Cyberpunk

ago. Perhaps his burnished forest green and fawn brown color scheme had always been an illusion created by makeup artists. I didn’t know and couldn’t—wouldn’t—ask. Today his mottling was more irregular, his colors black-to-puce, with nothing of the chestnut shine and richness that had always seemed his badge, his pride, no matter how grim the burden of crabdom in a human realm. Otherwise, though, he seemed unchanged. The crab’s fragmentary leg, famously amputated in a botched Halloween prank attempted, in a rare instance of filial accord, by Sternwood and Feary, in the show’s fourth season, still looked as freshly wounded as ever. The static nature of the crab’s injury, and his unwillingness to disguise the rather undelectable gooeyness of the stump, was often given partial credit for the erosion of the show’s ratings by the end of that fourth season.
    “Will you and Mr. Lethem be needing anything, sir?”
    The crab didn’t speak, only turned slightly, rattling claws on tile. I’d been warned of his recalcitrance, his hot and cold moods.
    “Very good, sir.” The housekeeper departed the lawn, leaving me there. No breeze stirred, and apart from my own breathing, and the swim of the sun’s pinpoint reflections in the blue of the pool’s surface, we might have been captured in the humid noon as in a block of Lucite.
    “May I sit?”
    Again the crab only scuttled. What the housekeeper had taken as a no I took as a yes , and found my way to one of the slatted chairs, one facing the crab but not, I hoped, so near as to make him feel intruded upon.
    “I don’t use a tape recorder, so I hope you don’t mind my taking notes.”
    This drew no response.
    “I want you to know, first of all, that I’m a fan. I came to your work quite embarrassingly late, but it’s touched me in ways I’m not sure I can describe. But then you’ve touched so many lives.”
    The crab now began to issue a sound like a lizard’s cry, or perhaps it was the high whine of a distant vacuum cleaner. Without wanting to stare too intently, I searched for signs of a listening attitude in amongst his eyestalks and feelers.
    “I don’t mean to suggest I have any special insights that would surprise or enlighten an artist of your stature. Think of me merely as a humble representative of an audience that hasn’t forgotten you. If anything, the work grows more resonant over the years.”
    The sound that signaled the end of the hiss or whine was like a barely detectable yawn. The crab raised one leg, too, as if finger-testing the windless air, or calling an invisible class to order with a single, authoritative gesture—one which also evoked, inevitably, a massive hand flipping the bird to the sky, issuing a fuck-you proclamation to the world at large.
    “As the more unimportant local and temporal elements of your show recede into time—I mean, all the dated jokes about long-forgotten current events, and the generic vulgar badinage which is only so typical of network comedy of that era—the singularity of your presence becomes more evident, more timeless and pure. You take part in a continuum of rather desultory figures who stand in symbolic protest against the crassness of the contemporary world, running back through Abe Vigoda and Bob Newhart and Imogene Coca, and pointing all the way, really, to Buster Keaton.”
    “I’ve heard that before,” said the crab in his loud, gravelly, immensely familiar voice. It startled me almost out of my chair, but I tried to disguise my reaction. “People used to write that all the time, but it’s a flat-out lie. I wasn’t influenced by Buster Keaton in any way.”
    “I didn’t mean—”
    “Nobody has any idea how hard it was for me coming up. It’s taken for granted now, kids like you come around, they grew up loving the crab and they figure everybody always loved the crab, the crab must have been some kind of overnight success. Sure, right, but that overnight lasted ten years, no more, no less. Ten years slugging it out on the circuit, little clubs, appearances at lodge dinners and state fairs, riding in the undercarriage of tour buses. I paid my dues a dozen times over and I still feel it right here.” The crab reared up, propping on his huge, closed claws, and tapped two legs assertively on his lower shell, as if miming a gut check. “Then you guys come around here talking about Buster Fucking Keaton. Like it was some kind of party for me, this fershlugginer career.