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  Local soldiers in waistcoats and gaiters lay in bloody heaps by the gates of the refinery. Another battalion marched forward in formation, muskets at the ready. A handful of Huns and Mongols, deployed at the gates, cut them up with orange tracer fire and watched the survivors scatter.

  Jebe Noyon laughed hugely. "Is like siege of Cambaluc! Only no stacking up heads or even taking ears any more, man, now we are civilized, okay? Later maybe we call in, like, grunts, choppers from 'Nam, napalm the son-of-a-bitches, far out, man."

  "You can't do that, Jebe," Rice said sternly. "The poor bastards don't have a chance. No point in exterminating them."

  Jebe shrugged. "I forget sometimes, okay? Always thinking to conquer the world." He revved the cycle and scowled. Rice grabbed the Mongol's stinking flak jacket as they roared downhill. Jebe took his disappointment out on the enemy, tearing through the streets in high gear, deliberately running down a group of Brunswick grenadiers. Only panic strength saved Rice from falling off as legs and torsos thumped and crunched beneath their tires.

  Jebe skidded to a stop inside the gates of the complex. A jabbering horde of Mongols in ammo belts and combat fatigues surrounded them at once. Rice pushed through them, his kidneys aching.

  Ionizing radiation smeared the evening sky around the Hohensalzburg Castle. They were kicking the portal up to the high-energy maximum, running cars full of Gray Cards in and sending the same cars back loaded to the ceiling with art and jewelry.

  Over the rattling of gunfire Rice could hear the whine of VTOL jets bringing in the evacuees from the US and Africa. Roman centurions, wrapped in mesh body armor and carrying shoulder-launched rockets, herded Realtime personnel into the tunnels that led to the portal.

  Mozart was in the crowd, waving enthusiastically to Rice. "We're pulling out, man! Fantastic, huh? Back to Realtime!"

  Rice looked at the clustered towers of pumps, coolers, and catalytic cracking units. "It's a goddamned shame," he said. "All that work, shot to hell."

  "We were losing too many people, man. Forget it. There's plenty of eighteenth centuries."

  The guards, sniping at the crowds outside, suddenly leaped aside as Rice's hovercar burst through the gates. Half a dozen Masonic fanatics still clung to the doors and pounded on the windscreen. Jebe's Mongols yanked the invaders free and axed them while a Roman flamethrower unit gushed fire across the gates.

  Marie Antoinette leaped out of the hovercar. Jebe grabbed for her, but her sleeve came off in his hand. She spotted Mozart and ran for him, Jebe only a few steps behind.

  "Wolf, you bastard!" she shouted. "You leave me behind! What about your promises, you merde, you pig-dog!"

  Mozart whipped off his mirrorshades. He turned to Rice. "Who is this woman?"

  "The Green Card, Wolf! You say I sell Rice to the Masonistas, you get me the card!" She stopped for breath and Jebe caught her by one arm. When she whirled on him, he cracked her across the jaw, and she dropped to the tarmac.

  The Mongol focused his smoldering eyes on Mozart. "Was you, eh? You, the traitor?" With the speed of a striking cobra he pulled his machine pistol and jammed the muzzle against Mozart's nose. "I put my gun on rock and roll, there nothing left of you but ears, man."

  A single shot echoed across the courtyard. Jebe's head rocked back, and he fell in a heap.

  Rice spun to his right. Parker, the DJ, stood in the doorway of an equipment shed. He held a Walther PPK. "Take it easy, Rice," Parker said, walking toward him. "He's just a grunt, expendable."

  "You killed him!"

  "So what?" Parker said, throwing one arm around Mozart's frail shoulders. "This here's my boy! I transmitted a couple of his new tunes up the line a month ago. You know what? The kid's number five on the Billboard charts! Number five!" Parker shoved the gun into his belt. "With a bullet!"

  "You gave him the Green Card, Parker?"

  "No," Mozart said. "It was Sutherland."

  "What did you do to her?"

  "Nothing! I swear to you, man! Well, maybe I kind of lived up to what she wanted to see. A broken man, you know, his music stolen from him, his very soul?" Mozart rolled his eyes upward. "She gave me the Green Card, but that still wasn't enough. She couldn't handle the guilt. You know the rest."

  "And when she got caught, you were afraid we wouldn't pull out. So you decided to drag me into it! You got Toinette to turn me over to the Masons. That was your doing!"

  As if hearing her name, Toinette moaned softly from the tarmac. Rice didn't care about the bruises, the dirt, the rips in her leopard-skin jeans. She was still the most gorgeous creature he'd ever seen.

  Mozart shrugged. "I was a Freemason once. Look, man, they're very uncool. I mean, all I did was drop a few hints, and look what happened." He waved casually at the carnage all around them. "I knew you'd get away from them somehow."

  "You can't just use people like that!"

  "Bullshit, Rice! You do it all the time! I needed this siege so Realtime would haul us out! For Christ's sake, I can't wait fifteen years to go up the line. History says I'm going to be dead in fifteen years! I don't want to die in this dump! I want that car and that recording studio!"

  "Forget it, pal," Rice said. "When they hear back in Realtime how you screwed things up here—"

  Parker laughed. "Shove off, Rice. We're talking Top of the Pops, here. Not some penny-ante refinery." He took Mozart's arm protectively. "Listen, Wolf, baby, let's get into those tunnels. I got some papers for you to sign as soon as we hit the future."

  The sun had set, but a muzzle-loading cannon lit the night, pumping shells into the city. For a moment Rice stood stunned as cannonballs clanged harmlessly off the storage tanks. Then, finally, he shook his head. Salzburg's time had run out.

  Hoisting Toinette over one shoulder, he ran toward the safety of the tunnels.

  INTERVIEW WITH THE CRAB

  By Jonathan Lethem

  The door to the crab's faux-Georgian Tallahassee mansion was opened by a male housekeeper with a trim red mustache, razor-cut orange hair showing white at the temples, and the disapproving air of a Mormon or Scientologist functionary. He was dressed, though, not in Western garb, nor that of a houseboy or cook, but instead in Chinese robes, so he resembled the token occidental opponent in a martial arts film—the type who lurks at the side of the primary Asian villain, and is dispatched by the hero penultimately and with great effort, as a kind of respectful nod to the Western viewer. I wondered if he might be the same person I'd negotiated with on the telephone, so protractedly, in seeking my interview with his employer. If so, he said nothing to confirm my suspicion, and spoke only deferentially now that I'd been granted access to the house. The foyer and entrance hallway of the crab's home were two stories high, with round-topped cathedral windows that flooded midday illumination on the mute, carpeted surfaces of floor and stairway, on the beige walls and tastefully framed black-and-white photographs, many of which, I noted at a glance, contained images of the crab with grinning visitors to the set of his old television program, Crab House Days. The housekeeper closed the door behind me and we stood together dwarfed in pillars of high light and suffocated, it seemed to me, by the Floridian summer heat and the faint odor of proteinous seashore rot that permeated the unconditioned air of the apparently immaculate house.

  "He'll see you by the pool, Mr. Lethem."

  I wasn't a fan of Crab House Days during its original run. The sitcom's five-season heyday as ABC's leading Wednesday night comedy program began during my second year of college, the years when I was least likely to care or even know what was on television or on the covers of supermarket magazines—a condition which actually persisted well into my thirties, when I got cable for the first time, largely in order to keep my eye on my favorite baseball team, the Mets. Crab House Days was by then well into its life as a late-night rerun, nobody's idea of hot news. And the crab's brief, unsavory resurgence in the form of the late-night cable reality show Crab Sex Dorm was still a few years off then, in the mid-nineties, when I incr
easingly began to linger, in my channel surfing, over episodes of the now-classic show. I watched Crab House Days idly at first, but soon I found myself entranced by the melancholic longueurs which would from time to time open up within the antic behaviors of the giant, housebound crab and his bawdy, ingenuous human family, the Foorcums.

  So many evenings Crab House Days, ostensibly a laugh-riot, seemed to end on a wistful note. Pansy Foorcum, the abrasive sexpot daughter who was nonetheless the crab's only reliable confidante, would make herself ready for a date, talking to the crab through the shared wall of their bedrooms as she dressed and applied makeup for a night out, and then go, leaving the crab time and time again to scuttle and fiddle alone in his room. Pansy in many ways played the role of the crustacean's advocate and mediator among the other Foorcums: Sternwood, the crab's loutish father; Grania, the crab's befuddled and mawkish mother; and, of course, the crab's and Pansy's younger sibling, the scene-stealing punk-Libertarian brat Feary Foorcum. Squabbling would cease as all four of the others contemplated Pansy's departure from the house. The other family members seemed saddened, their energies dampened, as though the pleasure in baiting and insulting the giant crab were diminished past any value once Pansy was no longer present to stick up for him. For the crab's part, his passive-aggressive ripostes and mordant asides were seemingly lost on their actual targets, Sternwood and Grania and Feary; rather, they were meant for Pansy's ears, and with her departure the crab typically fell to an irate and wounded silence.

  Now I allowed myself to be led through the foyer, past a vast, apparently unused dining room, its chairs and table covered with sheets, and through to the back patio. The housekeeper and I stepped through the frame of a sliding glass door. Lawn and gardens extended to high walls of vine-covered brick, fronted with a row of palm trees, and scattered between the house and the limits of the yard were well-tended circular plantings of midget palms and ferns, around an unusually large rectangular pool lipped with a wide margin of peach-colored tile. On the pool's tile, between three slatted wooden deck chairs and a low matching table, squatted the crab, wide and round as a golf cart, yet no higher than my knee.

  His armor's sheen wasn't what it had seemed fifteen years before, on television, or even in the low-resolution video of Crab Sex Dorm, a scant three years ago. Perhaps his burnished forest green and fawn brown color scheme had always been an illusion created by makeup artists. I didn't know and couldn't—wouldn't—ask. Today his mottling was more irregular, his colors black-to-puce, with nothing of the chestnut shine and richness that had always seemed his badge, his pride, no matter how grim the burden of crabdom in a human realm. Otherwise, though, he seemed unchanged. The crab's fragmentary leg, famously amputated in a botched Halloween prank attempted, in a rare instance of filial accord, by Sternwood and Feary, in the show's fourth season, still looked as freshly wounded as ever. The static nature of the crab's injury, and his unwillingness to disguise the rather undelectable gooeyness of the stump, was often given partial credit for the erosion of the show's ratings by the end of that fourth season.

  "Will you and Mr. Lethem be needing anything, sir?"

  The crab didn't speak, only turned slightly, rattling claws on tile. I'd been warned of his recalcitrance, his hot and cold moods.

  "Very good, sir." The housekeeper departed the lawn, leaving me there. No breeze stirred, and apart from my own breathing, and the swim of the sun's pinpoint reflections in the blue of the pool's surface, we might have been captured in the humid noon as in a block of Lucite.

  "May I sit?"

  Again the crab only scuttled. What the housekeeper had taken as a no I took as a yes, and found my way to one of the slatted chairs, one facing the crab but not, I hoped, so near as to make him feel intruded upon.

  "I don't use a tape recorder, so I hope you don't mind my taking notes."

  This drew no response.

  "I want you to know, first of all, that I'm a fan. I came to your work quite embarrassingly late, but it's touched me in ways I'm not sure I can describe. But then you've touched so many lives."

  The crab now began to issue a sound like a lizard's cry, or perhaps it was the high whine of a distant vacuum cleaner. Without wanting to stare too intently, I searched for signs of a listening attitude in amongst his eyestalks and feelers.

  "I don't mean to suggest I have any special insights that would surprise or enlighten an artist of your stature. Think of me merely as a humble representative of an audience that hasn't forgotten you. If anything, the work grows more resonant over the years."

  The sound that signaled the end of the hiss or whine was like a barely detectable yawn. The crab raised one leg, too, as if finger-testing the windless air, or calling an invisible class to order with a single, authoritative gesture—one which also evoked, inevitably, a massive hand flipping the bird to the sky, issuing a fuck-you proclamation to the world at large.

  "As the more unimportant local and temporal elements of your show recede into time—I mean, all the dated jokes about long-forgotten current events, and the generic vulgar badinage which is only so typical of network comedy of that era—the singularity of your presence becomes more evident, more timeless and pure. You take part in a continuum of rather desultory figures who stand in symbolic protest against the crassness of the contemporary world, running back through Abe Vigoda and Bob Newhart and Imogene Coca, and pointing all the way, really, to Buster Keaton."

  "I've heard that before," said the crab in his loud, gravelly, immensely familiar voice. It startled me almost out of my chair, but I tried to disguise my reaction. "People used to write that all the time, but it's a flat-out lie. I wasn't influenced by Buster Keaton in any way."

  "I didn't mean—"

  "Nobody has any idea how hard it was for me coming up. It's taken for granted now, kids like you come around, they grew up loving the crab and they figure everybody always loved the crab, the crab must have been some kind of overnight success. Sure, right, but that overnight lasted ten years, no more, no less. Ten years slugging it out on the circuit, little clubs, appearances at lodge dinners and state fairs, riding in the undercarriage of tour buses. I paid my dues a dozen times over and I still feel it right here." The crab reared up, propping on his huge, closed claws, and tapped two legs assertively on his lower shell, as if miming a gut check. "Then you guys come around here talking about Buster Fucking Keaton. Like it was some kind of party for me, this fershlugginer career. ‘Hmmm, why, I think I'll just allude to Buster Keaton, that ought to make the eggheads cream their panties.' Tell you the truth, I never saw Buster Keaton when I was coming up because I was too busy busting my chops trying to entertain you people. Never saw Buster Keaton until a couple of years ago and then when I did I didn't see anything I thought was all that great."

  "I didn't mean to suggest that your work was in any way derivative—"

  "Keaton ever do a show about a crab living in a human family?"

  I was silent.

  "I'm asking you because I want to know. You seem familiar with Keaton's work, so I'm putting the question to you in great sincerity. Anything with a crab?"

  "No."

  "Right, that's what I figured. My material is entirely my own. I came to it the same way maybe your precious Keaton or Vigoda came by their own—pure suffering, forged into something of value to others, like crushing a coal into a diamond, at great cost of effort and personal sacrifice, a process you wouldn't know too much about since everything to you is just a big pile of slippery postmodern allusions and references with no soul to speak of, not even any notion that it might be missing one, that there might be something to mourn the loss of—a soul, I mean."

  I knew it was not my place to defend myself, here—to point out that it was precisely that essence of existential suffering, or soul, if he preferred that term, which had drawn me to his work, made me seek for a description for how such an uncanny and timeless thing had broken out in the vacuous, tinselly environs of network situation comedy. Even as he ber
ated me he was inviting me inside, it appeared to me. My task was to selflessly accept that invitation.

  "You say your material is entirely your own. That suffering and sacrifice you speak of lies so close to the surface of your humor. How close were the Foorcums to a portrait of your own family?"

  "What are you, like the one guy in the United States with no Google?"

  "I'm sorry?"

  "I've said a thousand times if I've said it once: I haven't spoken about—or to—my family in over forty years. What makes you think I'm about to sing for you? What was your name, Lehman?"

  "Lethem."

  "Mr. Lethem, with all respect, go fart on a Wheat Thin. What makes you think today's the day some kid sashays in here and I'm just suddenly in the mood to break my silence for you on a whim, when I wouldn't even sing for that fucker Larry King? Even if I wanted to, my lawyers wouldn't let me. Every single person who ever knew me in that shitheel town has tried to sue me at some point, let alone the members of my beloved goddamn family. Rule one: We speak of the Foorcums as the Foorcums alone, or this is O-V-E-R."

  "The Foorcums, then. Are you in touch with Richard Drimpet and Joan Cranewood-Freehan, who played your on-screen parents?"

  "These are your questions?" The crab scratched with a single leg against the tile in one direction repeatedly, away from his body, as if trying to strike a match or dislodge something stuck to a foot. His claws, though, lay totally inert, draped before him. "Drimpet and I were off speaking terms by season three, another item you could've peeled off a fan site. Joan used to call me from time to time. She tried to get me to do a guest appearance on that Snowbirds show, kept pestering me to come on. But what am I going to say to a bunch of old ladies in a mobile home, you know? ‘Follow the sun, chickadees! You haven't got that long to live!'"

  "Was it difficult between you and Reg Loud? His embodiment of Feary Foorcum was so memorable, but the two of you were pitted against one another continuously throughout the show. And his behavior after the cancellation was rather bitter." I hoped the crab could follow my leads without having to take offense. Reg Loud had, of course, been jailed for narcotics possession several times after his difficult child-stardom found its nadir in the years following Crab House Days. For the crab, I could only assume the ferocity of the character's portrayal of his brother, combined with the young actor's very public woes, resonated deeply with ancient, real-life traumas. I was still circling what seemed to me the main, and perhaps tenderest subject, of Delia Watertree, who'd played Pansy Foorcum.