There was a pause
while the other party thought it over.
“You’re not lying on
the floor naked are you, Cass?”
“Geez Joy, of course not,” he said irritably in the direction
of the speakerphone. “But actually,
what do you care? You are my mistress,” he added winningly.
“Not on the carpet in
your office, I’m not,” said Joy.
His Enormity, Mayor
Cass Tamberlaine, was in the throes of an idea and desperately desired a second
opinion. It was three a.m.—the
hour at which Cass invariably got his best ideas. It was not, unfortunately, the hour at which Joy Pommery
felt best disposed to listen to them.
“Very well,” she told
him wearily. “I’ll be there as
soon as I can.”
Cass switched off the
phone and paced the deep-pile sea on which, at one end of the room, his desk
sat marooned like a derelict freighter.
He went to the window to look out at the grimy city, sparkling, in what
he always felt was an over-compensatory way, with twinkling lights. Lights going wink wink wink all night
long.
The lights always
irritated him. In burning through
the darkness, in so effortlessly rising above it, they always seemed to possess
some kind of secret and superior knowledge—as if they were little twinkling
minds. Maddening sprights of
light—the city’s fireflies. A
million little pinpricks of conscience.
“Alright,” he muttered out loud to himself, turning
away from the window, “so I smoke too much and eat too much and am okay a
little bit heavier than I should to be and, yes, am grateful once in a while
for the artificial liftoff certain chemical compounds provide, surely that’s
not enough to piss off the public, is it? Beyond Reality TV shows and fried foods, people don’t know
what the hell they what anyhow!”
He went over to the
mirror on the bathroom door and took another look. Of course he didn’t like what he saw there. He never liked what he saw. He was indisputably a mountain of a man—a mountain that was
soft and tumbledown, billowed, not a mountain that was hard and craggy. He looked as if he were melting.
“I’ve got to get in
shape,” he said to his always unsympathetic reflection, a reflection that, he
felt, invariably sneered back at him whenever he talked to it. There was no help anywhere.
Except that Joy was
coming.
“Godammit where is she anyhow?” he asked his empty office, and,
receiving no reply beyond the disgruntled conch-shell roar of the shadowy,
unused spaces through which he sluggishly paced, day after day, night after
night, like a caged hippo, he threw himself disconsolately onto the floor.
Lying there, bereft
of comfort, unsustained by ideas or insight, Cass felt three quite different
things all at the same time.
First, he felt, once again, like taking all his clothes off. Second, he felt like having a big
bucket of white chocolate ice cream.
And third, he wanted to feel the cool hand of Joy Pommery gently wiping
his copiously perspiring forehead with his pocket handkerchief and whispering
to him that all would be well.
How could all—or
anything at all—be well? Someone
one was, after all, trying to kill him.
He thought again about the horrible, beautifully painted death threats
that had been sent to him—and were now stacked in one of his desk drawers. To tell the truth, he couldn’t decide
whether to give them to the police or have them framed and hung on the walls.
But he did have this
one idea, and he wanted to see what Joy felt about it. If she ever turned up.
Happily, at just that
exact moment, there was a dainty knock—or maybe it was a weary knock—at the
office door, after which Joy let herself in.
“Joy!
Thank God!”
“Glad to see me, are
you?” she smiled at him. “I sort
of half expected to find you lying naked on the floor with a hopeless
erection!”
“Well, it almost came to that,” he told her.
“You said you had an
idea you wanted to run past me.”
“That’s right,” he
told her. “Look at these.”
He went to his
desk and came back with three or four glossy-looking pamphlets.
“What do you think of
these?”
Joy glanced at them.
“Isolation tanks?”
she asked.
“Flotation tanks. I think to float sounds more appealing than to be isolated.”
“What do you want
with one of these?” Joy asked him.
“They’re sensory deprivation tanks.
They’re filled with warm water and Epsom salts and you get into the tank
nude and somebody closes the lid and you float face-up in the dark and you
can’t see anything, or hear anything or smell anything or feel anything. Cass, you’d go mad in three minutes!
You’d be clawing and scratching to get out, screaming a dead, echoless
scream like some overweight version of one of those Edgar Allan Poe buried-alive
stories!”
Cass looked
crestfallen.
“I thought it’d be
good for my nerves,” he told her.
“It’d probably
introduce you to nerves you didn’t even know you had!” said Joy.
“Well I’ve got a lot
on my mind, Joy,” said Cass, “and I need some relief. I need to calm down.
These things are supposed to help.”
“I just can’t see one
working for you, Cass.”
“Well, anyway I want
to give it a shot.”
“Where are you going
to put the damned thing?”
“I thought right here
in my office.”
“You’re going to have
to smuggle it in. And it’s going
to be as big as a Volkswagen!
“Why will I have to
smuggle it in?”
“Because,” Joy told
him patiently, marvelling once again at his lack of political savvy, “it isn’t
a good idea for the already beleaguered citizens of Toronto to picture their
mayor, naked, floating heavily like an iceberg in a closed, black, coffin-like
box, whiling away his mayoralty time dreaming ancient dreams of nothingness in
the dark.”
“Okay so they don‘t have to
know.”
“Much better they
shouldn’t,” said Joy.
