JON SURGAL
399
finger. He's waiting for the thunderbolt. He wants to see God."
Mick sat back in his chair. He was sweating hard. He needed to put a
lid on it. His throat began to tighten, though, and he could tell he was
going to vomi t.
"All I'm saying," he mumbled, looking around for the men's room, "is
I think he's basically a religious man."
HeimJich's wife took one last drag on her cigarette and dinched it in
her glass of water. The cigarette went dead with a hiss of terminal agony.
It
turned brown and sank to the bottom of the glass.
"Personally," Heimlich's wife said, "I think he's a fag."
* * *
Generalisimo Francisco Franco died on a Wednesday, and HeimJich's
Winter Of Our Discontent party took place three days later.
Mick stood outside the door listening to the music and the chatter
coming from inside the apartment. He did not feel like making an
entrance. He felt obscurely guilty for having had nothing to do with
Franco's death. He edged into the stairwell and tried the back door, and it
was open.
He found himself in the kitchen. There were plastic glasses and liquor
bottles on the kitchen table, and people he did not know standing around
with drinks in their hands. Mick recognized a young professor with tenure
in the English Department at Columbia. The professor had an Arab name
that Mick could not remember. He was wearing a cable-stitch sweater and
a polished look of boredom. He was standing with his back to the side–
board and smoking some kind of high-tech pipe. The shaft of it was all
metal, as polished as his expression. It was hanging out of his mouth like a
prosthetic tongue at half mast. A girl in a tee-shirt was standing next to
him, straining to follow his conversation. She seemed dutifully impressed
by him.
"It's important for us to have things beyond our
ken,"
the professor
was saying. "We orphans of the void have a need to believe in order. Never
mind that we find none in our lives, no grand design, no schema: we need
it so it must be there. It'sjust that we are not equipped to
perceive
it, that's
all. Keep the door closed and you can always convince yourself there's
something behind it."
The girl in the tee-shirt took a sip of her drink. She was playing for
time.
"You know what I really like," she said at last. "Most people think
they're a drag but
r
really like them is horror movies."
"Horror movies." The young professor sucked on his pipe and nod–
ded as if she had said exactly the right thing. "They posit a very palpable
