Count Geiger's Blues Read Online Free PDF Page A

“The force that drives the water through the rocks / Drives my red blood.”
    *
    After the festival, Xavier got into his rented car (he hated to drive, but you couldn’t hail a cab in the Phosphor Fogs) and headed not toward Salonika—with its inescapable air of disintegrating civilization—but deeper into the mountains in quest of a Nietzschean solitude that would heal his neglected Life Force.
    Grantham wasn’t looking for him until late the next afternoon, and Pamela—of Pamela’s Boarding House—had told him how to get to a clear-water spring seldom visited by tourists. He might be able to take a moonlight swim there without disturbing anyone or being disturbed.
    By seven that evening, he had found the spot, a limestone sink at the base of a wooded cliff well back from the highway. An old mill had stood downstream from the pool into which this icy spring emptied, but it hadn’t operated for years. Now, it was only weathered timbers and rotten paddles: a picturesque ruin.
    Xavier parked above the mill, carried a picnic basket down a path tangled with blackberry vines, and ate dinner on a rock ledge over the spring, nibbling Gouda cheese and sourdough bread and sipping a good but inexpensive Chardonnay.
    He had a nylon tent in his rental car, the sort that can be pitched by snapping out its aluminum supports into a miniature Hemisphere. Xavier decided to swim, camp on the rock ledge, and swim again in the morning. Then he’d get his gear and begin the two-hour drive back to Salonika. Afterward, a whole day to rest up at home before returning to the dayroom—no rush. Journalistically speaking, The GBS Drama Festival was small potatoes, ranking well below a sex scandal featuring a senator or a televangelist.
    Later, tipsy from the wine, Xavier went skinnydipping, the water clear as glass and almost as sharp. Swimming in it was like drinking white lightning chilled in dry ice. Going under the spring’s surface was like closing your mouth on a stick of licorice and opening it on vacuum. Bubbles rippled over Xavier’s body like fresh 7Up, astonished minnows fled from him like glassy-blue match flames, and a slow-coiling eel hung before him as if trapped in gelatin—a weird eel, uncannily long, with eye spots as red as poppies and a feathery violet dorsal fin.
    Xavier broke the surface. Were electric eels a freshwater fauna? Nope. The eel might bite him, but it wouldn’t discharge thousands of volts into his helpless body. Hell, it must be scared of him . A little thrashing about would frighten it away and get his own sluggish blood moving. He butterflied across the spring, dolphin-kicking and looping his arms in and out of the water. Soon, he had neutralized the cold and driven off the eel.
    “ The force that drives the water through the rocks / Drives my red blood. ”
    Xavier rolled to his back. The oblate moon shone down, silvering the pool, like a radioactive skull—maybe Nietzsche’s. Nietzsche envied him both this lovely experience and his “great healthiness.”
    Out of the water, Xavier donned shorts and set up his tent. Crouched beside it, he heard a splash from the rock pool: a loud splash. He grabbed his flashlight and shone it on the water. Another splash, just as loud! This time he saw an odd creature leap from the bank to the pool. A muskrat? Xavier crossed the ledge and peered down into the weeds growing out of the jumble of rocks beside the water.
    His flashlight’s beam picked out a shape that experience and memory told him was that of, well, a frog. A bullfrog. An enormous bullfrog. As big as a well-fed house cat. He had heard of an African variety of frog that grew even larger than these frogs had grown, but he’d never seen one in the States, and the appearance of this frog, glistening a faint emerald-grey in the flashlight’s cone and the eerie wash of the moonlight, gave Xavier the shivers. He stared and stared. Finally, the third, and last, bullfrog plunged into the water, throwing up