35053668-Empire-of-the-Soul-Paul-William-Roberts

172
EMPIRE OF THE SOUL
‘Don’t make any sudden movements,’ I advised Otis.
All he did from that moment on, of course, was make sudden
movements; flipping open cases, hauling out wires and plugs and
canisters and meters and a pile of very technical-looking stuff that
resembled what you’d probably have after dismantling the
instrument panel of a jumbo jet. I wondered how long it would take
to put whatever it was back together again.
‘It iss together,’ Otis told me, somewhat defensively. ‘Basically.’
‘Excuse me, brother,’ said a six-footer with perfect teeth and biceps
like thighs. He filled the doorway. ‘Would you mind telling me
what all that is?’
Otis did not mind in the least, but the six-footer looked no wiser
as he ambled off in his size 15 sandals, brows clenched together.
He returned some minutes later with two even larger men and a
small dark-haired woman who looked as though she’d just eaten
something truly vile. She did all the talking, in a nasal New York
whine. Otis explained his life’s work once more.
‘That right?’ the woman kept saying. ‘Yeah? That right?’
Finally she muttered something at the three hit men, and they
meekly vanished.
‘You foller me, ’kay?’
Staggering under the weight of Otis’s boxes and cases and stuff, I
followed her and Otis followed me, carrying the smallest case of all.
We ended up in a windowless room, newly decorated, but bare apart
from some extremely expensive-looking yet vulgar armchairs that
stood on linoleum simulating irregular-shaped tiles in garish hues,
most of them variations on a theme of orange.
‘You can set ya shit up here, ’kay?’ the woman announced.
She stood watching as I tried to look like a man who’s been
around miles of wire, piles of meters, tons of plugs and gadgets all
his life. Otis crawled about like the skeleton of a Great Dane,
demanding resistors and capacitors and blue wires, red wires, white
wires, and even wires that seemed alarmingly free of any coloured
covering at all. Soon we had what looked to me like the aftermath of
an explosion in a television factory. Otis looked pleased. Then he
found his plugs did not match the room’s sockets. Tearing off these
plugs with his bare hands, he stripped wires with yellowed incisors,