Lycidas, the synecdoche of lemons, vast grand opprobrium on wheels, even Lycidas could be depended on in a pinch. As the man in gray stepped toward the car, Klasper wrenched it into drive and sped forward over the left curb. After tooling around a bit on the sidewalk, the car hopped down and sped down the street. In the jostling, Foster had to swiftly catch his stereo cube jittering down the dashboard. He reset it and “Thick As A Brick” began anew. In the circumstances, it seemed more than a song; it seemed like a premonition, an address.
After the spidery guitar picking hardened into chords, Ian Anderson began singing: “Really don’t mind, if you sit this one out.”
“What was that about?” Foster asked when Lycidas had ceased tremoring and the man in gray was out of view, as Foster’s house evaporated from hindsight.
Foster was now dimly aware that Klasper was sweating. Beads streamed from his hair and through the coulee of his cheeks. He turned to Foster, who saw the selfsame sweat wending around the circumference of his sequins and across the channels of blood. He was not happy.
“‘That,’ was what I was trying to avoid.”
“How d’you mean?”
Klasper had turned his head back to the road, breathing erratically, drumming his fingers on the wheel.
“It’ll be fine, Foster. It’ll be fine. I’ve got it under control.”
“Is this about your face?”
“Let’s just say… I stepped into some concrete. Y’know, before it set.”
“How d’you mean, Klasp?”
Klasper was silent.
“What’s actually going on?” Foster reached to pause the music. “And what about the box?”
Klasper’s foot made a motion for the breaks, but he didn’t follow through. Instead he kept driving.
“You know I trust you, right Foster?”
“Sure.”
“Then trust me.”
“I don’t follow.”
Klasper sighed. “Y’know, there’s a phrase from Milton for this. First part of ‘Paradise Lost,’ perennial classic, all that. It’s the part where Satan gets the rebel angels to wake the —— up and get going again. He tells them, ‘Awake, arise, or be for ever fall’n.’ And that’s what I need you to do, Foster.”
Foster only heard Klasper partially; the mention of Milton meant his attention automatically diverted to other matters—he did not share Klasper’s love of England’s Homer—and, in retrospect, it cost Foster a great deal.
Foster sighed and said a pat remark. “Alright. I understand.”
Klasper smiled. “That’a boy.”
Foster feebly released his misgivings, and in a few minutes stopped thinking about the man or the moving box.
They drove through town, watching the procession of shop windows and pedestrians roll by, making idle chatter, before they pulled up to the Verdant Vole, which dominated its own space on the corner of Tarkington and Lewis. Klasper parked horribly between two meters and shortly he and Foster were on the curb, looking around with little interest. Foster saw Klasper had left his window slightly open.
While he was waiting for Klasper, who had ducked through the “Employees Only” door with nary a word of instruction for him, Foster went and ordered a pastrami sandwich on rye—with a pickle spear, of course, and a glass of kosher soda. Then he sat and waited. The interior always reminded him of something between the garden of Eden and a mad scientist’s lab—between the host of potted plants which lined the window and the Rube Goldbergian apparatus that conveyed plates around the restaurant. It conveyed orders via a system of pulleys, perchance by the exchange and motion of marbles that circled the sides of the room unceasingly on rails, as the track wound around the periphery and the interior of the Verdant Vole.
On normal days, Foster and Klasper would normally just steal people’s orders as they swung by. The Vole accounted for this, as the pulley system made obsolete the notion of a waitstaff—just a cashier, a chef and a janitor (i.e. Klasper). But today was not a normal day, and the events of their prior hours together had shaken Foster’s notion of gustatory larceny.
As he waited, however, staring out the window, he heard the door open, and a grand shadow wash over him.
“Hello Foster.”
The next installment of “Awake, arise or be for ever fall’n” will appear in-print April 29.
