AREA 47

SECTION 89:

COURTNEY, Chapter 39

Reed opened the front door to let Kathy Martin (?) in and Tom North out.  Reed had already given the mental tax write-off to the deal with Softbyte: there wasn’t a single mnemonic business brain cell left functioning in his head.

Goofy Courtney giggling on the carpeting.  Tom edging his way out——unable to grok Courtney’s noncorporate, nimptopsical behavior——mumbling, “I’ll-call-you,” to Byron Reed.  Nonplused, megaleggy Kathy with her tiny bag of essential things, blocking the front doorway, mouth open, looking up at Tom, then over at Courtney, then up at Tom, then . . .

They sort of got stuck there in the doorway, and just looked at each other.  The bag of essential things helped essentially.  Tom was uncomfortable, but: WOW . . . And they looked at each other . . . Kathy didn’t know what was happening, but: MY, MY . . . They started talking to each other; still in the doorway, actually slightly touching each other.  Kathy gushed; she was all My, My, Big Guy.  Tom stammered, limp in the vocab; he was a bit-brain confronting sugar-on-the-grapefruit firmware.

Reed wore his sad, old hound dog face, not recognizing any love symptoms, just ODed on bad news and boozeblind Courtney.  Reed looked over at Courtney; his back was slumped in dejection.  She misunderstood his look.  Her eyes lit up and she pointed one finger straight up, and she fought her way up onto her feet, where she stood vertically, swaying only a little.  She gave Reed a grotesque wink like a retardo’s facial spaz, tilted her body toward the plugged doorway, and she discumfuddled and dithered her body over to Kathy and Tom.

“Hey, hey, Kathy,” Courty said.  She had to hold onto Kathy’s long-shouldered orchid-colored evening dress for support during the moment of dizziness.  “How ’bout dinner ’n’ a movie?  With Reed ’n’ me?  ’N’ Tom!  He’ll come along!”  Courtney’s sweetly swigged smile.

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“This is HEAVEN’S limousine!” Courtney yelled, pouring herself in first.  For Tom North, only the best would do, and it was the biggest, longest, Brobdingnagian stretch-limo obtainable for short-term rental.

Reed followed Courtney quickly to keep her away from the bar.

Kathy naturally assumed that it was Reed’s limo.  Tom helped her into the tennis-court-sized rear party area as if she were a fragile wisp of a flower that might be damaged by even a puff of wind.

Courtney felt sooo, sooo happy——even though Reed blocked her reaches for the little mini Cointreau bottle.  The video wasn’t even a fifth as bad as she had feared.  She felt vindicated.  They had done things to her body, but they hadn’t touched her soul.  They had frightened her mind, but they had not raped it.  She felt intact, and unharmed.  The biggest damage was just the fear she had been through, and the lingering background fear that Eric might somehow get to her again.  Courtney was not vindictive.  The concept of revenge was alien to her natural thinking.  Even after the awful fear that the terrible man had put her through, her mind did not quite veer into that channel.  Courtney was quite confident that God would punish Eric far more effectively than she ever could herself.  And after seeing the video, she was now equally confident that she would soon fully recover from the incident.  Or almost fully (herpes).  95%.  It wouldn’t hurt to be a little more careful with strange men, and to stay away from strange drugs.  There was a lot of weirdness in the world, but that was no reason to stay afraid all the time in a locked castle!  It was just cause to take reasonable precautions.

But the best thing: She was almost unrecognizable on TV!  Relief!  Sweet relief!  In the first rape sequence, she had been crying so hard, and sweating so hard, her hair all slick and tangled cross-ways so that not even her special icon-haircut was revealed.  Her face was a blur of twisting and wrenching neck motions . . . and then such a dead & dazed stupor . . . a viewer would have to be told that the rape subject was Courty; it was not immediately obvious.  Also the camera work was bad; the focus went in and out, the brightness was too harsh much of the time, obscuring the clarity of the TV-image.  The middle part of the gang-rape was not on the tape.  The second half of the tape was bits and pieces edited together, hodgepodge segments of her body being sexually abused in different ways.  It was just gross.  Revolting.  Inane.  Her face was so battered & swollen in the second half of the video, that she really was unrecognizable!

Reed navigated the limo to the Drop Rock Cafe, not even knowing if it was still in existence, but not knowing where else to take his comboozelated Courtney.  Tom North & Kathy obviously couldn’t care less: they were nearing the hand-holding stage; twenty nervous fingers wanting to touch each other, not knowing how to start.  Reed had never heard Tom at such a complete loss for words.

The corner restaurant in the West Village was still there.  But the name had changed.  NUCLEAR WAR HELL HOLE.  A big neon atomic-bomb-blast cloud above the restaurant’s name.  Tom North had the driver park the B-1 Bomber and they went in.

The luncheonette was still Fifties-decor.  Yes, and no.  Fifties underground bomb-shelter.

“Oh, look at the little dinosaurs on the tables!”  Courtney yelled.  “Look at the little dinosaurs on the tables!  Reed, look at the little dinosaurs on the tables!”

“Yes, Courty, they’re green plastic dinosaurs.”

Kathy and Tom were stuck in a silence somewhere between declarations of name and declarations of love.  It didn’t matter.  Their eyes were keenly communicative.

Kathy’s eyes, shy darts of painfully demure affection: Ooooooh.

Tom’s eyes: Gee-whillikers!  A morphologically hedonic, enhanced, kinesthetic XX genetic donor!  Hyper-paradigmatic!

The radiation-girl waitress carried a small chalkboard over to their table with the night’s neutron specials chalked on it; prices in megatons.

“I’ll take the atomic waste water beer,” Courtney said.

“No you won’t,” Reed ordered.

“A double Cointreau, then,” Courtney ordered right back.

“A double forget it,” Reed countermanded.

“OK, OK.  Meltdown stew.”

Not to interrupt the eye orgy, Reed ordered for everyone: “Four meltdowns.  Four Cokes.”

“No Coke, Pepsi.”

“Fine,” Reed said.  “Four Pepsis.”

“Hey,” Courtney said.  They couldn’t stick the Velcro over her eyes.  She poked the porta-chalkboard with her finger.  “It says right there: Coke!”

Waitress-wit over everyone’s head.  “You’re quite right.  My mistake.  Four Cokes it is.”  U-Turn.  They could tell by the way she wagged her radiation-burn rump that she disapproved of the low-life clientele she was getting these decrepit days.

A playful, suddenly shoeless foot started tootsie-tickling up the inside of Reed’s pantleg.  “Courty, calm down.”

She pointed a finger-gun at him like a mobster’s moll: “Whatsa matta?  ’Fraid you’ll get herpes?”  Bang.  She directed her talk loudly at Kathy and Tom, rotating the tires on the joke.  “Don’t sit too close to me, lovebirds,” she confided, and then shouted through her two-handed megaphone: “I HAVE HERPES!”  Pixilated pause.  “It’s an itch in a box, you try to male it, but it just comes . . . back unopened.  You can’t eliminate.  It.”  She shrugged her swilled-up shoulders.  “So you put your fingers in the box and scratch it!”  A drunky-poo smile.

The sad hound dog returned to Reed’s face: a droll depression.

Kathy looked away from Tom, as if waking up from a dream.  “What?  Courty, you have herpes?  Oh, how terrible!”

Everyone sat there in silent shock, except Reed, while the radiation-girl indifferently put four Cokes on the table: what’s a little herpes among terminally irradiated New Yorkers who daily brave Serious Shit like breathing fatal asbestos, letting ozoneless ultraviolet strike their cancerous skin, and living in the most crowded, people-touching-people, people-rubbing-up-against-people, AIDS-impregnated city?

Courtney was stuck in a stuccoed shock, belatedly realizing that she blew it.  She had muffed the delivery.  The line was right, the words were OK, but her inflections had been off.  They were supposed to KNOW that she was only joking.  But she goofed.  Now Kathy was utterly convinced.  And Courtney didn’t know how to unconvince her: she had delayed too long; the awkward silence reinforced the truth, strengthened it every second, beyond any weak lie she might now tell.

Reed said, “That’s right, Courty, stick me with your knife and twist it.  Give it another twist.  She’s angry with me because I had a little affair.  I cheated on her, got herpes, and gave her herpes.  I’ve said I’m sorry, I’ve said never again, I’ve begged for forgiveness.  Courty, do you really hate me so much that you have to tell everybody?” 

Courtney was charmed into tears by what he was doing, by his efforts to protect her reputation.  Big, goopy, drunken tears blinding her and dripping down her cheeks.  Not even seeing anyone else or thinking of anyone else, she had to let him know: “Oh, Reed, I don’t hate you!  I l——”

But Reed scooched his chair next to hers, with a quick slide, and forcefully grabbed her face in his hands and kissed her into silence.  It was the only thing that worked!

Reed kissed her; she was suddenly so soft and tender and vulnerable and attractive and feminine and fawning and carnal and foxy and tart and def and bitchin’ and savvy diva and cherry and superbad and WHOOOOOSH!

When Reed got his face back, he was cross-eyed and he had a hard-on like a pounding angry snake tangled in his underwear.  His whole body was hot, and his mind was all cleaned out like a double-shot of amyl nitrite.

Courtney was hanging on his neck like sexual slang, looking at him with deep, unguarded desire; then, when he began to talk, she lay her head on his shoulder: she was a love metaphor.

Urgently needed was a distraction from the awkward silence.  Reed said, “Say, Tom.  Why don’t you do that thing you do?”

Tom looked at him without comprehension.

“Kathy,” Reed said, “what’s this?”  He pointed.

“A glass of Coke?” she said sweetly.

“Nope,” Reed said.

Tom North smiled.  He then considered the container of Coca-Cola, a frown of thought deepening across his forehead.  “An amorphous-fused-silicate nongraduated gravitational containment receptacle of carbon-dioxide-charged, sucrose-supplemented, theobromine-rich proprietary-formula solution, thermally depressed by phase-transition heat sinks . . . synchronically a deployed hydrated fluid-ingestion system, phenomenologically activated——dichotomously——by partial ulnar rotation, or by the optional vacuum-induction translucent cellulosic pipette.”

Tom smiled.  Reed smiled.  Kathy gaped.

Courtney didn’t even hear him.  All she could hear was Byron Reed’s heartbeat, the sound of his voice, the crinkling of his leather jacket as he moved, the drumming of his fingers on the table.  Mmmmmmm.

COURTNEY, Chapter 40
 

Copyright 2005 Area 47