Free Count Geiger's Blues by Michael Bishop Page B

know what the doctor might find. Cancer. Muscular dystrophy. AIDS. Alzheimer’s. Nothing but a clean bill of health would relieve his anxiety, and maybe he couldn’t get one. So he never thought about his illness except recurrently through the day and continuously through the night. In “The Night-Song” from Thus Spake Zarathustra , the prophet says, “But I live in my own light, I drink again into myself the flames that break forth from me.” Xavier was living in his own darkness and drinking again into himself every potentially enlightening tongue of flame. Maybe those flames would flicker out if he ignored them. . . .
    The Mick just survived his classes at Ephebus, bringing home a D- in English for refusing to let Melville, Conrad, Joyce, and Faulkner “bore” him. This attitude enraged Xavier, who saw it as an excuse for avoiding the unfamiliar and dismissing big chunks of humanity’s past as unworthy of study.
    During Ephebus’s Christmas break, The Mick hunted different means of getting through his days while Xavier worked. He read (comic books), eyed the tube (soaps and game shows), fiddled with his computer (video games), and listened to his tapes and CDs (especially those of Cold Grease on Cary and Smite Them Hip & Thigh). What he didn’t do, Xavier noted, was throw the football in Le Grande Park, lift weights at the Y, take walks, or join a youth basketball league. “You’ve got to get some exercise,” Xavier told him. “You can’t just sit up here and vegetate.”
    So The Mick rummaged up his skateboard, bought knee and elbow pads, high-topped athletic shoes, and a helmet, and spent his days “thrashing” the sloped concrete walls at Skateboard City on Battery Place. He did this morning and the afternoon. He did it wearing court gear and a pair of loose dove-grey sweats—so that when he got home in the evening, he had the parboiled look of a lobster and the reek of a well-worked dray horse. His shins, forearms, and palms bore the bruises and hamburgery scrapes that he got playing “war” against other skateboard jockeys, and at dinner Xavier felt lucky if Mikhail didn’t nod off while eating.
    “Go easy,” Xavier said. “Don’t wear your skateboard out before the New Year.”
    So The Mick stayed home the next day, and that evening Xavier asked him to play chess. It took a while to persuade Mikhail, his own preferred sports being televised women’s roller derby and the all-out sort of concrete surfing favored at Skateboard City, but at last he fetched the chessmen and the board. This, thought Xavier, is what Mikhail needs. Skateboarding was on a par with declassé amusements like pro wrestling, jai alai, and drag racing, but chess was a hallowed variety of intellectual combat.
    The game began. The two traded pawns and erected defenses even as they plotted wily lines of attack. Xavier was into it, and likewise The Mick. Abruptly, Xavier’s nose began to bleed. He’d never had a nosebleed in his life, and the sight of so much crimson splashing the chess pieces—“ The Red Sea! ”, to quote Cyrano—unnerved him. Maybe the hemorrhage implied a fatal cancer. Both hands over his nose, he recoiled from the board as if from blazing coals.
    “ Caramba! ” The Mick cried. “Looky, unc—you’ve done a Friday the Thirteenth sequel on your whole damned army!”
    Nearly every piece on Xavier’s side of the board resembled the victims in a slasher film. Seeing the bloody carven knights, bishops, and other pieces, well, it made him recall every rotten horror film he’d stumbled into accidentally or whose plot he’d heard numbingly detailed by the Urbanite ’s Popular Culture staff. Abruptly—as abruptly as it had begun—his nosebleed was staunched. Mysteriously staunched.
    “You okay?” The Mick asked.
    “I think so.” Xavier wiped his face and hands with a tissue.
    “Here.” The Mick picked up the board. “I’ll clean the bloody fuckers up.”
    “Okay, but I’ll never touch one