph.D.s were going to lose their jobs. Blip was one of them, and he was not taking it well. He began spouting bizarre conspiracy theories the morning after the decision was finalized late last spring, calling to tell me that Tynee Industries was disposing of its low-level radioactive waste by selling it off in minute quantities as staples through its office supplies branch. I, Dr. Flake Fountain, was unaffected by the restructuring. I was a molecular biologist then. Now I’m a threat to national security as well.

  “Here’s something interesting.” Blip snapped out of his herbal tea desponden
cy and stooped to pluck a mushroom growing in a patch near the walkway. “Do you realize that this mushroom is bigger than the entire Green?”

  “You haven’t been eating those mushrooms, have you?”

  “These are Haymaker’s mushrooms. They’re only mildly psychotropic, but very poisonous,” he responded matter-of-factly, beginning to tap his foot, as was his way whenever he became excited. “But see, this isn’t a separate organism. What’s in my hand is only a single part of a much larger whole. Look around, man. You’ll notice these little brown bells all over the Green, whenever it’s drizzled a lot.” He walked me along the sidewalk, pointing out the peppering of small mushrooms that were scattered everywhere. “See, the mushrooms are just the fruiting bodies of a much larger organism that exists underground. Mushroom roots are called mycelium, and the mycelium is actually a huge network of fibers that are entwined and interconnected beneath our feet. It’s just like an aspen grove. It looks like a bunch of different trees, but they grow rhizomatically, and are actually only a single tree. Did you know that?”

  “Since when are you a botanist?”

  “Mycologist,” he corrected. “And you should know the difference, a biologist like yourself. Mushrooms aren’t plants. They don’t have any chlorophyll.”

  “I’m a molecular biologist,” I began to explain, then waved him off. Blip already understood the distinction. He was only hassling me for what he claimed was my excessive knowledge of the minutiae of life and my relative ignorance of the bigger picture. I amended my question. “Since when are you a mycologist?”