Ambient 06 - Going, Going, Gone

needle down again and again till I finally got up and changed the record. »All right, but tell ’em I got to charge a full day rate.«
    »Understood,« he said. »Meet them in the Willard coffee shop, nine sharp. The Willard Hotel. It’s a hotel. Know the place?«
    »Warren G. Harding shot his niece there, didn’t he?«
    »Nine sharp. Willard Hotel. We’ll be waiting. Think you’ll need any help waking up?«
    »Not yours.«
    Bennett skipped the gracious goodbye pages when he took his Emily Post lessons. Once he hung up I savoured the sound of blood rushing past my ears. The seller goes where the market calls but these assignments in DC were always a trial. Nothing like a trip to the land of the two-headed men to remind you why they dumped all that marble in a swamp. Nowhere else will you get the lingering miasma and rotting vegetables that sustain sound government. On a regular schedule the fen’s trolls burn off excess gas. The glow attracts fools and children. The stench overcomes them, the gas hits the blood like carbon monoxide, the bog sucks them under. They’re done for. Stay out of politics, my brothers, there’s no keeping clean.
    Bennett’s call had rung down the curtain on my mind’s nightly adventure. Even though I considered taking it from the top I noticed it was midnight, and since I’d been hit with this unforeseen breakfast subpoena I decided I’d better take the sensible road and toddle off to snoozeville. While shedding my outerwear I let myself go blank. Listened to walls creak as they eased their weary stones, heard the wind tickle the ivy’s dry threads. I was stashed in the usual drawer, an N Street townhouse with 1850 skin and 1965 guts. Claims adjusters infested the ground floor offices but the apartments were available for government transients. I don’t know who crashed in my suite when I wasn’t in town. Martin didn’t say, I didn’t ask. The joint must have been classville in buggywhip days but the trolls had been hard at work since. On a five-star scale I’d give the leftovers a negative four. A junkman wouldn’t take the furniture if you paid him. Turn on the faucets and take bets on what colour the water’d be. Cockroaches big as chihuahuas and just as quiet. Every morning rats raced through the groundcover out front to the point where even a dead sober man would think the yard was trying to sneak away from the house. Well, it was never more than a couple nights’ flop to me and after all, I’ve done time in places that made this look like the Savoy-Plaza. I’d just started kissing the sheets when my unseen friend returned.
    Help.
    Definitely not Bennett this time. I tried hauling myself up but it wasn’t easy.
    Help.
    Where was that boy? Somewhere on my left, maybe? Don’t believe the yarns, there’s not much to be gained when you start hearing people who aren’t there. »Yo boyo, your signal’s coming in clear. Show yourself.«
    Help me.
    »No need to be shy,« I called out, thinking I’d pinned him down on radar. I tiptoed to the bathroom and pushed at the door. »Hey Livingstone. Stanley here.« No answer, so I flipped on the brights and peeked in. »Anybody?« Nobody. Now if I’d stayed horizontal I could have probably convinced myself that the evening’s entertainment simply intensified those bad DC vibes, but once up my reptile brain couldn’t be rubed. Maybe I landed in the middle of one of those CIA campfire tales you always hear. Those necrophiliacs had no need to unscrew my bulbs, but they wouldn’t have cared. This was probably the kind of fun they had when they weren’t out shooting Nixon.
    Help.
    I did a Norman’s mother. Nobody in the shower so I checked under the sink. Bug city; ten thousand long-term leasees but none of them were talking. Men of science test all theories, so I stared down into the toilet bowl. In heightened states the sight of running water calms me down, and the longer I looked in the better I felt. Nothing but an unexpected side effect, I told myself. No telling what’ll bob up when the mind starts simmering. In my more adventurous days I once dropped a little blue tab, supposedly some derivative extracted from San Pedro cactus buds. Maybe so, but all it did was make me sneeze uncontrollably for fourteen hours.
    Please help.
    I looked up and I saw them standing there. Almost there, I’d better say. This was the first time I could eyeball somebody’s front and glim their back simultaneously, but that wasn’t the