Libra - Don Delillo [142]
“Which side are they?” Lee said.
“Don’t you want to take a guess?”
“The look of this place.”
“Sadder than shit. ”
“Anti-Castro. ”
“The Feebees come in here to talk to him about who’s who in the movement. They don’t know what they’re doing otherwise. They see a Mex kid with a butch haircut and think he’s a Cuban warrior. ”
“Where did you get that word?”
“Feebees? That’s my word. A long-time word of mine.”
“I thought it was my word.”
“You must have heard it from me,” Ferrie said. “This happens all the time. People think they invent things they actually heard from me. I have a way of creeping into people’s minds. I get inside people’s minds.”
A nasal voice, sinuously trailing the question of whether it ought to be believed.
“We have definite ESP, you and I. It probably covers years and continents. Have you ever lived outside the U.S.?”
Lee nodded.
“We probably had each other in range all that time. I want to experiment with remote hypnotism. Hypnotism over the phone or on TV. A fantastic political weapon. Some woman is after me for so-called hypnotizing her son so I could orally stimulate his genitals. I give flying lessons to boys at Lakefront. ”
Ferrie took him to visit a man who lived in a restored carriage house on Dauphine Street, behind a high white wall with a red door in the middle of it. His name was Clay Shaw and he was tall and middle-aged, with a sculptured head and striking white hair. He stood in the middle of the large room that occupied the entire main floor. Silk curtains, bronzework, cork floors covered with Oriental rugs. Two young men were seated, alert and bright as weathercocks.
“When is your birthday?” Shaw said first thing.
“October eighteen,” Lee said.
“Libra. A Libran.”
“The Scales,” Ferrie said.
“The Balance,” Shaw said.
It seemed to tell them everything they had to know.
Clay Shaw wore well-made casual clothes and had the easy manner of someone clearly educated to all the right things. When he smiled, a vein seemed to flash from the comer of his right eye to his hairline.
He said, “We have the positive Libran who has achieved self-mastery. He is well balanced, levelheaded, a sensible fellow respected by all. We have the negative Libran who is, let’s say, somewhat unsteady and impulsive. Easily, easily, easily influenced. Poised to make the dangerous leap. Either way, balance is the key.”
“I brought him here,” Ferrie said, “to see your collection of whips and chains.”
Everyone laughed.
“Clay has whips and chains, black hoods, black capes.”
“For Mardi Gras,” one of the young men said, and everyone laughed again.
Lee felt his smile floating in the air about six inches from his face. They stayed fifteen minutes and went out into the twilight.
“Do you believe in astrology?” Lee said.
“I believe in everything,” Ferrie told him.
He took Lee to his apartment, dark rooms with broken furniture and religious objects. The bookshelves were covered in wood-grain Con-Tact paper and bowed under the weight of many hundreds of medical books, law books, encyclopedias, stacks of autopsy records, books on cancer, forensic pathology, firearms.
Barbells on the floor. A framed document on the wall, a Ph. D. in psychology from Phoenix University—Bari, Italy.
Lee used the bathroom. Amber vials of pills and capsules filled the glass trays. There were loose capsules all over the floor and in the tub. Layers of sticky filament coated the washbasin and the wall next to it—whatever kind of glue he used to attach his mohair wig.
In the living room Ferrie began speaking about his condition even before Oswald emerged from the toilet.
“It’s called alopecia universalis. Of mysterious etiology and without known cure. Instead of hiding it, I adorn it, I dress it up. God made me a clown, so I clown it up. When my hair started coming out, I thought it meant imminent apocalypse, the Bomb falling on Louisiana. The Bomb would seal my authenticity, make me a saint. Fallout shelters were called family rooms of tomorrow. I was ready to live in the meanest hole. The