Mayfield Bunny

By Herbert Feldman

Mayfield Bunny, the new novel by Herbert Feldman, author of Broken Record, is the story
of an obsessional search, architected in fantasy and self-delusion. The novels protagonist,
Dr. Egon Chernel, has dedicated his unruly, anarchic life to the elimination of human blindness on Planet Earth: Chernels astonishing scientific miracle, source of a certain Nobel Prize, depends upon his uncovering and interviewing Mayfield Bunny, a being of unknown species and image. Chernel gathers a small band of followers, needy individuals, in search of their own slot in society, around him. Chernel, chosen as savior of the sightless, tyrannically drives his disciples through his fanatical, lunatic hunt for his Holy Grail, Mayfield Bunny.

Mayfield Bunny is absurd, surreal, but the book is, ultimately, a tragic rendering of the lethal price one pays for a life lived in fantasy and uncompromising delusion. You wont easily forget Egon Chernel and his acolytes in their quest for the mystery and essence of Mayfield Bunny.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 1, 2006
• ISBN: 9781465324788

Herbert Feldman

Herbert Feldman lives and works in New York City. He is the author of Broken Record, published in 2005.

Book preview

Copyright © 2006 by Herbert Feldman.

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

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

CHAPTER ONE

(Chernel in Hister’s Tunnel)

CHAPTER TWO

(The Florida Arcade)

CHAPTER THREE

(Klare)

CHAPTER FOUR

(Three Lorenzo: Regression and Expansion)

CHAPTER FIVE

(Mayfield, Duell and Me)

CHAPTER SIX

(Egon Chernel)

CHAPTER SEVEN

Chernel Meets Gonda: We Move On

CHAPTER EIGHT

Gonda Remembers Mayfield Bunny

CHAPTER NINE

Revisiting Fred Fabb

CHAPTER TEN

Valentine

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Leopold Gittels

CHAPTER TWELVE

Kornstrasse And Myrna: Past and Present

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

(Egon and Myrna And Parts of Love Lost or Found)

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

(Kornstrasse Redux)

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

(Chernel Moves On: In Present; Adrift In Preterite)

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

(Egon Chernel Returns: The Narrative Mourns Myrna Bunny)

CHAPTER NINETEEN

(Samuel Jose Esmeralda)

CHAPTER TWENTY

(Gay Times)

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

(Aqueduct)

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

(Work For Wages Or Vision. You Choose)

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

(Mayfield Bunny Memories)

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

(The Cost of Science)

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

(On The Ground In The Big Apple)

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

(Klare Aloft)

THE HOSELOPE

CHAPTER ONE

(Chernel in Hister’s Tunnel)

We are invalidated through mediocrity and fear.

Walking under the Hudson River toward New Jersey, one absorbs fading light. The subterranean roadway is rarely traveled, succor for highwaymen and survivors of Hister’s Bends replenishing, in marginal movement, their failing stock of mind and spirit.

On such a nocturnal trek, I encountered Egon Chernel, a Czechoslovak malcontent, carrying his oddment history in the folds under his eyes. He was running incoherently, like an escaped convict, toward New York when we collided. Excuse me, Chernel said when we were bonded, but I have never crossed in this direction before. Neither have I, I replied, in veracity, because I had, like Chernel, never taken the New York path, preferring the busy Holland Tunnel, rather than the disheveled secondary tunnel when entering the neon city. Chernel didn’t believe me. He came against me, running his hand across my nipples, flashing filed teeth, squeezing my cod. You pass through every day. Don’t lie to me. The entrance guard and/or exit guard gave me a full report of your unsavory habits. Old man. I appear from the opposite direction. I never go where you go. Why not? Because I choose not to. Is there disease in your direction? Cholera? Syphilis? Bubonic Plague? Doubtful. Your wiseacre tone implies the possibility of urban disease. You have fungus in your crotch Chernel was laughing. I bit his middle finger. Fungi, I said could impair my comatose libido, especially (since) the mushrooms festered in New Jersey. Wait and see what you’ll contract going your way.

Chernel, sneering canine teeth, moved away from me. Laughter, masking my fear, I fell to the dank floor of the tunnel. I elevated slowly, brushed my soaked trousers, and prepared to resume my journey home; already seven minutes behind schedule, a misdirection of time, which if not corrected would hurl my solar charts into a bottomless black hole.

I glanced over at Chernel. The Czech, on the floor of the secondary, clammy tunnel was rumpled into a wooly ball, suggesting an old obese cat snoozing. I was at the precise longitude where New York becomes New Jersey, or New Jersey becomes New York, depending upon one’s final destination, for Chernel the latter disembarkation, for me the former. The Czech was humming a dirge-like tune I did not recognize. Tears matted his large florid face.

Do you think I’ll be ravished by hippus? he asked when I returned to his side, sacrificing the sanctity of astronomy. He was contrite, gloomy as Omaha in November. I don’t know what hippus is, I answered, but if it can infiltrate the human body and if it presents itself as life threatening, then you can bet your bippy it’ll find you in New York.

You insignificant worm, Chernel screamed, hippus is an eye disease, not diarrhea. Hippus is characterized by a spasmodic variation in the size of the pupil, marked by painful itching and thought to be inflamed by an iris in tremor. I have seen horses with hippus; the sighting of the scourge paralyzed my left side for a month. I was a normal, ocular/equine researcher when I met a Central Park mare bellowing in pain and insult. I have never been the same since I felt the pulse of that afflicted sister. We shared misery and enlightenment, that Central Park mare and I, in a bucolic setting adjacent to Strawberry Fields, close to the very spot where the late lamented rock star was assassinated.

Can human beings develop hippus? "Yes. Yes. Of course. I have devoted my life to human hippus. I have searched for a human being, male or female, scourged by hippus, for thirty years. My crusade has taken me to every Eye and Ear Hospital in the United States and Canada, including the Masonic temple for deaf albinos in Monroe, Louisiana. I’ve bankrupted myself, but not to worry. Science cherishes poverty. When I uncover a hippus-human, I will publish, at my expense, the definitive paper in the Journal, Seeing and Not Seeing Or Seeing Something, Anything.

I met thousands groping in blindness, white eyes bleeding hippus, my blessed afflicted children—but the doctors refused to accept hippus for the blind ones. I was assailed by moronic verdicts of cataract and glaucoma. None of my so-called colleagues accepted hippus. (Chernel was on his feet, brushing off his Harris Tweed Lincoln green suit.) I tried, Chernel, continued to bribe the Director of the Eye, Ear, Nose and Sound Institute in Greenland, but to no avail. In that snowy waste of cosmic white that drives men into purblind rapture, the Conservatory housed hundreds of blind and (seriously) purblind specimens. I offered the very aged Director, lost in the journals of Captain Scott, two thousand dollars if he would allow me to photograph a random sampling of his fine specimens. The ingrate refused. He considered blindness homosexual."

I may have known a man with hippus. The gentleman, in higher position than me, at the Import-Export firm where I am employed, always brushed his eyes with his coat sleeves. He wore silk suits so as not to inflame his orbs. He constantly, day in and day out, scratched the eyes out of his head. He wore, underneath the florescent bulbs of the office pods, and outside, sipping mint tea, the black-black sunglasses of the blind. I never saw his eyes. He used to cut his verrucae with a German nail clipper in the men’s. I was very curious about his eyes—but I didn’t have the nerve to ask him to remove the black-black glasses so I could have a look.

Did he say he had hippus? Chernel anxiously queried. No. He never mentioned hippus. Where can I find this man? I don’t know.

But. I thought you worked with him. Correct. I worked with him. I don’t work with him now. We were in different departments. I saw him once a month at an all-hands meeting. He resigned without notice. Just upped and left. Four years ago. I don’t remember his name. I’m pretty sure it began with a B. His Christian name or his surname? What? His name, Christian or surname that started with B.

"Let’s not get pushy. I told you his name might have started with B. I never suggested it was an indisputable B. His name could have started with F or Z, but if asked to wager, I’d bet a buck on B. I doubt if he had hippus. His ailment was probably chronic red eye. I’ve itched like that, sometimes for days at a time. I never thought I was suffering from anything but infantile red eye. Did you ever notice, Chernel asked, a spasmodic variation in the size of the pupil. I wouldn’t know a spasmodic variation in the size of the pupil if it punched me in the testicles. I shoot-up my eyes with Murine when the itching gets real bad."

Murine! That poisonous junk can blind you. That’s your opinion. Murine helps me. Fifteen minutes after I sprits Murine into my eyes my sight becomes yellow and melancholy. I am under a blistering sun, my flimsy lids exposed. When the burning calms, a rougher bout of itching begins. I hurt until the Murine is dribbled into my eyes again. I thought Murine relieved the itching? Chernel, annoyed, said. He was no more exasperated than I was. The delay was unconscionable. The fabric of my evening’s astrological studies would be ruined if I neglected the planet Lulu, the sweet child shyly showing her undies in the failing October dusk. I could not afford to continue this dialogue with Chernel. My ambition would become depleted if I did so.

Of course. During the brief transitional epoch the itch faded, did not disappear, but occluded itself like a mole in a rose garden. The residue, optic flatulence, was swelter, finer then leper itching. My eyes remained in the tepid Murine bath for twenty minutes before the acrid itching returned. The temporary Murine relief was Hallelujah. Bunny agreed with me. We daubed each other with Murine several times a day. Bunny. Who’s Bunny? The man I worked with, my co-worker who wiped his eyes with silk coat sleeves and wore large black sunglasses.

You mean the gentleman strides with hippus. I can tell you my friend there are millions silently moving into blindness, who because their corrupt doctors insist their affliction is trivial, kindergarten games like cataract or glaucoma or—would you believe—macular degeneration. The condescending fiction calms the ninnies. They would be appalled if they knew that an equine disease, hippus, delivered their onrushing night, especially when the encyclopedia reports that hippus is (usually) A spasmodic variation in the size of the pupil, caused by a tremor of the iris—quite common in gaming circles. Blind like a thoroughbred or a vegetable peddler’s nag. Who could accept that verdict? Could you? I could not! And I have charted hippus as the design of my life over the last five decades. The doctors are not uninformed; no, they’re simply charlatans. They know a rollicking case of hippus when they touch it—but how can they tell their patients? The patient will not accept a horse disease, even if the horse is the princely Secretariat. The thieving physician will not be paid and will probably be sued for malpractice. One must be gentle in one’s dishonesty when consigning a patient to the borne of infinite night. How did you acquire this vast body of hippus knowledge? I asked, impressed by Chernel’s erudition. I told you I have pursued the elusive hippus for fifty years."

So you did. Tell me if a person suffering from hippus has entered the black curtain of blindness, and you appear to indicate that the sun-less rooms are inevitable—can he be cured, the blindness cauterized, so as to speak, if the individual so blighted, was liberated from the illusion of cataracts? Alas, no. Human hippus, sometimes called slow dance hippus, is locked into the afflicted eyes. The wretched disease pursues the spasmodic variations in the size of the pupil as inexorably as day morphs into night. There is no cure. We can’t (even) slow its progress. It moves, as it must, ineluctably, until the victim is efficiently blind; after total blindness there are no shivers of red light; the patient can still experience the testy itch, although this is not promised in all cases. I would estimate that 45% in full hippus-blindness experience the raucous itch, while 55% are fortunate enough to crawl along in itch-less night.

If that’s the case—than it’s the sin of deliberate cruelty to inform the victim that he (or she) has a disease as degrading as hippus. After all, blindness is not pleasant. Any sane person would think more of himself (or herself) believing he (or her) carried drama, a brain tumor or lesion in the optic nerve, rather than screaming out of opaque eyes, I am a horse. Ergo, I am hippus. Chernel, brushing his Lincoln green suit, turned away from me. I had yielded the stars tonight. I was committed to Chernel. I’m sorry if I upset you, but I offer logic. You, yourself have admitted that hippus is a dishonorable disease associated with racetrack touts."

I never said that. You certainly so suggested. Implicit, not explicit, in all you’ve said is that it’s humiliating to confess your blindness was caused by a horse disease. That could be, the implication. Thank you very much, I posited. So, I maintain, if that is the case, the implication I mean, how can you fault any hippus-blind victim for reporting to his family that his (or her) loss of vision was delivered by a richer disease, macular corrosion for instance, one he (or she) can be proud of, an entity that will provide mythic boxes of duck confit for two decades. What would you bring the hippus mendicant—a few lumps of sugar?

Very funny. You’re like all the rest, the starved and the glutton, the CEOs of gargantuan avarice. You despise, my new friend, the vision of Science. Why can’t people accept the rough edges of hippus? I don’t find it frightening. I can live with harsh data. Yes. Human beings can contract a horse disease and entertain blindness from it—while the horse, the carrier, may only experience a spasmodic variation in the size of the pupil. I accept the brutality of optical science. Why can’t you? Unsavory craven. You deserve herpes in your asshole.

The river was murky. My legs tensed against the sag of the Holland Tunnel, directly above us, as it girded to meet a vehicular rush. The rising waters were unnoticed by the speeding motorists traveling to New York or New Jersey. There were no pedestrians allowed in the Holland Tunnel. That was fine with me. I preferred my personal route, provided by one of the Baron’s ancient lackeys, after I uncovered an old map and torn blueprints in the City Planning Historical Society Library. That discovery, the most significant of my devolved life, occurred five years ago. The plans offered no grounds for debate. German barley farmers living in central New Jersey, near Morristown, built the secondary tunnel. The barley men required speed bringing their crops to the breweries of New York during the years immediately preceding the American Civil War. The Germans were in deadly competition with a commune of Huguenots domiciled in a patchwork of small villages above Albany. The Huguenots owned a linear undisturbed route to the city, thereby holding a decisive edge over the nautical Teutons who had to ford the Hudson in order to reach New York and its silos of profit.

An enterprising elder of the Bavarian Barleys, one Baron Rissel von Hister, presented the concept of building a tunnel under the Hudson River that would give the Jerseyites, who were actually closer to the markets of New York then the upstate French reprobates, a mercantile stranglehold. Hister dreamed the Jersey Wurst would control price and market share because of speed of delivery. He never tired of amusing his countrymen with tales of Huguenot carts overturned by ruffians in Yonkers at precisely the same hour that his serfs were closing an enormous deal with an ancestor of Jacob Rupert. I apologize for calling them serfs. They weren’t serfs, a Czarist nicety, but they were not freemen either. They were an illiterate subservient caste. I’m not sure why the Huguenots and Germans competed. The Germans farmed barley, the Huguenots pecans. What was the problem? Another study? Perhaps? But not this day. Another day. Perhaps.

The clockwork Frankfurters completed the tunnel on schedule. Sadly, they never had the opportunity to cross it. The waterway was declared illegal by the States of New York and New Jersey when the avaricious entities finally noticed the engineering miracle in their midst. The wily Teutons labored at night, employing the sea-stained moon as their source of light. A single shipment of Grade A barley, destined for Rupert’s breweries, commanded by Hister himself, passed through. Hister, in his log, reports leakage. The barley-men feared for their lives when a burst of Hudson, containing a collection of claims inspector’s discards, cadavers, as well as naked suggestive mannequins, lapped the flanks of the heroic horses, thoroughbreds suitable for a Hessian attack in the Trenton dusk. The men reached the banks of New York only to encounter a drunken gang of Huguenots drinking their profits from a huge sale to the Planters Peanuts people sequestered in Battery Park. Well, why not a highly profitable peanut sale? The cost to the Huguenots was zero accept for a few cracked shins delivered by German canes.

As indicated, Hister kept a log of the Tunnel’s progress, referred to as The Plans by scholars. I have searched the Internet and the bins of every Antiquarian Bookman in the city and have never been able to uncover a copy. Hister published 101 copies of The Plans and gave them to his comrades in the design and construction of the Tunnel. I have advertised in appropriate media, specializing in the sale of moldy worthless publications. I have mailed countless letters to museums and universities, offering libraries, holding substantial collections of arcanum, large sums of money for the tome without success.

The balance of Hister’s life was exhausted in complex and useless litigation: the Baron pleading with New York and New Jersey to allow his flock entry to the Tunnel they had built with Teutonic will and fortitude. He was ignored. The States were embarrassed that such an undertaking occurred inside their incredible ignorance and, worse, within their billable water rights. They forbade Hister access to his own Tunnel, pushing the Bavarians west, into Pennsylvania, where because of climactic dishevelment they shifted their staple from barley to beets. The Germans, outside Lancaster, entered into a daily depleting struggle with the Amish, a beet versus corn conflict that endures to the present day.

Hister passed in Lancaster, a bitter, half-mad recluse, a Muenchen Edison, who spent his last years in the employ of Luddites, designing floral baskets for frenetic New York tourists seeking the karma of simplicity from the ill-tempered Amish. The great tunnel-builder died neglected, his genius a footnote in nautical-architectural texts. Hister’s Tunnel was sealed. Humiliated New York and New Jersey built a passage of their own. The cereal box Holland Tunnel is a pathetic replica of Hister’s masterpiece, a puny imitation that pales before the original.

After uncovering Hister’s plans at the NY Public Library, I dedicated my life to redeeming the Bismarck, the apropos name Hister employed for the Tunnel, when the narcissistic entrepreneur was in a patriotic mood; with the assistance of moonlighting police divers, I finally dug the Bismarck from the depths of the befouled Hudson River.

Hister’s Tunnel was a remarkable achievement. Murals of barley and lobstermen adorned the walls; yellow tiles suggesting the road to Warsaw served as paving; ornate guarded kiosks safeguarded the route. The unsolved engineering problem, however, remained excessive leakage. Hister, in his Journal, acknowledged his failure to provide a waterproof passage for his country-krauts. The leakage was especially pernicious when the Holland sagged under an armada of traffic. The Hudson mothered both Tunnels, but the Holland rarely leaked, while the Bismarck didn’t pass a day without water. The Hudson, mind you, was remarkably polluted, which exacerbated beshit spillage. Still one could move through, on most days, with no more insult then a drowned rat on top of the broad brimmed hat the barley men wore when trekking underwater.

I always wore rubbers in the Bismarck, and was pleasantly surprised to see Chernel sporting a pair of totes. I have been crossing the Bismarck into New York and back out to New Jersey for six years. In the beginning I was alone. I have of late seen others passing through. I do not resent my new traveling companions.

About a year ago I noticed guards at both the entrance and exit of the Tunnel. They never speak to me. Their presence is profoundly disturbing. The same man is at both passageways. I go through the Tunnel once a day, in the evening, after clerking, at my position at an Import-Export firm, Pak-Leather, in lower Manhattan.

I arrive at the entrance in my diving suit, worn as insurance against excessive leakage. The guard salutes me. He never speaks. Occasionally he adjusts my equipment. He smokes a thin yellow cigar beneath a large no smoking sign. I smile; he looks away, blowing rings of smoke in the belly of the Tunnel. I gather up my papers and diving equipment and begin my 17-minute trek through the Bismarck.

Upon arriving at the New Jersey exit, I meet the same guard, smoking a thin yellow cigar. At first the coincidence was disconcerting. I asked the sullen gentleman if the gatekeeper at the New York entrance and the New Jersey exit were, in fact, one and the same—and if this were so how could he gallop through the Tunnel so rapidly since I didn’t see him run by. I have never had a reply, although he did, once, smile at me when I offered him a match for his sputtering cigar, which he refused, thanking me by blowing halos of acrid smoke into my face.

I have never met a wise man. I would not recognize wisdom if it cut my eyes. Perhaps wisdom resides in Chicago or Hong Kong, I said to Chernel. I, you miserable threadbare, am wisdom. You don’t have to travel to Chicago or to some Asian electronic latrine to come belly to belly with wisdom. You are in the pristine despairing light of perfect wisdom.

But what of hippus? "I have dedicated my life to hippus. I am party to her radiance and trickery. My words are arcane philosophy to one whose horizon is as emaciated as yours, to one who wears button down shirts and reeks of Old Spice, but for genius, yours truly, splendidly garbed in Lincoln Green Harris tweed, there can be no voyage but to the maidenhead of disease and black stars—and hippus is the quivering, multi-armed, my Shiva, mistress of universality, available to blind horses neighing in their stalls and the rare child of destiny, me, Egon Chernel. Only hippus offers the silence of negation, the scorched face courageously turned toward an insolent inconstant firmament. Hippus, beloved hippus, to uncover your apartment, to caress you as you savage the eyes of a human being; ambivalent, louche, devouring my gonads, my gorge up to meet you, the two of us wrestling in the Amazon, tumbling like Plague rats into the river, intertwined, locked into eternity, my body cracked in your embrace. The miracle of our love! Flies biting my buttocks into ribbons. Hippus. Myrmidon. Eyas. Come for me. Understand, my passion, I can wait through a dozen lifetimes for you. And a peasant like you, carrying a 1943 US Navy surplus diving suit and duffel full of defunct invoices, dares to question Egon Chernel about the life and death of the planet. You silly, infantile prick.

Chernel apologizes. He has no right to insult you. I do not understand the pettiness of your existence. How do you survive a day without worshipping hippus? There is no journey in life worth a farthing if it is not the pursuit and ineluctable capture of the hippus. You will be blessed by Leibnitz if you become part of the hippus crusade. I don’t understand your language. I want to learn words. An exotic vocabulary is required for a hippus intern. My initial contribution could be the entrance and exit guard, I suggested. Him. Why, yes. Perhaps.

No. Not him. He’s an insignificant tool of terror. I’ll contract with you. I’ll teach you three of my favorite words so you can begin to feel the colt-hippus in your wasted penis if you tell me everything you know about Bunny. But, I said, exhilarated, forgetting Lulu, I told you I remember very little about Bunny. A few minutes ago you told me you forgot his name. All you could recall were his silken swipes at his eyes, his greasy fingers—and now you know his name and so do I. If you tried, exhausted your small mind, I know you can summon Bunny into the fore-section of your cranium where, I am told, substantive memory resides. And if you can’t bring us to the Bunny-Light—why make something up.

Make something up! I thought you were the guardian of scientific truth. How can I lie to you? "Imagination, the mendacity of the gifted liar is the talisman of greatness. What does a voided postage stamp like you know about the doubling of truth and falsity, the twinning of veracity in an arcane equation of cosmic chaos? I will tell you again, my young friend, the only certainty on this wretched planet is hippus, actually Slow-Dance Hippus, the baleful Slow-Dance Hippus angrily domiciled in the darkening eyes of human beings.

Hippus as ocular plague in horses is taught at veterinarian colleges, the quaver of equine sight is universally accepted, but that was not always the case. My grandfather, side by side with the Baron Riessal von Hister, published 11,567 scientific papers before equine hippus was grudgingly acknowledged as possible. They finally triumphed when Mynheer Biddle’s Arabian pony, Sky-Eyes, contracted hippus and the solace provided, in Sky-Eyes’ final hours, from the Baron’s ointment, gently applied by my grandfather was blessed in the old wooden Orthodox church by the porcine, heart-shattered Mynheer, often times called by the diminutive Mein. Those glorious hours of research and struggle count for nothing today. My grandfather died of hippus. The illiterate doctors signed his death certificate consumption. Granddad infected himself with the hippus virus, rubbing his radiant blue orbs into the eyes of a horse heavy with hippus for a fortnight, not taking food or water, lying next to the hippus-horse, bussing him eye to eye. Bet Lucifer, Grandpapa absorbed, in his watery eyes, a screaming dose of hippus from the hippus-horse. Grandfather whinnied with joy, the epidemiological breakthrough he and Hister had waited decades for had finally arrived. Grandfather died six hours after his equine host. All this data, of course, is recorded in Hister’s Journal. You must have read the uplifting entries since you’re a wanderer in the Bismarck.

I’ve only read excerpts from PhD theses. I can’t lay my hands on a copy. Pity. It’s a radiant work. I have two copies, one inscribed to my grandfather by the Hister himself when my father definitively became a hippus-person. The Baron gave me the second copy when I was a child in Prague. He’d bounce me on his knees and wipe his wet face on my goose pimpled chest. I’ll lend you a copy when next we meet. I shall exercise such generosity if you tell me everything you know about Bunny.

Ah me, ah me. How limited you are. It’s a great work; perhaps the finest book in the history of western civilization. The exile Dante, in his simpering love for Beatrice, his restricted passion and quick masturbatory ejaculations, fantasizing Beatrice in oral sex, cannot hold a candle to the Baron’s vision of underwater immortality I have two copies, one inscribed by the Baron himself at the nanosecond of Grandpapa’s hippus-contraction. The Baron gave me the other copy when I was a child in Prague. He’d bounce me on his knees and wipe his wet face on my buttocks. I’ll lend you a copy when next we meet. My generosity in all things hippus depends upon your telling me everything you know about Mayfield Bunny.

The words. I must learn the words. I despise the darkness. Beatrice might as well be orange juice. The names. Beatrice. The exiled genius of Hister. Give me knowledge and I’ll resurrect Bunny.

Agreed, Chernel replied. "You have insatiable curiosity. Excellent! My grandfather considered curiosity the prime requisite for the hippus-hunter. Give me three words that will remove you from yourself. I’m ready and available. Come at me sainted hippus, drive me into the buttocks of the equator, into the swamp of documentation, pull, dear hippus, my brain from its worthless skull. Fire phonemes at me. We’ll drink wine from the Baron’s vineyards. If only Bunny was with us to share this radiance.

Myrmidon, eyas, pectous. There you are. They are the code that will unlock Bunny. The silk sleeve raised regally to the eye, the nonchalant swipe. He was royalty, Bunny was. He never cried like a mendicant. He was a prince dabbing at his outraged orbs.

Stop. Stop. I swoon. And you have had bagels and lox with him! You have kissed his sleeve. You have entered immortality.

That is as it was.

My father, holding hands with the Baron von Hister, weeps in his grave. How strange and wonderful. An emaciated punt like you should be vision’s intelligence. Artful blindness. Tickle my gonads. Beetle-faced, mud-mendicant, sill of sludge. I am not afraid. Egon Chernel flies above human misgivings. No. I must not boast. I do not seek revenge for bitter lost time, for humiliations and beatings, rank streets stinking of urine and garlic, rivers of useless prose. Hippus: I am ubiquitous, in-present, young, in the moment. Myrmidon: loyal retainer or attendant, best known as part of Achilles’ cast outside the gates of Troy. Eyas: hawk or falcon taken young from the nest for training. Pectous: resembling a jelly, especially in consistency. There they are, the words you requested. I cannot quibble with your selection. They are fine words. You need to write them down. Give me your hand. I’ll inscribe them inside your palm. Eyas is particularly deceptive, although myrmidon and pectous are not exactly chopped liver.

I eschewed Chernel’s palm writing and removed a small notebook, usually reserved for the names of planets and solar systems, from my suitcase. Chernel carefully wrote the lexicography out, employing a bulky Pfizer Labs ballpoint pen. He licked the pen as he wrote, drawing a fine bluish globe around his mouth. Done, Chernel rejoiced. Now speak the words twice and their knitting once, exactly as I have written them. Begin. The electric nourishment of myrmidon, eyas and pectous settled into my bones. Myrmidon. Myrmidon. Loyal retainer or attendant, best known as member, sans bomber jacket, of Achilles’ cast outside the gates of Troy. Eyas. Eyas. Hawk or falcon taken young from the nest for training. Pectous. Pectous. Resembling a jelly, especially in consistency."

Excellent! You have captured the aorta, the elusive lexicography of myrmidon, eyas and pectous. The Czech somersaulted and drew a mustache on himself. He viewed himself with a woman’s compact. When the mustache was set in his face, he asked me to eyeball it so he could have the appreciation of his art from an outsider. I did so; pleased to note that the mustache gave Chernel the fine round dimensions of a Prague gentleman off to the opera, perhaps Mozart’s Don Giovanni.

I hate it, Chernel said, "the hairy lip gives me the look of a fat bourgeois Brno merchant. The hunter of hippus must look distinguished. Hippus is austere, dear Bunny. We must attack jejune communities. There’s another one for you, jejune, but you can’t have that pretty until I have had something in return. You cannot take and take like the Baron in his depleted years when he deprived my father of salt so he could bathe his slut in perfume. My father gave the Baron his salt ration, the foodstuff that would have kept Mom alive, because the dear idiot could never say no to anybody, let alone the Baron Riessal von Hister. Hister’s arrogance and unbridled selfishness infuriated the Socialist, young Egon Chernel. When I was a little shit-faced boy of nine, I kicked the legendary Baron in the shins. I remember the day, as if it was this day. Hister came to our penury-house uninvited with his paramour, who was remarkably thin; no more flesh on her then a walking stick. She showed a quarry of white buboes around her lips. A few of them were open, bleeding pale pus, but most were secured, chalk stalactites in descending order of size. The Baron demanded three pounds of Yiddish ground salt for his beloved Munkk. My father was hard at work in his studio, sketching hippus blisters on massive slabs of canvas. Munkk, it appeared, was suffering from larynx arthritis, which meant she could not speak for more then thirty seconds a day—and would develop large red hives all over her emaciated body if she didn’t have the Yiddish salt, in large oral doses, every fifteen minutes.

The salt, immaculate and inexplicable, could not be mixed with another foodstuff. The Baron was prepared to keep the rare salt in his private cellars. Still, there were days when he had difficulty keeping his young tootsie supplied. Indeed there were afternoons when Munkk went without, a terrible insult for the proud von Hister. My father was not a kind man; he was an obsessed man, paranoid and crude. He yielded, not from weakness, but from insulation and boredom. Hister read my father. The Baron, false smile scrambling his face, said, ‘my dear Chernel, just give me the Jew salt. Munkk and I will depart when we have our three pounds and you can return to your hippus-blisters. Your canvas begs deeper white for the secondary blains. The dying hippus-horse screams in white eruptions. White, Chernel, white, the white ladder, the great Whale, the snows of the Himalayas. Hippus, Chernel, is white in profusion, in deadly ejaculation.’

"My father despised criticism. He admired psychosis and leukemia. He told the Baron that we had a meager four pounds in the winter locker. He was lying of course. My mother had shoplifted eighteen pounds from the Rabbi the Monday before last. Her score was common knowledge in the village because Mama bragged about her thefts over steaming mince dumplings in Cousin Frieda’s kitchen. The Baron accused my father of mendacity and began to throttle him. I jumped between the men and kicked the Baron in the shins, thereby terminating the fracas. I sympathized with Hister. My father was despicably selfish.

I can still hear the lamentable Munkk farting, the alabaster pustules bursting, the neon red blood spurting from her pallid face. But, I could not allow the Baron to choke my father into delirium, even if he did have a pale, sexy mistress with remarkable buboes. Did your father give the Baron the salt? I asked, helping Chernel wipe the mustache from his face, not an easy task since slivers of ink were embedded deep into his skin.

"Yes. My mother, wraith-like ascended from the cellar, where she was burning price stickers off stolen bathing suits, and insisted the Baron take a five-pound bag home with him. Mama force-fed a dozen tablespoons of coarse Yiddish salt into Munkk, which greatly relieved the suffering young woman. Dear Mama loved sickly post-teenaged girls. Munkk kissed Mama’s deep cleavage before she and the Baron departed with the five-pound bag secured in the ancestral saddlebags. My father returned to his easel, building ladders of lavender hippus polyp nuclei. I don’t know why I bring you into the attic of my family. Is the mustache gone? Let me observe Egon Chernel in the insidious glass. I am lonely. Father warned me. Loneliness is Lucifer’s playground. Pop knew the price of scientific genius. The life force extracted, from its disciples, by the hippus. I admit it. I am desolate. Weakened, diluted by hippus, as was my father until he suicided himself with the hippus virus and in that nobility gave his rather small shabby life enormous scientific value.

My father took his hippus ravaged remains to a hilly plain in Glasgow where he lay his bones alongside the sainted Edward Jenner. But, Pop died in vain. Jenner hurled his bones into the North Sea where the slivers of boiled beef hanging off losers belong. My father did not find a vaccine, not (even) an ointment for slow-dance hippus. His failure was as poignant as the leakage in Hister’s Tunnel, which I note is encrusting your rubbers with flakes of pizza topped with anchovies and bits of pepperoni. I understand my father’s disappointment and loss. I guard myself against excessive hippus-pride. I shall live to see the world worship the scientific genius that brought hippus to its knees. My long lugubrious text will be anointed in the Bible of hippus research, translated into every land where horses reside in the wild, or in circuses or as film extras. I will accept my Nobel graciously. I’ll climb the podium in Stockholm holding videos of hippus verrucae over my head. Ah, yes, but such a wretched lonely business. My dear. My dear. What is your name? Is the mustache all gone, as Munkk used to say, the all gone I mean.

Lorenzo. The mustache, except for the occasional attractive sliver of blue, is gone. Lorenzo? Lorenzo, what? Just Lorenzo. I was never given a Christian name. How sad. What about Bunny? Does Bunny boast a Christian name? His populated name was Mayfield Bunny. Mayfield, pretty fine moniker to take into the world. Mayfield Bunny. Then. Yes.

Tell me Lorenzo—why didn’t your parents bless you with a Christian name? It’s hard to say. I asked them the same question. They insisted there were too many of us. We were a dysfunctional family of twenty-two. I was the nineteenth. My parents stopped issuing Christian names at the birth of their sixteenth child, my role model, brother Frobisher. Frobisher, Chernel said, that’s impressive. They certainly didn’t lack for imagination if they could come up with a Frobisher the sixteenth time around. Well, yes. The first sixteen did very nicely. I can’t remember all my siblings. We had an Abigail, a Dallas, a Lance, a Manfred, a Pierre, a Cassandra, a Juice, an Achilles, a Lark, a Boo, a Dauphin, a Victoria, and an Empire among others and, of course, the aforementioned Frobisher. After Frobisher, my parents lost interest. The naming of their offspring was a major event in the lives of my parents, more important then the actuality of the birth. They would conduct polls among their friends when the new fetus was sighted. But, you know, repetition breeds discontent. I guess I was born during their geriatric trials. My Christian name was neglected, like Beef Wellington, when the stomach goes rancid. Tell me, Chernel asked, did your parents remain married when the vacancy of nomenclature invaded their marriage?"

"Well, yes. In a sullen kind of way. They rarely spoke. My mother was bed-ridden during my kindergarten years, and was constantly spitting venom at my father for not earning enough money to feed and clothe the twenty-two of us properly. Mama wanted twenty-five brats because she believed a quarter century of kids would give her an excellent chance for selection as Mother of the Year by the Kellogg’s Corn Flakes people. A trip to the Margaret Sanger Institute in Sacramento was the grand prize. According to the Guinness Book of Records the most children born to a woman, inseminated by the same man was twenty-four, achieved by the Dane female living in Winnipeg, Greta Laakso in 1872. I am speaking of the North American continent, not including those randy insects in Mexico. Negroes and Asians didn’t count because mother didn’t consider them legitimate human beings. Father, crippled by lumbago, would not go beyond our nest of twenty-two. Mother called Dad Puppy-Balls, but he never managed number twenty-three. There was a stillborn in his last year, but Guinness didn’t recognize such aberrations. Frobisher, who is very wise, insisted that the push for the record began after his birth, and from superstition and dread my parents ceased issuing Christian names after number sixteen.

Be that as it may, my lack of a Christian name has made my life a crown of thorns. People are confused because Lorenzo is a kind of first name. When I meet somebody, he or she will, ask my name and I’ll respond Lorenzo. They logically believe Lorenzo is my Christian name. At business meetings my associates are insulted by such immediate informality. At social events, I rush into an intimacy I didn’t intend, especially among women. Invariably somebody will ask ‘Lorenzo what?’ and I answer ‘just Lorenzo.’ Nervous smiles ensue. I sprint through the tedious explanation, never satisfying the annoyed party. They think I’m rude. It’s a terrible situation that has cost me several opportunities, professionally and romantically. I thought of calling myself Lorenzo Lorenzo, but somehow that legerdemain didn’t work for me. I’m underemployed, unloved, grotesquely lonely and blame my despised position on my parents for not completely naming me.

Do you ever break bread with any of your single-named siblings? No. How would we know each other? Well, that’s not completely true. We solitaries had a numbering system. I was Lorenzo Three. The girl child born directly after Frobisher was Lorenzo One. And so on. Frobisher was the median. We differentiated each other numerically.

I have the solution. You require a Christian name. No man can go through life without one. You were an outcast through no fault of your own. You are attenuated without a first name. I, Egon Charnel, therefore, dub you Three Lorenzo. Three is your Christian name and Lorenzo your surname. We have inverted the childhood insult of Lorenzo III. Three, you can boast an inclusive name at last.

I don’t know. I’ve lived many years as Lorenzo. Change frightens me. Don’t be an idiot, Chernel said angrily. There’s room for improvement in the smallest compartment. Life is a stew of cooked dreams. Only the dead settle for the status quo. If I were afraid of change—would I still be the great Czech hunter of hippus? Would my sainted father have taken the hippus into himself? Would the Baron have built his Tunnel while his beloved Munkk was dying of hippus spilled into her privates? No. A zillion times no. Three. I need you. I’m afraid of loneliness and failure. Together we can hunt the hippus and conquer blindness. Together we will comfort Mayfield Bunny. Irony of ironies. Von Hister’s Tunnel joined us at the hip. Together we shall become the guardians of vision.

I was feverish. Chernel’s words were a cold, rain-whipped wind. I was drawn, like a fly on windowpane, into his maniacal schemes. The water level in the Tunnel was rising. Night had established itself. The leakage, Hister posited, is highest when the land is dark. Okay. I’ll do it. I’ll take the Christian name Three, I said to Chernel. Good, he responded, melancholy in his voice. We’ll need your birth certificate. I’ll have my lawyer draw up the papers so that you’re a perfectly legal Three. You do own a birth certificate? Yes. Good. Good.

Chernel fell silent. The air in the Tunnel had gone rancid. My friend was troubled. His moodiness, I detested any form of sudden change, was unsettling. After the remarkable triumph of Three, Chernel’s mental drifting was insulting.

Christian names are essential Three, he continued in an unfocused tone. They give a man a sense of time and place, a balance, if you will. The man with a first name is not and cannot become an orphan. Oh. Very valuable. Three. Christian names. But surely not the raison d’etre of a man’s life. Believe me not all the bits and pieces of a life is a name randomly selected. I have always had Egon as my own, yet I’m heartsick and choked in the slime of mislaid dysfunctional dreams.

Something wonderful had come into my life and I was not going to allow Chernel’s Eastern European angst to ruin it. I would be a fool, I said to believe I had achieved my destiny because I have a first name, but Three, Three, is more than a pot of beans. Three represents a new and exciting entity. I am now called Three Lorenzo. Three is a warm blanket on a cold night. Three is substantial. Three is whole. Three has made me a unit.

I would never diminish your excellent discovery of Three. It’s just that I realized you’d be on your way to New Jersey in search of dead planets and I’ll stumble blindly along trekking the hippus and Mayfield Bunny. The isolation frightens me. I’m a tired old man near the end of his trials.

If Chernel was lonely, so was I. Scanning the night sky for Lulu in my small Jersey City rented room, I wanted to believe the seductive solar body was more valuable then seeking hippus through the good offices of Mayfield Bunny, but, still, Egon’s grail defined his life; Lulu certainly did not define mine. I had no definition in my life, no resolution. Chernel offered friendship. Chernel had anointed me Three. He had given me an identity. What more could a man ask of a parent?

Did you mean what you said about helping me change my name legally to Three Lorenzo? I queried.

"Meet me at my office tomorrow, 14 John Street, Suite 1409. Upon entering you will see the Baron’s thrilling painting of a dying white stallion, hijacked into cholesterol flood by hippus. My secretary will serve coffee. Do not take tea. I shall arrive at exactly AM 9:38. You must disembark at the John Street subway station at AM 9:15. Ask Klare to show you the photo gallery of blind men and women who were victims of slow-dance hippus. All images pulled by Egon Chernel. Not a working pair of eyes in the lot. You can read my postcards of the sightless.

Klare weighed 350 pounds as of AM 8:09 this morning. She’ll ask you to pinch her fleshy thighs. Please don’t. Between you, me and the ghost of Hister, I’m feeding her small doses of hippus in her morning tea. When she first came to me she weighed 116 pounds. She’s added kilos of meat in the last nine weeks. I tell you, Three, this viral hippus extrication frightens me. The Baron never associated obesity as a hippus symptom. Very disturbing, fatsos as offspring of lean hippus. I intend doubling her dosage next week, summoning her to implosion. An autopsy may yield some valuable hippus data. Strangely, Klare has not developed the spasmodic variation in the size of her pupils or the harsh hippus-itch. Three. Her sight has improved dramatically. She can read signs as far north as 40th Street. She wore thick spectacles at our first interview, blissfully myopic she was. Three. I hired her because she was purblind. Now, she has the eyes of a condor. Three. Three-Son. We have so much to do. Yes. Yes. You must come to me tomorrow. Introduce yourself to Klare. We’ll knight you Three Lorenzo with beakers of champagne. And giddy from the bubbles we’ll begin the search, the sacred migration to Mayfield Bunny. Together. Three. You and I. Against the world, the Philistine swine that have conspired against Science, against Science’s savior, Egon Chernel. We shall persevere. Tomorrow. We begin. Three. Arrive no later then AM 9:15. Egon Chernel abhors tardiness.

Chernel turned and ran toward the New York exit, the rising water up to his bulky thighs. I was in no rush. I had missed the despairing ascent of the small sad new planet, Lulu, an event I had anticipated for years, but, well, I had acquired a Christian name. I, without fear, passed the guard with the burning yellow cigar at the New Jersey exit. As usual he ignored me, buffing his heavy black boots with a Black & Decker sanding device. Hister’s curse, the bleeding intestines of the Tunnel, had robbed me of legacy.

CHAPTER TWO

(The Florida Arcade)

I called Chernel’s name, but the Czech had evaporated in the mist and murk of the Tunnel. I had a long tedious journey ahead of me before I was safely ensconced in my Florida Arcade, Jersey City rented room at the Fabbs, offering a splendid view of the adjoining mall parking lot, as well as the C’mon And Feed Me Glom Station that had opened a few weeks ago.

First, there was the exhausting climb out of Hister’s Tunnel to the exterior security station. The route included a punishing linear trek up a spiked plateau. The trail was strewn with rocks and cuddly brown bear feces. The distance from top to bottom was fifty feet, a slip, therefore, could break the majority of one’s bones. I lost balance several times, once in a particularly nasty drop in sleet, but I never descended to the bottom of the plateau. Because of the disequilibria of Chernel—tonight promised a perilous journey. I, however, maintained calm, huddling my frightened body against the gravelly ramp with its traces of watery ordure, its sinews stinking of expired rats, and methodically climbing, reciting Lulu’s orbital equations as I ascended, I reached the top of the plateau in eighteen minutes; all things considered, more then acceptable.

Outside, I joined the masses emerging from the Holland Tunnel in buses, on foot, on bicycles, motorcycles, mopeds and large gas guzzling automobiles. I elbowed myself smartly into the queue for the Jersey City bus, slipping like smoke, past two elderly women, who were scooping up dropped cans of Campbell’s Chunky Chicken and bulky parcels of Big Mac’s.

Because of my christening with Chernel, folk like Ms. Suicide, with whom I had ridden for the last five years, not that I ever spoke to any of them, were lost to an earlier bus. Nor did they speak to me, buried as they were in fantasies of escape from their daily grind—body stench in summer, wet wool rash in winter, the charnel house of failure every day of the losing year. Still, their presence provided continuity, perhaps a tomorrow, a cramming of warmth; without them my alienation was without mooring. The group, sullen at this advanced hour, was smaller then the riot I usually encountered. I was able to secure a window seat, toward the rear, of the overheated bus without stress.

I was on the first of two bus rides; I also faced a fifteen-minute walk through menacing streets before I arrived home. My commuting time, to my job, in the morning, was two hours and eight minutes, in the evening two hours and twenty-seven minutes. The difference represented by the walk through Hister’s Tunnel at night, as opposed to the bus ride through the Holland Tunnel in the morning. The initial bus ride home, the event I was now experiencing, was the longest segment, covering one hour and seventeen minutes, drifting through comatose landscapes of gas stations, bleary 24 hour diners, skyscraper oil refineries that suggested deformed Mongoloid basketball players and swamp land reeking of toxic waste.

On damp evenings, such as tonight, the air was rancid from clouds of putrefaction. An open window was an invitation for suffocation by gas, closing the window for the long trip was breathing air replete with the nauseating odors of stale perfume, perforating skin, burst scabs and one’s own anxious sweat. I invariably chose the open window because it gave me the idiot’s illusion of free will.

I stared out of the window, covering my mouth, like a Japanese at the beach, with my handkerchief. Industrial New Jersey was hard at it. Great sewers of smoke rushed into the sky,