Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede by Bradley Denton (my reading book .txt) 📕

below the window, watching the snow-speckled screen of a color TV atop the registration desk. Buddy was on the screen, and the sound was turned up loud enough that I could hear him doing his version of “Bo Diddley.” The Great Red Spot floated above his tousled hair like a halo.

The woman lay as still as a lump of dough; the volume of the television had kept her from hearing my bike’s tires on the gravel. I returned to Peggy Sue, pushed her down the length of the building to the access road, and sure enough found an empty northern parking lot and fourteen more rooms.

At the lot’s far edge, a chain-link fence threaded with dead vines marked the boundary of a salvage yard. The scabrous skulls of three GMC pickup trucks grinned at me through the links. Their windshields were intact. They had made it to the Spirit Land.

A blue dumpster with stenciled letters indicating that it was emptied on Tuesdays sat in the lot’s northeastern corner. I hid Peggy Sue behind it.

“Talk to her if she gets lonely,” I told the nearest truck skull.

Then I crossed to the motel and climbed metal stairs to the second-floor walkway. I was feeling an echo of the primitive urge for height, of our ancestors’ need to see danger approaching at a distance… which made little sense in my situation, because once inside a room, I would keep the curtains drawn. Also, if my enemies blocked the stairs, my only escape would be to jump over the walkway railing. Ignoring these facts, I chose the corner room, number 15.

As I had hoped, the FIFTY-FOUR MOTOR INN REASONABLE RATES had lousy door locks, the kind that will open to a credit card slid between the jamb and the spring bolt. Unfortunately, I was so tired that my coordination was screwed, so after a few tries I gave up on that method and rammed the door with my shoulder. The wooden jamb was rotten, and the bolt ripped through it as if it were moist cardboard. The breakin made only a small noise, so I didn’t think the woman at the other end of the building could have heard it.

Once inside number 15, I fumbled in the gray light filtering through the curtains and chained the door. Then I started laughing. The base plate of the chain was nailed into a jamb with the strength of frozen pudding, and I had chained the door.

I laughed so hard that I was barely able to unbuckle and pull off my helmet, and I collapsed face-first onto the bed to muffle myself. The pebbled bedspread smelled like day-old dinner rolls. The bedsprings sagged and squeaked. I laughed until the only sound I could make was a strangled wheeze. My abdomen ached. Tears tickled my nose. I couldn’t move. I slept.

I was awakened by pain in my crotch. I hadn’t stopped to piss during the ride down from Topeka, and Peggy Sue and the road had pounded my bladder and kidneys the whole way. I’d been so cold and tired that I hadn’t even been aware of the problem until now.

I sludged out of bed, supported myself with a hand on the wall, and shuffled around a corner into the closet-size bathroom. When I flipped the light switch, a buzzing white fluorescence almost slammed me to the floor. The glare wouldn’t be seen outside number 15, but from where I stood, it hurt almost as much as the urine pressure.

I threw my gloves into the main room, squirmed out of the Moonsuit and kicked it after the gloves, then shoved my jeans and shorts to my knees in a panic. I was grateful that the toilet didn’t have a lid. The relief was momentary, however. My guts twisted, and I had to finish in a hurry in order to turn around. Diarrhea. An ache began pulsing behind my left eye.

After flushing the toilet, which made ominous gurgling noises, I tried to throw up. All I could do was heave. The last thing I’d eaten had been a few handfuls of microwave popcorn just before leaving home.

When the heaving stopped, I struggled up from my knees, pulled up my underwear and jeans, and saw my face in the speckled mirror over the sink. My hair was rumpled, and I looked a lot like Buddy might look without glasses, except that the whites of my eyes were tracked with crimson veins. I glanced at my wristwatch; the time was a little after 3:00 P.M. I had been wearing my gas-permeable contact lenses for thirty-two hours. With that realization, I experienced a sensation like having Comet shoved under my eyelids.

I removed the lenses and rinsed them in the ochre water that jitterbugged from the faucet. I had neither a storage case nor wetting solution. Sharon Sharpston wore the same type of gas-permeable lenses, so I had planned to borrow those things while I stayed at her apartment.

What might Sharon be doing at that moment? I wondered. I pictured her sitting on a straight-backed chair in a police station in Topeka, her chopped auburn hair standing at attention, her violet eyes looking down her impossibly straight nose at the Authority who was trying to question her.

“My professional ethics prevent me from discussing my client’s psychological profile,” she would be saying. “However, I can tell you that he is an intriguing person whom I find tremendously exciting sexually. Now, if you badger me any further, my boyfriend Bruce will give you a sound thrashing with the Constitution.”

The pain behind my left eye increased. In the almost three years that I had known Sharon, I had never been able to visualize her naked. Bruce always came into the picture before I was able to unfasten anything.

I went back into the main room and placed my contact lenses on the palm of one of my gloves, which had landed beside the TV on the desk. The set was an ancient black-and-white Zenith, and when I snapped it on, it filled the room with pale flashes. Only one channel displayed a viewable picture, but one channel was all that I or anyone else would need today.

“—Southwest 163rd Street, Topeka, Kansas,” Buddy was saying. His fuzzy image scrolled up a few times, then came to an unsteady rest. “You know, folks,” he continued, shaking his head, “it’s no fun being stranded. I’d appreciate some help soon, please, either from this Oliver Vale or from whoever can think of anything.”

He took a deep breath, then shook his head again and began playing “What to Do.”

I sat on the foot of the bed, staring at the screen and feeling guilty. We hadn’t even managed to hustle our lazy butts to Mars yet, so how could we ever hope to get to Ganymede to save a kid who couldn’t do much for us anyhow except write songs and play the guitar?

At that thought, I became afraid that I knew what the pain behind my left eye was. It was apeshit insanity trying to bore up into my forehead and spread through my brain like a metastasizing carcinoma.

It couldn’t be sane to think of the video-Ganymede as reality. It made much more sense to believe that the image on the Zenith, and the one at home on my Sony, were random outpourings of electrons following the same logic as the infinite number of monkeys with the infinite number of typewriters cranking out Julius Caesar and I, the Jury. In a universe chockful of chaotic energies, didn’t the Uncertainty Principle and the Laws of Thermodynamics predict that a televised rock ‘n’ roll ghost was bound to pop up sooner or later?

I wished that I had toughed it out in my one attempt to take physics at K-State.

Not that an answer would have made any difference. Even after six hours of sleep, my soul’s belief in Buddy was as strong as it had been beside the low-water bridge. I would have to learn to live with the pain behind my eye.

The guilt was another matter. Madness I can handle, but guilt sucks.

I had decided to go to Lubbock to discover the truth of what had happened, but if Buddy had truly arisen, I would have to do more. I would have to find a way to rescue him. If his ascension to Ganymede meant that he had become immortal in life as well as in music, I would have plenty of time.

The pain behind my eye increased, and I leaned forward to shut off the TV. The Zenith crackled and glared with a bright dot, but unlike my Sony, it didn’t turn itself on again. I thanked it for that.

A few hours remained before it would be dark” enough for me and Peggy Sue to leave the FIFTY-FOUR MOTOR INN REASONABLE RATES. I wasn’t sleepy anymore, though, so to kill the time I turned on the pink plastic radio that sat beside the lamp on the nightstand. I was careful to keep the volume low in case the woman in the office had turned off her television.

“—last seen driving south on a county road near Topeka. Registration records describe the vehicle as a black 1957 Ariel Cyclone motorcycle, a model that resembles Triumph motorcycles of the same era. Vale apparently fled spontaneously, so his destination, if any, is unknown. Police, county sheriff’s deputies, state troopers, and highway patrol officers are scouring the eastern half of the state—”

“It’s a dirty job, but somebody has to do it,” I muttered.

“—and their counterparts in Oklahoma, Nebraska, and Missouri have been alerted. Once again, any citizen who sees anyone fitting the description of Oliver Vale is urged to contact the nearest law-enforcement office at once. According to reports, the ‘Buddy Holly’ television intrusion is nationwide, and late reports are that normal broadcasts in foreign countries, including the Soviet Union, have also been displaced. State Department sources warn that we may find ourselves embroiled in a serious international incident if this situation is not resolved quickly. The White House has no comment.”

The newscast ended, and the reporter was replaced by a disc jockey. “Well, friends and neighbors,” the deejay said, “it looks to me like we’re livin’ in peculiar times, yes indeedy. One thing you can count on, though: KOWW ain’t ever played that rock and roll noise, and we ain’t ever going to. So this is the place to get away from what’s on your TV.”

A song turgid with steel guitars began playing. I twisted the tuning knob, and it fell off.

I listened to the steel guitars. Curiously, the whiny music soothed me, and I relaxed more with every drunken note. Maybe it was because the songs and rhythms with which I had grown up had been mostly frantic and loud. Whatever the reason, though, I lay back and slept again. I even had a pleasant sexual dream about Julie “Eat shit and die, Oliver” Calloway in which she more than repented for earning her nickname.

When I awoke, the news announcer was back, saying the same things he’d said before. I turned off the radio and sat up, stretching. My watch said that it was six o’clock. Almost time to go. I stripped off my clothes and, with only a rotten doorjamb protecting me from the world, went naked into the bathroom. The water emerged from the shower head at a fast dribble, alternating between chilled and scalding. I washed with a sliver of brown soap that smelled like turpentine and dried with a towel that was covered with old cigarette burns.

I had left the bathroom and was still toweling when a metallic booming noise echoed outside. It was the sound of something bumping an empty dumpster.

Someone had found Peggy Sue.

A smart person would have