Pinball by Jerzy Kosinski Read Free Book Online Page B

best ever. It keeps the public excited and it keeps the star safe from all the crazies; because as long as nobody knows who Goddard is,nobody can take a shot at him. A singer who loses his head over his public will be publicly beheaded. Remember John Lennon?”
    Nash finished his beer and glanced at his watch. “I’d give up if I were you,” he concluded. “Everyone else has. Goddard says it all when he sings those lines from Joyce’s
Ulysses:
I am the boy
That can enjoy
Invisibility.
     
    And why shouldn’t he enjoy his invisibility? If anybody as good as he is wants to be a mystery, I say let him. And I wonder if anybody really gives a fuck, any longer.”
    “My partner does,” said Domostroy. “What do I tell her?”
    “Tell her to go after me instead. I’ve got a sound mind, the looks of a rock star, and what’s more, I don’t hide!”
    In the New York Public Library, Domostroy pored over one article after another, and they all bore out what he already knew without offering any fresh clues. Each year Goddard’s records continued to top the charts of best-sellers, and each week the sound of his music grew in popularity until it seemed to fill the airwaves, yet no one had managed to discover who he was. His mystery remained inviolate, in spite of elaborate efforts to crack it. One San Francisco textual music scholar claimed that Goddard was an ex-student of his at Berkeley who followed the Descartes credo “
Larvatus prodeo
—I walk about masked” and who had written essays that sounded a lot like the lyrics of Goddard’s bestselling song “The Passion of the Soul.” The scholar related how, when he tried to contact the student, the man had disappeared, and none of his friends would provide any reliable information about him. A Manhattan disc jockey announced with similarassurance that Goddard was a farmer with a wife and three children who lived on a remote farm in upper New York State. And a well-known English rock guitarist was convinced that he and Goddard used to hang out in a certain London jazz club before either of them had made it.
    Each of a number of psychics hired by tabloid newspapers and fan magazines had come up with a different composite of the man. One saw Goddard as a pathologically shy small-town youth holed up in a private asylum where with the collaboration of his music editors he wrote and recorded his music; another clearly pictured him as a drug addict in an industrial city, requiring periodic hospitalization; a third said that before he turned invisible, Goddard was known to the world under another name as a second-rate country singer and that only by means of a CIA conspiracy, coupled with the help of hired professional music writers and of his influential big business friends and his mistress, who was a well-known Hollywood agent, Goddard had managed to go so long unmasked.
    Reluctantly, Domostroy decided to take a look at the Goddard Beat, a popular West Side discotheque that was named after Goddard and featured his music. The Goddard Beat differed from most discos in that, instead of hiring disc jockeys to program records, it employed live performers, often the most inventive rock ‘n’ roll and pop groups available, to whom doing a gig at the Goddard Beat was tantamount to reaching Mecca.
    Domostroy abhorred discos and had stayed away from them even when, at the time of his own popularity, he’d been invited to go to them with friends. His reason was simple: mixed by a computer, amplified by a robot, and danced to by human automatons, disco music was not art.
    As Domostroy entered the Goddard Beat, members of one of the alternating bands of the evening were noisily removing electronic gear from the stage while another band’s members were setting up theirs. Before Domostroy could push his way through the sweaty crowd to a place atthe bar, the new band hit its first number, and all around him couples began to sway, tightly embraced.
    When he finally reached the bar and