SATURDAY NIGHT

By Ian McEeeeewwww!

February 15, 2003:

Tony Stratton springs upright in bed earlier than usual this morning with a craving for a mug of thick, rich, brown, tasty, downright woggish coffee. His entire being seemed to be vibrating in time with some cosmic… vibrator. He crosses the hardwood floor of the chilly London flat and stands naked by the window, listening closely to the chorus of shrill, irritating voices emanating from each of the billions of atoms that constituted his long, white English body. What are those voices trying to tell him?

“Look”, they say, “over towards the…”

He can’t quite get it…

” Towards the…”

Jail door? No. The bear court? Ah… the airport! Look over towards the airport!

In the azure sky over Heathrow, Tony is looking at what appears to be three large weather balloons, each adorned with a witty caricature of a woman’s face: a sultry blonde, a laughing redhead, and a pale Romanian gypsy. The blonde and the gypsy seem tranquilly afloat; the redhead, however, is in trouble: hanging from some rope or twine attached to the balloon’s nether parts is a visibly distraught man in a dark overcoat flailing his arms about, oversize glasses askew, as the balloon, apparently leaking helium, wobbles groundward. Curiously, it almost seems to Tony as if this desperate fellow, who has got to be at least two miles away, is staring straight at him. Oh well, time to head downstairs and brew up some of that good, good coffee!

* * *

Down in the paneled basement kitchen, his son, Pinetop, already has coffee waiting. Pinetop is both a master in the art of making shumai (Japanese steamed dumplings), and a master in the art of hoomai (Tuvan throat-singing) - or was it the other way around? At any rate, Pinetop is just finishing off his fourth yogurt-banana-wheat germ health shake of the

morning.

“Pinetop,” said Tony, “did you just happen to see that horrifying balloon business at the airport this morning?”

“No, Dad. Let’s see if it made the news.”

Pinetop turns on the set. A round-table talk show is in progress and a fifty-something author in goggle-frame glasses has the floor.

“What days are these?” asks the author, patched elbows on the table. “ We move through the pleasant, user-friendly urban space as if enchanted by a bad witch, a witch whose tit is as cold as, well, as another witch’s tit. Are we baffled? Certainly. Fearful? You bet. And yet, there is a kind of grandeur in the realization that all the eons of evolutionary struggle, all those reptilian fights to the death, all the gnashing of incisors has led to this special moment , when, cursed or otherwise, we may now stroll down to the corner, to the internet café, and have our little Cappuccino Anna.”

* * *

Back upstairs, Tony gazed at the sleeping figure of his wife Victoria. All these years later, she looked hardly older than the girl he had courted some twenty years ago.

“I wonder how she’d look in one of my Saville Row double-breasted jobs”, thought Tony, and started rummaging through his closet for an older, slimmer cut.

“Right, then”, thought Tony, after Vic was propped up against the headboard in a nice pinstripe. There was still something missing. He was just about to go mucking about in Vic’s closet when Tex rang up. Dr. Robert (Tex) McConnell was the psychopharmacologist with whom Tony shared his Harley Street suite. He was calling to remind him of their Chinese Checkers game that afternoon. Tony would have to be quick if he was going to make first marble.

* * *

Tony fired up his Jaguar XK and ripped her out of the garage and into the traffic. Last minute sex with Victoria had been especially, well, British, this morning - an unbearably exciting overture followed by a long stretch of pure creepiness, culminating in a near-violent moment of mutual humiliation before the inevitable retreat into self-reproach, resentment and, finally, icy detachment. Oh, well, he’d take it out on the other motorists. What good is a Jag in traffic if one can’t somehow stick it to the unfortunate clots who get in your way? And why were there so many bloody people in the street? Luckily, he knew a shortcut.

As Tony made the turn into Cripply Mews, he was startled by a percussive hit to the car accompanied by a thunk and a grinding screech back to his left. He pulled over alongside a retaining wall and studied the rear view mirror. A man in a dark overcoat got out of a parked Mercedes and began to check for damage. He thought he might actually know him from somewhere. His impression was that he was an academic or a scribbler of some sort: the glasses, the graying hair, the shoulder bag stuffed with what looked like books in manuscript form, a ruthlessly indoor complexion. Tony exited the car and walked toward the bloke, searching his wallet for his license.

The man, who had been bending over behind his car, stood up with a large piece of tail light in his hand and stared at him. On his face was an odd, somewhat malevolent smile.

“Aren’t you Dr. Stratton, the how-do-you-say, psychopharmacologist, who’s on the telly and so forth?”, the man asked.

“Well, I’m Dr. Stratton, that’s right”.

“Well, it seems that you’ve fucked up my car. And you’re going to pay for it, correct?”

Scribbler or not, the fellow seemed vaguely threatening.

This called for a pre-emptive strike.

“Listen, fellow - what’s your name?”

“McEwan.”

“McEwan, what are you, late fifties? Married, certainly. Everything about you, body language, drawn muscles in the face, vocal cues, they all bespeak clinical depression. Feeling listless the last few years? Anhedonic? To the point where functioning is impaired?”

Tony thought he saw McEwan’s eyes soften a bit, though the sardonic rictus held fast.

“Does writer’s block count?”

“Exactly. Hold on a sec.”

Tony got out his cell phone and called the flat.

“Pinetop? Listen, would you be a darling and give the man I’m standing here with, a Mr. McEwan, a taste of the Taiga Forest? Brilliant. Here you go, McEwan… give a listen.”

McEwan took the phone and put it to his ear. And, as the moment passed, it seemed as if the very structure of his skull beneath the skin began to transform.

Tony knew what he was experiencing. It was a sound he had heard emanating from Pinetop’s room ever since the boy was ten, and later at rehearsals with his band, the New Riders of the Tuvan Steppe. The rough sound from the back of the throat, like a rocky road carved through the Siberian wilderness. A soothing, textured moan, uncannily like the lowing of cattle in the valley. After a few beats, there was a rise in pitch to emulate a racing mountain stream, a bubbling whir that suddenly ascended to a higher frequency, better to mimic the crickets chirping in the Taigo.

McEwan lowered the phone and handed it back to Tony. He had let go of the broken tail light and it now lay in the street. His face seemed lit as if by a beam passed through an ancient crystal prism, and his eyes were moist. His smile was different now. Not a trace of his former aggressivity remained.

“Thank you, man. Thank you”, said McEwan. “And I mean that from the bottom of my heart. I guess I’ve been waiting for that to happen for a long time now. I was ready, and there it was and here you are with your magical phone. I suddenly have a gazillion ideas for my next novel and not one of them involves really sick anglo sex or something falling out of the sky like that dog at the beginning of that old Aldous Huxley book. Not even a grotty, humiliating home invasion like in almost every melodramatic Brit novel or film written since the early sixties. And, you know, it’s strange, but any inclination I may have had to support the prime minister and the Bush administration’s plans for invading Iraq has completely vanished. Beautiful, man, really. Thank you. Thank you.”

* * *

Lying next to Victoria that night, Tony had moved into that place that lies beyond exhaustion, a place called… well, he just couldn’t sleep. It had been marvelous to come home after all that bother in the street, and especially after the hellish beating Tex had handed him at Chinese Checkers… marvelous to smell the sweet aroma of Japanese dumplings in the pan, to see Vic and Pinetop waiting for him at table. Later, as Vic was tucking him in, Pinetop padded into the room and lay at the foot of the bed, just as he had done as a child. The family bond had been renewed afresh.

As he felt himself begin to drift off, he seemed to be staring at a vast night sky - so many stars! And there they were - the three balloons with the women’s faces painted on them. No hanging scribbler this time, though. But there he was, Tony, in the sky with them, only figured as a constellation, like a Greek hero who had been lifted to the heavens. In his hand, the stars were arranged to form a large wooden paddle with a tack or nail at the end of it. And in a kind of ecstasy, one by one, he burst the balloons. Wham, there goes the blonde. Pop, and the laughing redhead explodes into nothingness. Ping, and the milk-fleshed gypsy is gone forever. Tony rolled over and curled up next to Vic. He pulled the quilt up over both of them, tight and cozy - and fell asleep.