Doctor Sax - Jack Kerouac [38]
“But my dear, so baroque–I don’t mean to use my name —so gay—”
“Which after all you measure everything by. I wanted strength in the party, blood–no Zounds and arses in their follifications, making pear pillows in the shade–well, poop along they can– I don’t see any reason why, if the Wizard of Nittlingen is willing to– allow it shall we say, I go along, have no preference in the matter—” He turned away, pursed over his key-chain … key to his coffin, gold.
“Dovists are after all mere lovers of–no different than the Brownings of other Romes, groaners of other gabbles —I mean—”
Count Condu stood at the stone window staring severely into the night; in Baroque’s elegant chambers it was possible to relax, so he wore his malagant–hood-like his head loomed over his shoulders as if winged– A knock on the door, Sabatini ushered in young Boaz the son of the Castle Caretaker who was an old mysterious goof always hiding in the cellar– Young Boaz, with his long dark feet and leer, strangely satanically handsome like a clay head stretched, sophisticated son of a hermit, “Oh—!—Baroque is here.”
“I should say, dearie, it’s my room.”
“Your room! I thought it was Count Condu’s. Well may I close the door—?”
“No, flit to an eve,” muttered the Count in his cup.
The wildest news,” said Boaz.
“And now—?” perked Baroque expectantly (he wore his brocaded white silk tunic pajamas a la Cossack with a great bloodclot in red thread over the heart, he smoked from elegant holder, “perfumed of course,” a brilliant wit in the Ark Galleries of the Rack where he’d been for a while before descending (not to take courses in a taxi school) to forfend the later migamies for his mother’s estate and save the day, and find himself a Sugar Daddy at the same time so here he was) (the Wizard’s brother, meek ill-tempered oldqueen Flapsnaw, we never saw him around).
“And now,” provided Boaz, “they have officially denounced the Dovists as underground heretics of the Free Movement—”
“Free movement,” snorted Condu— “some kind of dysentery? Would be rather a joke if the Snake should spew out like a great wet fart watering and be-splattering the earth with a piece of its own good riddance—”
In the window, suddenly, unbeknownst to all of them, Doctor Sax appears, dark, merged with the balcony, shrouded, silent, as they talk.
“Such a notion,” laughed B. “That doves, are kin, to snakes, my dear!”
“They infer it from doves’ and snakes’ proximities.”
“Infer without proof is less than infer without proof for no reason–these people show ignorance without charm.”
“Well foo you too,” said Boaz bowing and slapping his white gloves together. “Maybe they’ll rain you out sometime in a blap, then where will your verdigris be? out in the garden under an onion.”
“Onions show stones”—Baroque threw in.
“It’d be better if fancy iterators re-fancied their anvil on a wit”
“Touché”.
The Doctor Sax vanished–out in the yard it could be heard, a faint triumphant distant ha ha ha ha ha of inside secret sureness in the black–around the bird bath his shroud slanted to a fade–the moon croaked–Blook wandered in the back Garden with a garland of peanut butter twigs in his hair, put there by Semibu the suspicious dwarf, ‘twas to ward away the Onion. Blook had a orror of onion— In the belfry of the castle triumphant leered the panic Bat–a Spider hung from the wall facing the river with his silvery moonlight thread all dusty, a stately lion descended the stairs in the cellars where the Zoo was kept, a truckload of Gnomes came flipping through the wire—(in underground tunnels).
Condu, looking out the window, mused.
Baroque read the little booklet of Dovist poem in his bed.
Boaz sat stiffly writing his elegy for the dead, at the table, by the lamp.
“On the Day,” read Baroque, “clouds of Seminal Gray Doves shall issue forth from the Snake’s Mouth and it shall collapse in a Prophetic Camp,