The mix - such as it was - ended a week later. Tell asked Jannings for a recommendation and a tape.

'Okay, but you know you're not supposed to play the tape for anyone until the alb.u.m comes out,' Jannings said.

'I know.'

'And why you'd ever want to, for anyone, is beyond me. These guys make The b.u.t.thole Surfers sound like The Beatles.'

'Come on, Paul, it wasn't that bad. And even if it was, it's over.'

He smiled. 'Yeah. There's that. And if I ever work in this business again, I'll give you a call.'

'That would be great.'

They shook hands. Tell left the building which had once been known as Music City, and the thought of the sneakers under the door of stall number one in the third-floor men's John never crossed his mind.

Jannings, who had been in the business twenty-five years, had once told him that when it came to mixing bop (he never called it rock and roll, only bop), you were either s.h.i.t or Superman. For the two months following the Beats' mixing session, John Tell was s.h.i.t. He didn't work. He began to get nervous about the rent. Twice he almost called Jannings, but something in him thought that would be a mistake.

Then the music mixer on a film called Karate Masters of Ma.s.sacre died of a ma.s.sive coronary and Tell got six weeks' work at the Brill Building (which had been known as Tin Pan Alley back in the heyday of Broadway and the Big Band sound), finishing the mix. It was library stuff in the public domain - and a few plinking sitars - for the most part, but it paid the rent. And following his last day on the show, Tell had no more than walked into his apartment before the phone rang. It was Paul Jannings, asking him if he had checked the Billboard pop chart lately. Tell said he hadn't.

'It came on at number seventy-nine.' Jannings managed to sound simultaneously disgusted, amused, and amazed. 'With a bullet.'

'What did?' But he knew as soon as the question was out of his mouth.

' ''Diving in the Dirt.'' '

It was the name of a cut on The Dead Beats' forthcoming Beat It 'Til It's Dead alb.u.m, the only cut which had seemed to Tell and Jannings remotely like single material.

's.h.i.t!'

'Indeed it is, but I have a crazy idea it's gonna go top ten. Have you seen the video?'

'No.'

'What a scream. It's mostly Ginger, the chick in the group, playing mud-honey in some generic bayou with a guy who looks like Donald Trump in overalls. It sends what my intellectual friends like to call 'mixed cultural messages'.' And Jannings laughed so hard Tell had to hold the phone away from his ear.

When Jannings had himself under control again, he said, 'Anyway, it probably means the alb.u.m'll go top ten, too. A platinum-plated dog-t.u.r.d is still a dog-t.u.r.d, but a platinum reference is platinum all the way through - you understand dis t'ing, Bwana?'

'Indeed I do,' Tell said, pulling open his desk drawer to make sure his Dead Beats ca.s.sette, unplayed since Jannings had given it to him on the last day of the mix, was still there.

'So what are you doing?' Jannings asked him.

'Looking for a job.'

'You want to work with me again? I'm doing Roger Daltrey's new alb.u.m. Starts in two weeks.'

'Christ, yes!'

The money would be good, but it was more than that; following The Dead Beats and six weeks of Karate Masters of Ma.s.sacre, working with the ex-lead singer of The Who would be like coming into a warm place on a cold night. Whatever he might turn out to be like personally, the man could sing. And working with Jannings again would be good, too. 'Where?'

'Same old stand. Tabori at Music City.'

'I'm there.'

Roger Daltrey not only could sing, he turned out to be a tolerably nice guy in the bargain. Tell thought the next three or four weeks would be good ones. He had a job, he had a production credit on an alb.u.m that had popped onto the Billboard charts at number forty-one (and the single was up to number seventeen and still climbing), and he felt safe about the rent for the first time since he had come to New York from Pennsylvania four years ago.

It was June, trees were in full leaf, girls were wearing short skirts again, and the world seemed a fine place to be. Tell felt this way on his first day back at work for Paul Jannings until approximately 11.45 P.M. Then he walked into the third-floor bathroom, saw the same once-white sneakers under the door of stall one, and all his good feelings suddenly collapsed.

They are not the same. Can't be the same.

They were, though. That single empty eyelet was the clearest point of identification, but everything else about them was also the same. Exactly the same, and that included their positions. There was only one real difference that Tell could see: there were more dead flies around them now.

He went slowly into the third stall, 'his' stall, lowered his pants, and sat down. He wasn't surprised to find that the urge which had brought him here had entirely departed. He sat still for a little while just the same, however, listening for sounds. The rattle of a newspaper. The clearing of a throat. h.e.l.l, even a fart.

No sounds came.

That's because I'm in here alone, Tell thought. Except, that is, for the dead guy in the first stall.

The bathroom's outer door banged briskly open. Tell almost screamed. Someone hummed his way over to the urinals, and as water began to splash out there, an explanation occurred to Tell and he relaxed. It was so simple it was absurd . . . and undoubtedly correct. He glanced at his watch and saw it was 1:47.

A regular man is a happy man, his father used to say. Tell's dad had been a taciturn fellow, and that saying (along with Clean your hands before you clean your plate} had been one of his few aphorisms. If regularity really did mean happiness, then Tell supposed he was a happy man. His need to visit the bathroom came on at about the same time every day, and he supposed the same must be true of his pal Sneakers, who favored Stall #i just as Tell himself favored Stall #3.

If you needed to pa.s.s the stalls to get to the urinals, you would have seen that stall empty lots of times, or with different shoes under it. After all, what are the chances a body could stay undiscovered in a men's-room toilet-stall for . . .

He worked out in his mind the time he'd last been there.

. . . four months, give or take?

No chance at all was the answer to that one. He could believe the janitors weren't too fussy about cleaning the stalls - all those dead flies - but they would have to check on the toilet-paper supply every day or two, right? And even if you left those things out, dead people started to smell after awhile, right? G.o.d knew this wasn't the sweetest-smelling place on earth - and following a visit from the fat guy who worked down the hall at Ja.n.u.s Music it was almost uninhabitable - but surely the stink of a dead body would be a lot louder. A lot gaudier.

Gaudy? Gaudy? Jesus, what a word. And how would you know? You never smelted a decomposing body in your life.

True, but he was pretty sure he'd know what he was smelling if he did. Logic was logic and regularity was regularity and that was the end of it. The guy was probably a pencil-pusher from Ja.n.u.s or a writer for Snappy Kards, on the other side of the floor. For all John Tell knew, the guy was in there composing greeting-card verse right now: Roses are red and violets are blue, You thought I was dead but that wasn't true; I just deliver my mail at the same time as you!

That sucks, Tell thought, and uttered a wild little laugh. The fellow who had banged the door open, almost startling him into a scream, had progressed to the wash-basins. Now the splashing-lathering sound of him washing his hands stopped briefly. Tell could imagine the newcomer listening, wondering who was laughing behind one of the closed stall doors, wondering if it was a joke, a dirty picture, or if the man was just crazy. There were, after all, lots of crazy people in New York. You saw them all the time, talking to themselves and laughing for no appreciable reason . . . the way Tell had just now.

Tell tried to imagine Sneakers also listening and couldn't.

Suddenly he didn't feel like laughing any more.

Suddenly he just felt like getting out of there.

He didn't want the man at the basin to see him, though. The man would look at him. Just for a moment, but that would be enough to know what he was thinking. People who laughed behind closed toilet-stall doors were not to be trusted.

Click-clack of shoes on the old white hexagonal bathroom tiles, whooze of the door being opened, hisshh of it settling slowly back into place. You could bang it open but the pneumatic elbow-joint kept it from banging shut. That might upset the third-floor receptionist as he sat smoking Camels and reading the latest issue of Krrang!

G.o.d, it's so silent in here! Why doesn't the guy move? At least a little?

But there was just the silence, thick and smooth and total, the sort of silence the dead would hear in their coffins if they could still hear, and Tell again became convinced that Sneakers was dead, f.u.c.k logic, he was dead and had been dead for who knew how long, he was sitting in there and if you opened the door you would see some slumped mossy thing with its hands dangling between its thighs, you would see - For a moment he was on the verge of calling, Hey, Sneaks! You all right?

But what if Sneakers answered, not in a questioning or irritated voice but in a froggy grinding croak? Wasn't there something about waking the dead? About - Suddenly Tell was up, up fast, flushing the toilet and b.u.t.toning his pants, out of the stall, zipping his fly as he headed for the door, aware that in a few seconds he was going to feel silly but not caring. Yet he could not forbear one glance under the first stall as he pa.s.sed. Dirty white mislaced sneakers. And dead flies. Quite a few of them.

Weren't any dead flies in my stall. And just how is it that all this time has gone by and he still hasn't noticed that he missed one of the eyelets? Or does he wear em that way all the time, as some kind of artistic statement?

Tell hit the door pretty hard coming out. The receptionist just up the hall glanced at him with the cool curiosity he saved for beings merely mortal (as opposed to such deities in human form as Roger Daltrey).

Tell hurried down the hall to Tabori Studios.

'Paul?'

'What?' Jannings answered without looking up from the board. Georgie Ronkler was standing off to one side, watching Jannings closely and nibbling a cuticle - cuticles were all he had left to nibble; his fingernails simply did not exist above the point where they parted company with live flesh and hot nerve-endings. He was close to the door. If Jannings began to rant, Georgie

would slip through it.

'I think there might be something wrong in - '

Jannings groaned. 'Something else?'

'What do you mean?'

'This drum track is what I mean. It's badly botched, and I don't know what we can do about it.' He flicked a toggle, and drums crashed into the studio. 'You hear it?'

The snare, you mean?'

'Of course Imean the snare! It stands out a mile from the rest of the percussion, but it's married to it!'

'Yes, but - '

'Yes but Jesus b.l.o.o.d.y f.u.c.k. I hate s.h.i.t like this! Forty tracks I got here, forty G.o.ddam tracks to record a simple bop tune and some IDIOT technician - '

From the tail of his eye Tell saw Georgie disappear like a cool breeze.

'But look, Paul, if you lower the equalization - '

'The eq's got nothing to do with - '

'Shut up and listen a minute,' Tell said soothingly - something he could have said to no one else on the face of the earth - and slid a switch. Jannings stopped ranting and started listening. He asked a question. Tell answered it. Then he asked one Tell couldn't answer, but Jannings was able to answer it himself, and all of a sudden they were looking at a whole new spectrum of possibilities for a song called 'Answer to You, Answer to Me'.

After awhile, sensing that the storm had pa.s.sed, Georgie Ronkler crept back in.

And Tell forgot all about the sneakers.

They returned to his mind the following evening. He was at home, sitting on the toilet in his own bathroom, reading Wise Blood while Vivaldi played mildly from the bedroom speakers (although Tell now mixed rock and roll for a living, he owned only four rock records, two by Bruce Springsteen and two by John Fogerty).

He looked up from his book, somewhat startled. A question of cosmic ludicrousness had suddenly occurred to him: How long has it been since you took a c.r.a.p in the evening, John?

He didn't know, but he thought he might be taking them then quite a bit more frequently in the future. At least one of his habits might change, it seemed.

Sitting in the living room fifteen minutes later, his book forgotten in his lap, something else occurred to him: he hadn't used the third-floor rest room once that day. They had gone across the street for coffee at ten, and he had taken a whiz in the men's room of Donut Buddy while Paul and Georgie sat at the counter, drinking coffee and talking about overdubs. Then, on his lunch hour, he had made a quick pit-stop at the Brew 'n Burger . . . and another on the first floor late that afternoon when he had gone down to drop off a bunch of mail that he could have just as easily stuffed into the mail-slot by the elevators.

Avoiding the third-floor men's? Was that what he'd been doing today without even realizing it? You bet your Reeboks it was. Avoiding it like a scared kid who goes a block out of his way coming home from school so he won't have to go past the local haunted house. Avoiding it like the plague.

'Well, so what?' he said out loud.

He couldn't exactly articulate the so-what, but he knew there was one; there was something just a little too existential, even for New York, about getting spooked out of a public bathroom by a pair of dirty sneakers.

Aloud, very clearly, Tell said: 'This has got to stop.'

But that was Thursday night and something happened on Friday night that changed everything. That was when the door closed between him and Paul Jannings.

Tell was a shy man and didn't make friends easily. In the rural Pennsylvania town where he had gone to high school, a quirk of fate had put Tell up on stage with a guitar in his hands - the last place he'd ever expected to be. The ba.s.sist of a group called The Satin Saturns fell ill with salmonella the day before a well-paying gig. The lead guitarist, who was also in the school band, knew John Tell could play both ba.s.s and rhythm. This lead guitarist was big and potentially violent. John Tell was small, humble, and breakable. The guitarist offered him a choice between playing the ill ba.s.sist's instrument and having it rammed up his a.s.s to the fifth fret. This choice had gone a long way toward clarifying his feelings about playing in front of a large audience.

But by the end of the third song, he was no longer frightened. By the end of the first set he knew he was home. Years after that first gig, Tell heard a story about Bill Wyman, ba.s.sist of The Rolling Stones. According to the story, Wyman actually nodded off during a performance - not in some tiny club, mind you, but in a huge hall - and fell from the stage, breaking his collarbone. Tell supposed lots of people thought the story was apocryphal, but he himself had an idea it was true . . . and he was, after all, in a unique position to understand how something like that could happen. Ba.s.sists were the invisible men of the rock world. There were exceptions - Paul McCartney, for one - but they only proved the rule.

Perhaps because of the job's very lack of glamor, there was a chronic shortage of ba.s.s players. When The Satin Saturns broke up a month later (the lead guitarist and the drummer got into a fist-fight over a girl), Tell joined a band formed by the Saturns' rhythm man, and his life's course was chosen, as simply and quietly as that.

Tell liked playing in the band. You were up front, looking down on everyone else, not just at the party but making the party happen; you were simultaneously almost invisible and absolutely essential. Every now and then you had to sing a little back-up, but n.o.body expected you to make a speech or anything.

He had lived that life - part-time student and full-time band gypsy - for ten years. He was good, but not ambitious - there was no fire in his belly. Eventually he drifted into session work in New York, began fooling with the boards, and discovered he liked life even better on the far side of the gla.s.s window. During all that time he had made one good friend: Paul Jannings. That had happened fast, and Tell supposed the unique pressures that went with the job had had something to do with it . . . but not everything. Mostly, he suspected, it had been a combination of two factors: his own essential loneliness and Jannings's personality, which was so powerful it was almost overwhelming. And it wasn't so different for Georgie, Tell came to realize following what happened on that Friday night.

He and Paul were having a drink at one of the back tables in McMa.n.u.s's Pub, talking about the mix, the biz, the Mets, whatever, when all of a sudden Jannings's right hand was under the table and gently squeezing Tell's crotch.

Tell moved away so violently that the candle in the center of the table fell over and Jannings's gla.s.s of wine spilled. A waiter came over and righted the candle before it could scorch the tablecloth, then left. Tell stared at Jannings, his eyes wide and shocked.

'I'm sorry,' Jannings said, and he did look sorry . . . but he also looked unperturbed.

'Jesus Christ, Paul!' It was all he could think of to say, and it sounded hopelessly inadequate.

'I thought you were ready, that's all,' Jannings said. 'I suppose I should have been a little more subtle.'

'Ready?' Tell repeated. 'What do you mean? Ready for what?'

'To come out. To give yourself permission to come out.'

'I'm not that way,' Tell said, but his heart was pounding very hard and fast. Part of it was outrage, part was fear of the implacable certainty he saw in Jannings's eyes, most of it was dismay. What Jannings had done had shut him out.

'Let's let it go, shall we? We'll just order and make up our minds that it never happened.' Until you want it to, those implacable eyes added.

Oh, it happened, all right, Tell wanted to say, but didn't. The voice of reason and practicality would not allow it . . . would not allow him to risk lighting Paul Jannings's notoriously short fuse. This was, after all, a good job . . . and the job per se wasn't all. He could use Roger Daltrey's tape in his portfolio even more than he could use two more weeks' salary. He would do well to be diplomatic and save the outraged-young-man act for another time. Besides, did he really have anything to feel outraged about? It wasn't as if Jannings had raped him, after all.

And that was really just the tip of the iceberg. The rest was this: his mouth closed because that was what his mouth had always done. It did more than close - it snapped shut like a bear-trap, with all his heart below those interlocked teeth and all his head above.