"Ne!" the stout gatekeeper growled, brandishing his Uzi. He heaved his beer belly off his stool with a grunt and lumbered menacingly towards me. I didn't understand Czech but the body language was clear enough. I backed away from the stainless steel doors and went to the reception desk to find out why I had been imprisoned in the University of Truth and Justice.
"Security," Annichka, the cutie at reception, explained merrily. "Mister X arrived this morning."
"I just want to go for a walk."
"No one can enter or leave the building for the next three days."
"Three days!"
"You could watch television," Annichka suggested helpfully. "There are big screen TVs in all the bars."
I brightened. "That'a good thought. Maybe they have Amerikan football."
"I'm sure they do. We even get daytime soap operas in this building!" I was touched by the guileless pride on this post-communist duckie's beaming face.
"That's lovely. Hey, Annichka, who called me yesterday from the Amerikan Embassy? Did he leave a number?"
"Let me check… A Mr. Steele Remington. Here's his number. There's a phone booth just next to the stairs over there."
"Great. Thanks." I looked around furtively as I made my phone call. Lucy had warned me off calling the outside world and I wanted to know why. At the same time I didn't want to get caught by her. Luckily, Steele picked up the phone right away.
"Hey, Steele. I've got news for you," I said eagerly. "Xox is in town."
"I know, I know," my old school friend replied wearily. "It's on CNN and every other international channel. He's given a dozen major interviews since breakfast. He arrived this morning from New York via Berlin."
"Oh." A thought struck me. "How come you're tracking his movements?"
"Because Mister X is an eminent Amerikan citizen and the Secretary of State has given personal directions that we are to extend him every facility in our power."
"I thought he was Albanian. Didn't you tell me on the plane that nobody knew anything about him?"
"That's also true. Listen, bud, your Mister X is a very public enigma. We know everything about him and none of it means shit."
"Did he make his money dealing drugs?" I asked wildly.
"That's one I've never heard before." Steele seemed genuinely taken aback. "Where did you pick that up?"
"Everyone's too happy around here. And they give people vitamins at the reception desk."
"Interesting, but I'm not sure how far that will go with the backroom boys. They're getting a bit insistent on hard evidence these days. Tape recordings of drug deals are good. Videotapes are better."
"Steele, whom do you really work for?"
"Are you taping this?"
"No…. Why the suspicion?"
"Because someone is. I have a little device here that tells me when my phone conversations are being tapped and it just went berserk." Steele didn't sound very friendly anymore.
"Well, I guess I'll talk to you later then," I replied lamely before he hung up. I wandered back to the reception desk and asked Annichka if she knew anything about phone calls being taped.
Annichka nodded her pretty head and smiled at me. "It's just a routine precaution while Mister Xox is here. His guards are monitoring all communications in and out of the building. We have to be very careful." Annichka looked over my shoulder. "Isn't that right, Lucy?"
"That's right, Annichka. We can never be too careful about His well-being." In a severe grey suit, Lucy looked like a very business-like angel. "I'm sorry. They're all here right now. It's a very high level meeting. Leaks could be embarrassing. We can't take chances."
"Who is here?"
"Oh, all the Big People. The people who really matter. The ones who enjoy His confidence. Professor Masaryk. Doctor Terence Killjoy-Yuck. Lady Monica Bigglesworth-Fume. Professor Attila Ugh from Budapest. The famous dissident journalist Cain Piknik came from his hospital bed in Warsaw even though he was undergoing surgery on his liver." Lucy looked around and lowered her voice. "Mister Xox will be meeting the President later this afternoon."
"The President of Czech…?"
Lucy nodded proudly. "Good King Wenceslas himself."
"What does it mean?"
"I think Mister Xox is planning to make a very important announcement about the University's future."
"What is it?"
"Oh, I wouldn't know. But we'll find out soon enough." She gave my arm a little squeeze. "Relax. Read a good book. Have you read the book I gave you, His most recent one?"
"I started it," I lied, meekly cowering under the austere gaze of this angelic school-marm.
"Well, finish it then. Take long showers. Eat proper meals. Don't drink. And stay away from the twentieth floor."
"Is that where the Big People are meeting?"
"Yes. And Our Lord's guards can be a teensy-weensy impulsive sometimes."
I retreated to my room. I wrote long chatty letters to everyone I could think of. I watched football reruns on cable TV for hours on end. I went to the gym and sweated for hours in the sauna. I was so bored that I even lifted weights, spraining various embryonic muscles in the process. I limped back to the sixteenth floor and paced around sulkily in my luxurious cell. On a whim I had stopped taking the vitamins Lucy had given me. I was in a foul mood. I thought wistfully about my friends Flossie and Navel. I thought about getting Steele to send over some Marines to rescue me. I thought about sitting in a cafe with Man, talking about the end of the world. I thought about killing myself. The window wouldn't open far enough to jump, I didn't have any rope, and I couldn't extract the blades from my electric razor. I tried all three bars in the building but the barmen refused to serve me. "Miss Lucy's orders, sir," they smiled sorrowfully, spreading their hands in languid Central European resignation. "Would you like some coffee?" I drank so much coffee that I was forced to retreat to the library in search of something really dull with which to steady my jangled nerves. I buried myself in the rosy sheets of the Financial Times, having perused every word of the international news, the promise of the crossword still in front of me, when my hard won composure was rudely disrupted.
"I prefer the Wall Street Journal myself." I looked around balefully. I hate being interrupted when I'm engrossed in the latest installment in that ultimate melodrama of our times, the rise and fall of stock prices. A portly bald man in a badly wrinkled grey suit stood over me, smiling. He eased himself into an armchair next to mine and let out a comfortable sigh.
"The coverage is not as in depth," the bald intruder continued, oblivious to the hatred and incredulity on my face. "But then that is precisely the point. When you read a financial newspaper, you must always think of all those men on commuter trains, rushing from their suburban homes at seven in the morning, having gulped down instant coffee and desiccated cereal or perhaps a couple of greasy eggs on sliced white bread washed down with orange juice made from concentrate."
The man nodded to himself. The yellow light from the overhead lamps glinted on his bald pate. I looked at him with growing interest. His grin seemed glued to his clean-shaven face. "Think of their digestion! The acids generated by their breakfasts are sloshing around, biting deeper into already ulcerous stomachs. Now are they going to be able to concentrate properly on the newspaper they have hastily picked up at the train station? A newspaper which they buy solely because all their fellow commuters buy the same paper in order to show to each other that they are also businessmen, solid upstanding citizens who possess, or have the ambition to possess, a suburban house and a wife to go with it..."
"I ask you," the bald one continued, "will such men be able to read the newspaper well? Will they look at the small stories? Will they catch the nuances, the lines between the lines, the lines which were left out altogether because the editor was told by his managing editor who in turn was told by his publisher that a certain little fact might just as well not be mentioned for the time being for good reasons that don't need to be specified... In most cases, of course, the editor doesn't even need to be explicitly told such things. He already knows the finer points of the trade, otherwise he wouldn't have his job in the first place. And so, the little details that really matter are never in the newspaper. But then what does really matter on the financial markets? Markets are strange things. In some ways like democracies. No single vote matters and yet the sum of all votes does matter. It is the same on the financial markets. Why does a trader on the currency exchanges buy or sell dollars at a given moment? Why does he think that the Japanese economy is faltering? He has read it in the newspaper while half his attention was uneasily devoted to the churning in his stomach, and so have a million other sleepy commuters with the same digestive problem. And so the complex interplay of what we are allowed to eat and what we are allowed to think, it is this interplay which really matters. Perhaps it is the same thing. Ingestion. We are what we eat. This is the secret of my success."
The bald man heaved himself up slowly. "You will excuse me. I am supposed to be in a meeting. I am always supposed to be in a meeting. It is a pleasure to play hooky. I knew they would not look for me in the library. I have enjoyed this conversation," he said politely, still grinning. I nodded. I hadn't said a word.
I spent the next half hour leafing through the newspaper but even the comics couldn't hold my attention. I went back up to my room and paced around discontentedly for a while. Then I noticed the noises next door and stiffened.
I don't watch pornography unless I can help it, but I know the sound of sex when I hear it. Although this sounded more like a herd of elephants having a wild orgy: great rambunctious harrumphing grunts, punctuated by piercing wails in ecstatic counterpoint, all to the cheerful squeaky rhythm of a bed being given the bouncing of a lifetime.
It was too much to handle: my curiosity was madly piqued. I fumbled with the latch of my window in an attempt to catch a glimpse of the action. I couldn't quite get my head through the window, but I knew what to do in this emergency, thanks to an instructive hour spent in detention in the company of two slightly older thugs when I was myself in fourth grade and only just beginning my career in crime. I rushed to the bathroom for my portable shaving mirror, hooked it onto the end of a coat hanger, and dangled the impromptu periscope out the window. As I searched cautiously for the right angle, I could only hope that the couple next door were too engrossed to notice.
My mirror nearly fell off the coat hanger when I caught sight of my rutting neighbours. Pieces of grey suiting lay scattered around the bald man I had encountered in the library less than an hour before. Seen from behind, he was an impressive sight: his naked back and buttocks and legs were covered in a thick mat of greying hair, altogether appropriate to his virile movements. I have always admired our cousins, the great apes, and this helped me get over the shock of recognizing the bald gorilla's paramour. Blonde hair strewn all over the pillow, her body flushed with passion's fever, face contorted in purple joy, a barely recognizable angel: Lucy. Her severe grey suit lay promiscuously crumpled with her lover's pinstripes in grotesque caricature of the bodies writhing and cavorting above.
I watched the reflections in my distorting mirror in stunned silence before yielding for a moment to mute misery. The night Lucy and I may have spent together, even if in dream, had given me a warm fuzzy feeling of ownership, and the shattering of that illusion struck me like a slap in the face. A swarm of horrid thoughts came buzzing into my head as I watched their unending revels. His boastful bellows and her joyous shrieks grew louder and louder, and each successive climax bred ever more hateful comparisons of endurance, and, yes, length. And I had to admit the gorilla won on all counts. Definitely the Alpha male.
Head drooping, I was about to admit defeat and go sulk in a corner with my thumbs in my ears to block off the mating couple's victorious cries, when suddenly I forgot everything. In the corner of my periscope, I noticed a small black object twitching to and fro… and as it turned towards me, I saw a glint of light: another periscope! I hastily pulled in my own amateur device, moved to the further end of the window, and tilted my periscope's angle downward to watch the watchers. The alien periscope protruded and retracted, whirred and spun, like a watchful alien. I flinched involuntarily each time it turned towards me: it had the intimidating bulk and menacing sheen of a nuclear submarine. The long shaft was attached to a sleek black metal viewfinder hooked up in turn to a videocamera. The whole operation was frighteningly professional, but what scared me most were the two men stooping over the viewfinder screen. I had never seen the smaller rat-faced man before, but I instantly recognized the tall stooping figure in the beige trench coat: the distinctive vulture face could only belong to my old college tutor, Terence Killjoy-Yuck, at whose behest I had come to work in Prague at the University of Truth and Justice.
At that very moment the bald man let out a resounding roar. My nerves couldn't take it any longer: my ramshackle contraption slipped out of my quivering fingers. Dolefully, I watched the shaving mirror slip off the coat hanger as it fell sixteen floors to the road below, shattering into a million murderous fragments. A passing cyclist sailed safely by, oblivious of his good luck. I, on the other hand, stood entranced a fraction too late: Terence's periscope swivelled towards me and I stared helplessly into its malign gaze. Now the watchers knew that I was watching them watching. And I didn't even have time to smile.
The next two days passed without event. I had made friends with one of the barmen, a big blond boy named Marek who had a passion for Amerikan football. I sneered at the throwing arm of his favorite quarterback while he considered my fervent attachment to the Kalifornia Quakers an unworthy, atavistic, and parochial sentiment which could not be justified on any truly rational basis. Naturally, we had bonded at first sight. That evening he furtively slipped me two bottles of whisky in a plastic bag which I smuggled into my room and hid in the water tank of my toilet. I knew that treacherous Lucy would not leave me in peace until I had read Xox's book and so, with a heart-felt sigh, I barricaded myself into my room, brought out the whisky, and set myself to work. It was heavy going, ploughing through all this gibberish about Godel's theorem, chaos theory, fractal geometry, and how the hidden order of the universe lay precisely in its randomness. I had happily left science and math behind me in high school and this book felt like cruel and unusual punishment. I did notice with interest a footnote which read, "I am indebted to Dr. Terence Killjoy-Yuck for his comments on this subject. However, I disagree with him on all grounds." My victory dance when I reached the end of the book was a thing of joy.
But then I idly glanced at the photograph of the author on the end flap of the dust cover. A portly man in a grey suit peered out of the picture, his grin a crease in the middle of his round hairless head. I recognized him at once: billionaire, philanthropist, and sex maniac, the enigmatic and very hairy Mister Xox.
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