“So I gathered.”
“Came in handy.”
“Probably kept Ordegard from throwing another grenade at us, saved our lives.”
“To the king of rock-‘n’-roll,” she said, raising her brandy snifter.
The band stopped torturing the Ellington tunes and took a break, so maybe there was a God in Heaven after all, and blessed order in the universe.
Harry and Connie clinked glasses, sipped. He said, “Why Elvis?”
She sighed. “Early Elvis — he was something. He was all about freedom, about being what you want to be, about not being pushed around just because you’re different. ‘Don’t step on my blue suede shoes.’ Songs from his first ten years were already golden oldies when I was just seven or eight, but they spoke to me. You know?”
“Seven or eight? Heavy stuff for a little kid. I mean, a lot of those songs were about loneliness, heartbreak.”
“Sure. He was that dream figure — a sensitive rebel, polite but not willing to take any shit, romantic and cynical at the same time. I was raised in orphanages, foster homes, so I knew what loneliness was all about, and my heart had some cracks of its own.”
The waitress brought their burgers, and the busboy refreshed their coffee.
Harry was beginning to feel like a human being again. A dirty, rumpled, aching, weary, frightened human being, but a human being nonetheless.
“Okay,” he said, “I can understand being crazy for the early Elvis, memorizing the early songs. But later?”
Shaking ketchup onto her burger, Connie said, “In its way, the end’s as interesting as the beginning. American tragedy.”
“Tragedy? Winding up a fat Vegas singer in sequined jumpsuits?”
“Sure. The handsome and courageous king, so full of promise, transcendent — then because of a tragic flaw, he takes a tumble, a long fall, dead at forty-two.”
“Died on a toilet.”
“I didn’t say this was Shakespearean tragedy. There’s an element of the absurd in it. That’s what makes it
“I don’t think you’ll see either the Democrats or Republicans using that line as a campaign slogan anytime soon.” The burger was delicious. Around a mouthful of it, he said, “So what was Elvis’s tragic flaw?”
“He refused to grow up. Or maybe he wasn’t able.”
“Isn’t an artist supposed to hold on to the child within him?”
She took a bite of her sandwich, shook her head. “Not the same as perpetually
“Tell me.”
She had clearly thought a lot about it. “Elvis lost direction. I think maybe he fell in love with fame more than freedom. Genuine freedom, freedom with responsibility not from it — that’s a worthy adult dream. But fame is just a cheap thrill. You’d have to be immature to really enjoy fame, don’t you think?”
“I wouldn’t want it. Not that I’m likely to
“Worthless, fleeting, a trinket only a child would mistake for diamonds. Elvis, he looked like a grownup, talked like one—”
“Sure as hell sang like a grownup when he was at his best.”
“Yeah. But emotionally he was a case of arrested development, and the grownup was just a costume he wore, a masquerade. Which is why he always had a big entourage like his own private boy’s club, and ate mostly fried banana sandwiches with peanut butter, kids’ food, and rented whole amusement parks when he wanted to have fun with his friends. It’s why he wasn’t able to stop people like Colonel Parker from taking advantage of him.”
Grownups. Children. Arrested development. Psychosis. Fame. Sorcery. Fairy tales. Arrested development. Monsters. Masquerade.
Harry sat up straighter, his mind racing.
Connie was still talking, but her voice seemed to be coming from a distance: “… so the last part of Elvis’s life shows you how many traps there are…”
Psychotic child. Fascinated by monsters. With a sorcerer’s power. Arrested development. Looks like a grownup but masquerading.
“… how easy it is to lose your freedom and never find your way back to it…”
Harry put down his sandwich. “My God, I think maybe I know who Ticktock is.”
“Who?”
“Wait. Let me think about this.”
Shrill laughter erupted from a table of noisy drunks near the bandstand. Two men in their fifties with the look of wealth about them, two blondes in their twenties. They were trying to live their own fairy tales: the aging men dreaming of perfect sex and the envy of other men; the women dreaming of riches, and happily unaware that their fantasies would one day seem dreary, dull, and tacky even to them.
Harry rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands, struggled to order his thoughts. “Haven’t you noticed there’s something childish about him?”
“Ticktock? That ox?”
“That’s his golem. I’m talking about the real Ticktock, the one who makes the golems. This seems like a game to him. He’s playing with me the way a nasty little boy will pull the wings off a fly and watch it struggle to get airborne, or torture a beetle with matches. The deadline at dawn, the taunting attacks, childish, as if he’s some playground bully having his fun.”
He remembered more of what Ticktock had said as he had risen from the bed in the condo, just before he’d started the fire:…
Push anyone around if you want…
“Harry?”
He blinked, shivered. “Some sociopaths are made by having been abused as children. But others are just born that way, bent.”
“Something screwed up in the genes,” she agreed.
“Suppose Ticktock was born bad.”
“He was never an angel.”
“And suppose this incredible power of his doesn’t come from some weird lab experiment. Maybe it’s also a result of screwed-up genes. If he was born with this power, then it separated him from other people the way fame separated Presley, and he never learned to grow up, didn’t need or want to grow up. In his heart he’s still a child. Playing a child’s game. A mean little child’s game.”
Harry recalled the bearish vagrant standing in his bedroom, red-faced with rage, shouting over and over again:
Connie leaned across the table and waved one hand in front of his face. “Don’t go catatonic on me, Harry. I’m still waiting for the punchline. Who is Ticktock? You think maybe he actually
“No. He’s older. Still young. But older.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Because I’ve met him.”
He told Connie about the young man who had slipped under the crime-scene tape and crossed the sidewalk to the shattered window,of the restaurant where Ordegard had shot up the lunchtime crowd. Tennis shoes, jeans, a Tecate beer T-shirt.
