The Octopus on My Head Read online

  ALSO BY JIM NISBET

  —NOVELS—

  The Damned Don’t Die

  (AKA The Gourmet)

  The Spider's Cage

  (AKA Ulysses' Dog)

  Lethal Injection

  Death Puppet

  The Price of the Ticket

  The Syracuse Codex

  Dark Companion

  Windward Passage

  A Moment of Doubt

  Old and Cold

  Snitch World

  —POETRY—

  Poems for a Lady

  Gnachos for Bishop Berkeley

  Morpho

  (with Alastair Johnston)

  Small Apt

  (with photos by Shelly Vogel)

  Across the Tasman Sea

  —NONFICTION—

  Laminating the Conic Frustum

  —RECORDINGS—

  The Visitor

  For more information, as well as MP3s of

  “The Visitor” and “The Golden Gate Bridge,” visit

  NoirConeVille.com

  This edition first published in the United States in 2013 by

  The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

  141 Wooster Street

  New York, NY 10012

  www.overlookpress.com

  For bulk and special sales, please contact [email protected], or write us at the above address.

  Copyright © 2007 by Jim Nisbet

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  ISBN: 978-1-4683-0710-8

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  This one’s for Erno

  MORT ⋅ 2007

  …un noyé pensif parfois descend…

  […sometimes a drowned man pensively descends…]

  —Arthur Rimbaud, Le Bateau ivre

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter One

  IVY PRUITT HAD A LITTLE PAD OVER A GARAGE IN OAKLAND, UP one story by an outside flight of stairs on the back of the building. Its landing overlooked the biggest cemetery in town.

  I went to see Ivy because I thought he might be ready to play again, and I wanted to be around when it happened. I don’t know why I thought he might be ready for a change and in any case Ivy was always a lot of trouble, but there I was. There was Ivy, too, smoking heroin.

  His studio apartment had a lot of potential. He’d sweet-talked his nonagenarian landlord into something like six months of free rent in exchange for which Ivy would run errands at his, Ivy’s, convenience. Ivy wore clean clothes when he couldn’t afford cigarettes, and though he never cooked or entertained, he cleaned house compulsively, so, except for the redolence of burnt tarball, the apartment looked exactly as it must have looked when he moved in. Freshly painted, gleamingly porcelained, sparklingly windowed, brightly scoured, damply mopped, and barely furnished at all, there were a mattress on the floor of the street-side room and a card table flanked by a pair of aluminum lawn chairs in the kitchen. Add the bathroom, and that was it. Sizewise it was about the same as my place in San Francisco, except Ivy’s wasn’t a dump and cost half as much. He moved the chairs around as occasion demanded, but I’m sure that often he just stood, leaning against the stove, on the nod like a sleeping horse. Most of the time he was alone. I saw no television, no stereo, not even a radio, and there wasn’t a sign of a musical instrument.

  Even the bathroom remained immaculate, as if dispossessed, just like the kitchen, for a junky doesn’t have much use for either end of alimentation. But the kitchen had a southern exposure which flooded it with sunlight, and it’s always sunny in Oakland. So despite its otherwise sordid and solitary employment, the room seemed, at two in the afternoon, almost oppressively cheerful. And it was to this room that Ivy repaired, after cursory amenities at the door, as inevitably drawn to the stove as a comet to its epicenter. Among the few appliances in sight—a refrigerator, a hot water heater, a toaster with a thrift-shop price tag—the stove retained an incomparable utility.

  At that time I had never seen tar heroin, let alone chased the dragon; but Ivy Pruitt soon reduced these cultural deprivations to a pair of quaint artifacts.

  The stove was gas-fired. Ivy produced a tarball from a black cylindrical film can and rolled it around between his flattened palms, much as an artist kneads a gum eraser before applying it to a sketch. When the ball was quite round and about three-eighths of an inch in diameter, he fired up a front burner, and, with a casualness that belied considerable dexterity, he juggled the ball between the flat blades of two table knives, one in each hand, whose violet patinas betrayed them as well-inured to this particular sortie of etiquette. He twirled the tar in and out of the blue flame and brought it to a seethe without combustion, with the prowess of a sushi chef partitioning snapper. He talked the whole time, too.

  “Now listen, Curly, you don’t want to overheat this stuff or it turns to shit. The dragon escapes. The dragon doesn’t cotton to being trapped in small adhesive balls for months at a time, so he’s always laying for a chance to beat the rap. Although the cocksucker shouldn’t complain. Most sentient beings remain trapped for entire lifetimes. Not the dragon. The dragon chafes if he goes six months beyond the poppy harvest. Did I ever tell you what Lavinia used to say about letting me fuck her in the ass?”

  The inevitability of such ‘confidences’ between ‘men’ being yet another uninteresting aspect of both concepts, I said no, emphatically. What’s more, I added, I was hoping to get through the day without hearing a word about Lavinia.

  He ignored me. “‘Trying to get that joint of yours into my asshole is like trying to put God back into the peyote button. It’s not going to happen.’”

  “Hey,” I said, impressed, “that might be the best definition of entropy I’ve ever heard.”

  Without averting his eyes from his task Ivy said, “Oh, we knew a thing or two about entropy, Lavinia and I did. Ivy, she always said, that joint of yours is too little for heaven and too big for hell. So,” he wagged his head from side to side, as if adjusting his spine, “Me and my joint spent a couple years in purgatory, tending toward chaos the whole time.” He grinned into the flame and uttered, “Heat death,” as if it were an invocation, with uncommon relish.

  Abruptly the ball of heroin sublimated noiselessly into a wraith of redolent blue smoke, uncoiling its mortality up and off the two blades only to encounter the descending numinous rapacity of Ivy’s flared nostrils, these cued by some inscrutable signal from the alembic, and into which the serpent disappeared entirely, with great sinuosity, whipping into its proper lair like a newlywed moray eel home for supper.

  Ivy kept his lips and eyes shut tight while he
continued to inhale deeply through his nose. If he’d been embracing the key-desk as he deployed the passacaglia at the end of Bach’s Toccata and Cantata in B Minor on the big organ at Grace Cathedral in front of a thousand people, he wouldn’t have appeared more concentrated, or more transported. After a pause he laid the two knives crosswise over a saucer in the middle of the stove top—maybe the only plate in the house, but quite as if a meal had been finished and wanted only a discreet waiter to quickly remove the remains and, with equal discretion, to hesitate in the bringing of the check in order to permit his customer the languid pleasure of a lingering surfeit. Under the saucer lay a quarter page of folded newspaper. The headline read, “Animal Feminization Reported Spreading.”

  Ivy produced a long and smokeless exhale, like a pearl diver gone to sixty feet and back. He watched the air for perceptible wisps; none appeared and none, of course, meant an efficient intoxication. He sighed contentedly. His eyelids drooped and lifted; their pupils had become little black suns with no planets to warm. He half-smiled abruptly.

  “Taste?”

  A signal hospitality. And who was I to decline it?

  Ivy had yet to extinguish the flame, but with that cavalier Weltanschauung of the junkie—that if he’s high all’s right with the world, and that therefore, if the world is not high too, it should be—he mistook my acceptance of his generosity by the light of his own familiarity with the ritual, an oversight which would require a second generosity, slightly begrudged. For it was but a wink later that, by my unschooled hand, the flame had carbonized the proffered gift into an irretrievable pollutant of the kitchen’s hygienic atmosphere, consumed in the flash that comes of too rapid an application of the heat; leaving my nose spiraling after an acrid vapor as coy as it was inert, much as the air pushed by the advancing swatter seems only to abet the escape of the fly.

  Recognizing his misjudgment Ivy rolled up a second, punitively smaller dose, administered it with the doting efficiency of Proust’s mother fumigating her son’s asthma, and I got high.

  We stepped out the kitchen door to a whitewashed landing barely big enough to contain two people standing. Dazzling, parched and peeled by its remorseless southern exposure, the little porch presented to us, blinking happily behind our shades, a grand and silent expanse of tombstones and lawn, sepulchres and cypress trees, lavender and obelisks, mourning doves and solarized granite. The vast cemetery stretched south and west from a moss-flocked wall at the back of the narrow yard, almost directly below us, to the freeway nearly a mile distant, and swept east up the hill to our left, perhaps another half mile, all the way to an asphalt apron surmounted by the looming Mormon Tabernacle. This necropolis appeared to cover everything as far as the squinting eye could see; but it extended, in fact, only so far as its pixilating vaults, rolling over the crown of a hillock and out of sight, engaged and lost a quick skirmish with the fierce rays of the meridian sun; there, as if redoubled one for one they seemed to stagger in a blur all the way to the twinkling expanse of the San Francisco Bay, some six or seven miles away.

  The sight put me in mind of Paul Valery’s poem, The Cemetery by the Sea, or Le Cimetière marin, as it’s properly called.

  “French,” Ivy sniffed, cosseting his high against the intrusion of thought.

  “May I spare you the opacity of a foreign language, not to mention its music?”

  Indolent, he shrugged. I was indolent too, but I like the poem. A modest if liberal decantation of a few lines came readily to mind.

  This tranquil roof, where doves parade,

  among murmuring pines and tombs…

  “Murmuring,” Ivy agreed. “Play soft.”

  …The judgment of noon consigns the sea

  To fire—the sea, every day renewed!

  What recompense, after deadly meditation,

  This prolonged regard of godlike tranquility…

  “With apologies to the original,” I added, “it’s a very nice meditation on life and death. I prefer it to Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.”

  Ivy’s eyebrows raised above his sunglasses. “If you think of God at all, do you think of Him as tranquil?”

  “It’s plural, in the French. But if we’re talking about one god at a time, and if it’s a male god, well … I suppose His tranquility would depend upon whether or not He is comfortably ensconced in His peyote button.”

  Ivy smiled.

  We gazed over this silence, basking in as thorough a serenity as might be hoped for, tranquil as lunchtime on a week day in a blue-collar neighborhood.

  After a while I noticed a large smokestack of whitewashed bricks at the top of the block, about a hundred yards up the hill from us, beyond which a tall Monterey pine appeared to undulate in the heat waves emanating from the smudged mouth of the chimney. Invisible vapors caused the boughs of the tree to dance more languidly and erratically than they otherwise might, even were there a breeze. I asked what it was.

  “That’s our local columbarium.”

  “We’re watching a cremation?”

  “Some hapless mortal coil, oxidizing to ashes,” Ivy confirmed. He made a curt motion of his hand, and not without a certain delectation. “Even as we reflect on the meaning of existence.”

  Lofting from some cornice among the tombs a pigeon appeared to jump a foot as it flew between the top of the stack and the background pine, only to resume its direct flight once past it.

  “The gift of serenity,” Ivy suggested.

  “They say,” I ventured, “that only teeth remain among the ashes.”

  Ivy grimaced. “There’s your recompense, no matter how much meditation is applied.” His emphasis on the two nouns made it clear that he surrendered little credence to either concept.

  “No doubt,” I suggested, “some enterprising type has long since invented a tooth rake?”

  “A simple gravel screen would do,” Ivy nodded. “But the real deal is to send a man to hell with his teeth intact. The better to gnash with, once he gets there. Same thing he did with them here,” he added softly.

  “I hadn’t thought of it that way,” I admitted.

  Ivy’s own smoke-yellowed teeth contrasted nicely with the glint of his tinted lenses. “To gnash,” he spread his hands, “is to live.”

  “That sounds somewhat … monaural.”

  “It’s all figured out ahead of time.”

  “Ivy,” I queried him, “do you stipulate predestination?”

  “Not in the micro.” He shook his head and drew himself up, as if with effort. “Certainly not. The paths vary. But in the macro it cooks down to the same thing for everybody.” He passed a hand, palm down, over the view. “Is it conceivable that, out of ten thousand stones, It’s all bullshit isn’t chiseled into at least one of them?”

  There were a lot of stones out there.

  Ivy turned his head to one side, still surveying the necropolis. “You’d think a guy with an octopus tattooed on his head had best readily agree with that.” He chuckled.

  I chuckled, too. “So you would think.”

  I kept my eyes on the cemetery, though. After a decent interval I said, “But, in all seriousness, what about music?”

  Ivy turned his dark glasses towards me, plainly astonished.

  I asked again. “Come on, Ivy. You think music is bullshit, too?”

  He laughed pretty hard this time. It wasn’t the chuffing whinny of a juvenile stoner, either; rather it was the delighted outburst of a man who, if he’s seen everything, now finds himself genuinely amused. But it was also the mild, unfueled percussion of the junky, whose ergonomic can only fully deploy itself upon the one thing, not on delight per se. Finally, it seemed the laugh of a man who doesn’t lately do much laughing.

  Ivy shook his head, smiling. “Go find me some jumper cables. I’m fixin’ to fibrillate.”

  I had taken only a little coffee that morning, thinking Ivy and I might go for a late breakfast. So when I puked over the railing, there wasn’t much to it. Bile, mostly.


  That’s when Ivy really began to laugh.

  “I’ve missed you, Curly,” he said affectionately, when he could make himself understood. “Where the hell you been?”

  Chapter Two

  AFTER SHE LEFT IVY PRUITT, LAVINIA GOT HERSELF A girlfriend. Girlfriend had been paroled from the California Institute for Women—California’s “joint for the jointless,” as Ivy called it—less than six months before she was shotgunned by a terrified convenience store owner she was trying to stick up with an air rifle.

  Lavinia hired a lawyer who failed to clear the girlfriend’s name. But, via subversion of the discovery process, a dub of the pertinent ten minutes of videotape from the store’s surveillance camera made it into San Francisco’s underground rave scene, with a sound track that sounded like two forklifts fighting over a fifty-five gallon drum full of ecstasy. The clip was deemed danceable, and Lavinia found herself the here-and-now spokeswoman for the deceased ex-girlfriend, an authentic wild-blue-yonder countercultural anti-heroine (“…a woman protagonist,” Ivy sententiously reminded me, quoting from a review of the ‘performance’ on a website called KlubXeen.com, downloaded and printed at his local branch of the Oakland Public Library, “as in a play or book, characterized by a lack of traditional heroic qualities.”); from which fifteen minutes of notoriety Lavinia entrepreneured herself to the persona of Auntie, heroin dealer to the hipoisie.

  I professed shock.

  Ivy shrugged. “A girl does what she knows best. What Lavinia did was talk a Mexican tarball wholesaler into a franchise.”

  I professed incredulity.

  “Want to experience entrepreneurial zeal at its most pristine?” Ivy extended an open palm. “Gimme ten bucks.”

  I professed uncertainty.

  “Look at it this way,” Ivy suggested. “It’s the same price as the latest stupid Hollywood movie targeting a demographic you know nothing about, less the cost of parking and popcorn, but the taste it leaves in your mouth lasts longer.”

  I frowned.

  “A soon-to-be-forgotten movie.”

  I forked over the ten bucks.