LUDIC LOG

As Percy fumbles with the key to the entrance door to the Clearview, Nick engages in his post-gig ritual of randomly pressing everyone's door buzzer. The door swings open and tired Percy heads straight for the door of their apartment, but Nick pauses at the Pepsi vending machine. The Pepsi machine has for many months refused to accept any change belonging to young Bloodhead, but nearly every night Nick adds new scars to the cheerful red-white-and-blue face of the machine trying to get it to take his quarters. Nick, Percy, and Pepsi Machine all know that Nick is in the end going to vandalize the machine and get free Pepsis, but like duelists of yore, they go through the solemn ritual before getting down to the real bloodshed.

"Goddamn machine! I don't get this. Do they have toll booth attendants that throw your quarter back at you? I don't want to do this," reaching inside the door for a sawed-off, taped-up table leg, "if this machine would just take my money..."

"Uh huh." Percy goes inside to dump the equipment, serenaded by the sound of Nick thrashing the Pepsi machine within an inch of its electronic life, followed by the cascading ring of change, spitting slot-machine-like, from the return tray, and the falling-corpse thud of ill-gotten soda cans rolling into the hopper. Heading out to the Van of Love to grab the amps he sees Nick, his pockets bulging comically with change, filling a red plastic milk crate with unpaid-for pop. Nick smiles peacefully and tosses Percy an A & W.

"Hurry up with that stuff", Nick says, dragging the crate inside and away from the brutally scarred vending machine. "We gotta go meet the new fish".

"What? You mean the whoever that moved into #2H? It's almost two AM. They'll be asleep."

"Nah, I saw their lights in when we were pulling up. Besides," Nick adds, hefting thecrate and walking outside again, "no one sleeps their first night in a new apartment. Did you?"

"My first night in this apartment I didn't sleep because you invited half of Maricopa County over to drink an entire liquor store worth of beer." Following Nick outside and upstairs against his better judgment, Percy surveys the damage to the Pepsi machine. There are holes in the Pepsi-can-shaped plastic front; the metal change box is dented and scarred almost beyond recognition, and Nick has scratched 'EAT ME' on the side. "Boy, I think you really overdid it this time, Nick."

"Ah, they'll never notice. C'mon."

Up the stairs to the apartment directly above and across from them: #2H, formerly the home of a family of Satanists, disliked even by the generally unlikable residents of the Clearview. Nick is right about them still being awake: immediately after he knocks (making Percy hold the housewarming gift crate of stolen carbonated beverages) he hears light quick steps, a woman's steps, crossing the carpeted floors and unlatching the locks. The door swings open and Nick strolls in, barely noticing the young woman who opens the door. Percy notices her, though: he sees Hortense Kalumni and instantly falls in love.

"What the hell? Get out of my apartment now! I'll call the police!" She grabs her cream-colored Princess phone and makes a gesture of pure bluff: the phone isn't hooked up yet. Nick peeks under the Rick Springfield poster.

Percy, all smiles and proffered Pepsi, stares in a trying-not-to-stare way. "Er...hi! We're from the, uh, we're from downstairs. Your neighbors. Really. No need to, uh, call the cops." He grins in what he hopes is a disarming way, but it just looks embarrassed and a little frightening.

"Nice crosshatching," says Nick in re the Satanic mural.

"Well, just come right in, why don't you," Hortense, very sarky, storming over to Nick, who she has solidly placed as the ringleader in this apparent mad scientist/hunchbacked flunky scenario. Percy is left standing ignored, fat and foolish at the door, holding the milk crate pointlessly.

Nick lights up a cigarette and examines the "Hard to Hold" poster with distaste. "You know, I got a Samantha Fox poster would look really good next to this."

"I tell you what," Hortense hisses, drumming her fingers in a way that portends no good but which Percy finds dead sexy, "I'm actually going to refrain from calling the police because first of all, I think authentic psychos would have better manners, and second because my phone doesn't work. But I will say that if you two aren't out of my apartment in three minutes I'm going to start screaming out the names of major felonies at the top of my lungs." Nick instinctively glances at the windows; they're open.

Irrelevant Percy sets down his case of assorted soft drinks. "Why, enh, why three whole minutes?"

"Because I want to give you enough time to help me open this can of paint."

"Fair enough."

"And can you please not smoke in here?" She is still looking at Nick, who is equally oblivious of Percy's foundering on the rocks of romantic obsession.

"What?"

"Can you not smoke in my apartment, please?"

"Why, is your gas leaking?"

"No, I just don't smoke."

Nicky looks at her as if she has mentioned her great fondness for eating newborn babies, and then reluctantly stubs his cigarette out against his too-abused motorcycle boot. Percy, sensing that drastic measures are called for, wanders over and physically insinuates himself in the line of sight between the two.

"Look," he meekly asserts, "we really are your downstairs neighbors, so there's really no need to alert the authorities in any way." Although he tries to give the word 'authorities' a sort of saucy, rebellious inflection, he can't help worrying that something has gone terribly, disastrously wrong with this whole evening. The object of his much too quickly formed affection seems to notice him for the first time, but her only gesture of goodwill or even recognition is to hand him a can of smoke gray house paint and a flathead screwdriver. He struggles mightily with it, failing absolutely to impress her with his brute strength or clockwork efficiency. "Although possibly the paramedics might be able to help out with the jaws of life."

This witticism is lost on both Ms. Kalumni, who is looking purposefully at her digital watch, and Mr. Bloodhead, who is too amused at the sight of Percy trying to open the can to acknowledge this lame attempt at icebreaking humor. Hortense continues to stare meaningfully at her watch. "One minute, thirty-two seconds," she announces. "Digital clocks are the only things in my life that haven't let me down."

"She's timing us. Better hurry it up, McJ--" Percy whips around to forestall Nick's usage of his potentially embarrassing nom de plume a bit too quickly: the paint can lid gives up its resistance to his screwdriver campaign and pops off, with the result that the stains on Hortense's carpet are now largely obscured by a large dollop of gray acrylic paint. This is all it takes for her to finally notice Percy, and he almost wishes he'd thought of it sooner.

"Oh, fabulous! Thank you so much. This is really terrific. Get out! Out of my --" She pauses, looking now not at Percy or the paint or anything really, but looking perhaps at something larger, something very close which only she can see. She is suddenly and heartbreakingly sad, and sits on the floor next to the slow creeping oval of spilled paint.

"Oh, God...this really is my apartment, isn't it? My new apartment," she says, her voice equally close to laughing and crying. "I have blood on the floors of my new apartment. My new neighbors have come into my new apartment and spilled paint all over it." The moment is uncomfortable in the extreme to the Glower Twins, to Percy whose experiences the world through a foot-thick swatch of ironic distance and to Nick whose interest in other human beings is tenuous at best. They exchange glances the meaning of which they cannot interpret because the glances are new, encoding questions they have no answers for.

Hortense sits looking into nothing, trying not to let her eyes rest on Nick or Percy or the apartment or the stain on the floor because if she sees them she will cry. She is not afraid to cry but today, on this day, she sees it as a kind of surrender. She also does not want to cry in front of strangers, an act she equates in terms of sheer impropriety with going topless on a public street (like many women, Hortense carries in her mind a book of emotional etiquette, an entire chapter of which is given over to ways of crying). So she sits on the floor not crying, but suspended in that border world between crying and not-crying, which her guests find much more uncomfortable than if she actually were weeping. The only things she can find to look at are the ceiling and the Revelations-themed tableau. She has, she thinks, seen too much of the latter already today, so she simply stares at the former, working her throat and widening her eyes so that sobs and tears can find no outlet.

Percy formulates a retreat-and-regroup message, which he delivers to his roommate in the form of a slap on the biceps and a nod towards the door. Silently exiting and timidly closing the door, they leave Hortense tracing the patterns of water damage above her. Past that, uninterrupted, is the night sky. It waits with her for seventeen minutes, after which time a simpler, more polite knock sounds at her door.

She is only strong enough to get up and open the door because she already knows who it is. Nick and Percy, all big-dumb-and-charming grins and freshly stolen soda. Percy, eloquence regained and fortified with self-loathing (his favored vitamin): "Hi! We are Nick," (here he indicates the just-named) "and Percy," (taps his own chest) "your downstairs neighbors whom you have never met. May we come in and not smoke?"

She laughs, a laugh that worms its way up from a patch of uncertain mood, and waves them lazily in, possibly having assumed that things have gotten about as bad as they're going to get.

"We stole that carton of Pepsi from the downstairs vending machine as a housewarming present for you," Nick, friendly as he gets, explains. "It's sort of a tradition that when a new fish, eh, new person moves into the building we bust up the machine and get them Pepsis."

"Yeah," Percy adds, "makes it a lot more festive than when you just vandalize it for no particular reason." Nick ignores this dissenting opinion and knocks some LPs off a plush tan easy chair and avails himself of it. He sticks his purposeless cigarette behind his ear and cracks open a Mountain Dew. Hortense sits back on the floor.

Percy looks around, trying to think of some effective way of cleaning up the now-sticky paint stain, but managing only to look like an ineffectual nebbish. He feels it would only make matters worse if he were to destroy one of her towels or rugs by sopping up the paint with it.

"You know, the last people who lived in this apartment only drank animal fluids," says Nick, failing to suppress a belch.

"So they were really Satanists, huh? It sure is nice to live in a building with a history." She selects a few scattered Diet Pepsis and hauls them off to her refrigerator. "So are all the people in this building petty thieves?"

"No," Percy shooting a optical sneer at Nick, who is going through a photo album he has found on the mantel, "some of them are drug addicts too." Resolutely he crosses the floor of the living room (avoiding the 12-inch gray blob) and extends his hand to her bemused expression, instantly thinking that it was an idiotic thing to do. "I'm, uh, Percy. Percy McKenzie." Nick's attention is diverted from shots of Hortense at Camp Sunfall and he watches with a new evil in his eyes as Hortense shakes his hand with little vigor.

"I'm Hortense Kalumni." Percy doesn't expect this particular name and, in an attempt to keep his face from looking like it's just heard something funny, ends up looking like it's heard something frightening. Crass Nick actually snorts, a reedy choking sound that makes Percy shiver. "Go ahead and laugh," she says airily, "it won't make me dislike you any more than I do."

"Kalumni, huh? What is that, Italian?" Nick wants to annoy Percy, not be rude to Hortense, but it's pretty hard for an outsider to tell the difference.

"And what's your name? Or do you just have a police blotter number?"

"I'm Nick. Nick Bloodhead." He waves jauntily as his grin looks around for some shit to eat.

"Bloodhead! What an interesting name. What is that, Italian?"

"Nah. It's Anglo-Saxon." He pronounces this as if it were a foreign phrase, the pronunciation of which he was uncertain.

"Language of the oppressor," adds Percy, then both of them, slipping into the comfortable jargon of band-talk: "Kill Whitey!" Nick laughs wickedly, but Percy feels uncharacteristically ashamed, geeky for having copped this private joke in front of her, as if he had just mentioned how much he enjoyed going to Star Trek conventions. Hortense just stares, her expression a tricky mix of appalled and amused.

"Boy, what a couple of pistols you guys are, huh." She looks with renewed interest at the paint stain on the floor as Nick arises from the loafer and steps over boxes to the door. Percy follows him very slowly, lingering in a terrible suspension between romantic infatuation and embarrassed discomfort.

"Anyway," says Nick, digging for his lighter preparatory to entering the hall and resuming the smoking portion of his life, "we just wanted to stop by and check you out, you know, see if you were weird enough to live in this building." He opens the door and stands at the threshold, lighting up as soon as he reaches the minimum point at which he can be considered out of the apartment.

"And am I?" She wanders towards the door in a perfunctory gesture of seeing-you-outism. This brings her very close to Percy, which brings him very close to a cold sweat. He shuffles reluctantly to the doorway.

"Well, the jury's still out. You get some big points for the name, that's for sure," says Nick, heading for the stairwell.

"Ignore him," says witty Percy, "he's just having a lot of trouble understanding the 'no smoking' thing."

"Does everyone smoke in this building? It does smell a lot like an AA meeting in the hallways."

"Well, I don't..." says Percy. "But I'm the only one, I think."

"We figure," calls Nick from the stairway, "when you live in a dry wooden firetrap built in the late 1890's why not fucking take advantage of it."

"Are you," sez Percy, "going to go to the tenant's meeting tomorrow night? You moved in just in time for it. Four times a year and guaranteed to make you laugh."

"I dunno...I have a lot of moving in stuff to do, and I start a new job Monday."

Nick stomps pointedly on the top stair. "I'm going down to" take heroin "bed, kids. See you in a while Perce. Nice to meet you, uh, Hortense, heh."

"See you, Nick." Percy is, as he sometimes is, very very glad to see his friend go.

"Nice to meet you, Nick. Come back whenever you learn to ask whether you can come in."

"Anyway," says Percy, desperate to reintroduce himself to the conversation, "the tenant's meeting is supposed to be optional, but everyone shows up. It's usually a lot of fun, real adventures in surrealism stuff. No better way to get to know the people around here, and when it comes to the Clearview forewarned is forearmed."

"No kidding. I only wish you'd told me that before you arrived." Percy laughs gently, not sure whether this was a friendly little barb or a sincere expression of hatred. He presses on with the mirthful determination of the doomed soldier.

"Yeah...but anyway, if you feel like going, I, or we, could come up and pick you up, so to speak, at about 6:45. It's at seven." The word BABBLING burns in giant thirty foot high flaming letters in his brain. "You won't regret it, I promise."

"Okay. But if I go with you to this thing you have to promise me something else."

"Sure! You name it." You name it. Add that one, he thinks, to the Big Book of Asinine Clichés as you seem to be writing a new chapter of it every time you open your fat mouth.

"You have to come by early and help me clean up this paint."

"Oh! Jesus, of course, yes. I am so, so sorry. I feel like a real, well, there's no word I can think of as bad as what I feel like."

"It's okay, Percy. Don't kill yourself over it." She touches his shoulder, a casual and meaningless touch that casts a long shadow over the rest of his life. "Just help me fix it and we'll be even, okay?"

"Sure." He is still inside the door and wants to remain there very badly. He is far too cynical and bright to lend any credence to the idea of love at first sight, or even love at 349th sight, but he is quite cognizant that he is in the grips of something rather more intense than the free-floating ungrounded lust that he normally attaches to women in general. "Can I, uh, can I help you unpack or anything? Or clean up?"

"No thanks, really. I've got everything under a convincing illusion of control. I think I just need to be alone for a little while."

"Ah." There comes a bad realization that he knew was coming from the moment he opened his mouth, but which he had tried to shunt to his brain's 'Ignorable Truths' file to rest alongside You're Going to Die Someday, You're Too Fat, You'll Never Be a Millionaire, and The Revolution Probably Isn't Just Around the Corner. "I get you. Sorry."

"It's okay," she says in what she is alarmed to discover seems to be a conciliatory tone. "Don't worry about it. I'm just really tired." She favors him with a smile the exact meaning of which neither of them can quite pin down. "It's nice to meet you."

"You too. I'll see you about six, maybe, tomorrow? If you need anything," he slips a small gray business card with his band's logo on it out of his back pocket and offers it to her, "here's my, our number downstairs."

She takes the card just as he remembers that his name is listed on the card as Percy McJizz. He tries not to seem petrified and mortified and seems sickly whimsical and mortified instead. For her part she hardly seems to look at the card at all. "Thanks," she says, "I'll be sure to use this as soon as my phone is hooked up."

"Oh, yeah, I remember somewhere in my stupidity-clouded 'mind' your mentioning your phone didn't work. Maybe I should go before your already low opinion of me inflates to Hitlerian proportions."

"See you."

"Bye."

Exeunt Percy: although our drama extends beyond the scope of the standard narrative, we will not follow him off the stage we have set as he plods, grim and heavy, down the stairs to his apartment, muttering "Jesus what a jerk" at himself. Hortense Kalumni closes the door, and slumps against the wall, placing her head in her hands, and physical exhaustion finally catches up with emotional exhaustion. She wanders, empty and drained, into her kitchen, still holding the Lethal Injection business card. She surveys the wreckage of her home, fishes in a box sitting on the kitchen table, and comes out with a small erasable message board. On this she tacks the card and writes in hot pink water marker: GET PHONE HOOKED UP. She breaks down in a kitchen chair, and would fall asleep there if not for the tinny insistent mewling of her cat, whose desire to be fed is simple and pure, and untempered by false concern for dear Hortense's fragile state. Cats are fortunate, because they know what they want.