Down on the deck the fun-loving trio is gossiping about Frankie D., who is supposed to have slept with most of the middle management of Ribman and Stone. She wears inappropriate clothing to corporate functions. Her hair is like Easter basket grass. She thinks she has friends.
Every line Gerri speaks bristles with wit. Every gesture Tommy makes is bounded in grace. When he touches her arm to punctuate a point, a message of perfect clarity passes instantly between them. These are the best people Rho's ever known. This is the best she's been in months. She is bathed in a new understanding, this fine evening's unexpected gift to that Cinderella self of hers too long scrubbing the same flagstones clean, and the understanding says to her: your life is your invention, that's all, your life is your invention, the naive obviousness of it positively intoxicating. You make it up, ha ha. Now she's married to Wylie, now she isn't. Now she has kids, now she doesn't. Here is a sense of play missing since childhood. She looks to Tommy. Now she bends to. . .
Now Gerri is sharing her drink and Tommy is deconstructing an ironic slasher film -- or is it merely a lengthy joke? -- and when Rho glances up to check on the moon she catches a glimpse of Mother frozen at an upstairs window, but, no, the hallucination dissolves, she refuses to submit to those obsolete emotions, to all that gamy bait, keep your head keyed to the present, why should the party ever end?
"Damn these mosquitoes!" Gerri is slapping impatiently at her exposed legs. "I'm literally covered in nasty bites."
"It's 'cause you're so sweet," cracks Tommy, scratching at his own arm. "Where's our little bat-friend when you need him?"
"I don't feel a thing," Rho brags, stretching her arms heavenward. "I'm in a bug-free zone."
"Well, I'm being eaten alive." Gerri slaps a palm against the side of her face. "And these damn things never work." Suddenly she picks up a candle and heaves the glass globe as if it were a ticking bomb out into the darkness. Startled by the violence of her behavior, she looks at her companions in shock and then breaks into laughter. "Sorry, Rho, gee, I'll buy you another. I don't know what came over me."
"Okay, you guys." Rho begins gathering up plates. "Inside."
The kitchen light seems painfully intense, exaggerated to no purpose. Dishes stacked in the sink and along the counter appear to have multiplied on their own in the incubating fluorescence.
"My God," Gerri bellows, "did we eat all that?"
"Maybe we're in the wrong house," suggests Tommy, deadpan.
Rho is scraping cow bones into a garbage bag. "Where's Wylie?" she asks.
Gerri stands before the open refrigerator, searching the freezer for that pint of butter pecan Rho promised her. "Maybe he's passed out in the John."
Rho puts down a plate. "Wylie?" she calls in a hushed voice. "Wylie, where are you?" She wipes her hands on the stained towel and goes wandering off into the unlit gloom of the silent house.
Tommy leans against the counter, working a toothpick around his gums, bewitched by the provocative incoherence the television is shooting into him. "Look," he drawls, comprehension dawning,
"Jaws."
Teeth, water, blood, it is a spellbinding blend, as potent now as it was when he first saw the film, half a dozen viewings ago.
Gerri locates the one remaining clean spoon and busily scoops high premium ice cream into her puckered mouth until. . . "What the hell are you doing?" She holds out a reproving hand. "Gimme that."
Tommy's eyebrows go up and down. He drops the wet toothpick into her palm, where it is inspected with a fortune-teller's gaze and tossed without comment into the trash.
"Good dinner," Tommy ventures.
"Do you think," she gasps, sucking air onto her chilled molars, "Rho was quite herself tonight?"
The question's still afloat in the space between them when Rho appears in the doorway, displaying the expression of one working out a problem in long division. "Wylie," she says, her voice lanced and drained, "Wylie's not here."
Tommy, still concentrating on the television, pretends not to hear. "Huh?" he asks.
"Of course he is," says Gerri. She knows Wylie. "He's upstairs. He went upstairs. He's looking in on the kids."
Rho is shaking her head carefully, as if it held items of priceless fragility. "There's no one up there but the twins."
"He's in the John."
"I checked every room."
Tommy interrupts by humming the aggravating notes of the old
Twilight Zone
theme. "What about out back?" he suggests. "Cleaning the grill. Or the garage? Or out by the garbage cans?"
Rho's head won't stop moving.
"Didn't he say something about running out to the store?" asks Gerri. "Running low on limes?"
"Maybe he went out for a pack of cigarettes," says Tommy, well aware that his friend does not smoke.
"Look in the driveway," Rho says. She wants to shout. "Neither car is gone." Now she reruns the tape: she sees herself moving from room to room and she sees herself watching herself, and as she watches, the Rho searching seems to be moving faster and the Rho watching seems to be growing more and more still. Nothing has happened. Nothing is happening. She casts about this room she finds herself in, this kitchen, and recognizes nothing of any relevance to who she is or what is occurring here. Her pots and pans seem to have been rubbed and washed by foreign hands; all the objects in the house have begun migrating on to a different life and they are taking her with them. She reruns the tape: she sees herself moving from room to. . .
"Let me take a look," volunteers Tommy, hurrying off, male impatience eager to be doing.
Gerri can't quite comprehend the terms of this situation, either. "I mean, this is a joke, right? Any second now Wylie hops out of a closet and gives us a good scare?"
"Wylie wouldn't do that." It is not a point to be debated.
Gerri doesn't know what to say. She pats Rho's arm. She makes appropriate noises: "Well, don't worry, it'll be all right, wherever he is, it can't be that far, nobody simply vanishes."
They sit at the table for several minutes of uncomfortable silence, Gerri intrigued by the notion that Wylie's disappearance has some crucial relation to herself. Then Rho is up and through the hallway, the white living room, the front door, deaf to the sound of her name pursuing her across the damp lawn and out into the middle of the deserted street, where she stops and stares off into the impenetrable distance like one come to the end of a long vacant pier. The humid darkness swarms with the random messages of insects, the winking fireflies, the creaking crickets. There is no sign of Wylie. Gerri leads her back to a house alive with light, each window a blazing rectangle of illusory mirth reminding envious passersby of the party they would never give, the invitation they would never receive.
Tommy is pacing amid the fashionable starkness of the living room and picking at his forehead. He admits events have turned exceedingly strange. He's even rummaged through bedroom drawers and closets (thank you, Rho, for your exquisite taste in lingerie), hunting for evidence of missing clothes, suitcases, etc. Nothing seems to have been disturbed.
"I don't understand," says Rho.
Tommy suggests a quick drive around the neighborhood. Gerri can stay behind with the sleeping children. The emptiness in Rho's eyes is replaced by a tentative expression of hope, a child's relief at an adult assumption of authority.
Tommy's Prelude creeps at cortege speed from block to leafy block. Rho sits anxiously forward, starting at the slightest movement, real or imagined, out on the dark streets. It's as quiet this Friday as on any other night of the week, the typical suburban stillness only occasionally disturbed by passing joggers (singly and in pairs), kids on bikes, the muscular adolescent walking his questionably domesticated dog, each scrutinized carefully by Rho, her head leaning out the open car window, a song running repeatedly through it, the same song, as a matter of fact, that looped through her mind during Mother's funeral, a silly Calypso ditty about her roof having a hole in it and she might drown. She rubs her arms, she's cold on this, the warmest night of the year.
Tommy is watching her as he drives, the moody pattern of light and shadow sliding dramatically across her perfect profile, this shared sense of peril and mystery, and he can't help it, he's sitting there behind the wheel with an erection in his lap.
Back at the house while Gerri is alone the telephone rings and when she answers it there's nobody there. She doesn't know whether to tell Rho about this call or not.
Back at the house Tommy and Rho and Gerri huddle on black furniture in the white living room, interrogating one another with an insistence that desires somehow to speak Wylie, to locate the exact words in the exact order that will conjure his physical presence before them. Thought, however, goes round and round like a tire axle-deep in swamp mud.
Tommy, of course, has assumed the role of chief of detectives. "Once again, can you think of any place, no matter how remote, that Wylie might have gone. Friends? Relatives?" He pauses. "Enemies?"
Rho resembles a mannequin that has been removed from display for repainting.
Gerri is thinking how Wylie might have struck his head on a cabinet, say, in an inebriated stumble, and is now wandering the city in a state of amnesia.
Tommy is thinking about a recent report he saw on UFO abductions. He also thinks about what's her name, the baby-sitter, her long black hair, her long tight jeans. "No point in notifying the cops yet," he says. "They won't do a damn thing until twenty-four hours have passed."
Rho. Rho sits.
A long-haired cat with a frosty blue coat and cold yellow eyes steps in daintily measured tread down the carpeted stairs. Awakened from sleek gray-toned dreams of murder and euphoria, he has come to investigate this annoying commotion within the kingdom. At the foot of the stairs he sits in stony Buddhistic calm, the truth of the room reflected in the glossy convexities of his stare. He blinks and the supremely languid draw of his lids suggests whole taxonomies of boredom beyond human reckoning. But since neither sight nor smell detects the scantest particle of available food, attention is fading, fades, faded. His name is Pluto.
With a rough impatience Rho rubs the shadowed hollow of her temple. It throbs. She regards her dear, useless friends. For the anguish in her face there is no mitigation. Her dress is black. Her hair is brown. Her mind is blank.
She asks, "What is happening here?"
Like the present tense, Daddy was gone gone.
Two
A HEADFUL OF CORPSES
Three blocks away, on a street like any other street, in a house like any other house, lived. . .
"Don't move," she ordered, thrusting forth a pale arm from the beached mattress in the corner, the day-to-day coarsening of the voice unchecked in its apparent declension toward silence, scraping now at the masculine registers, the novelty of its tone commanding obedience; he halted, frozen in place, his arrested shadow lofting gigantically up the wall, across the low ceiling, a slick black membrane quivering in minatory shapelessness close overhead.
Candle stubs of diverse length and hue glittered fitfully from every available surface, including the seat of the Exercycle, the top of the dead television, and each precarious stack of new CDs rising like terraced stalagmites at obstacle course intervals across the hard uncarpeted floor. The walls of the room glowed like tanned skin. Illuminated to romantic excess in the living oranges and yellows of another time, the plain animality of the body was undeniable, the soft play of fire upon rounded limbs, lovers' eyes embellished by textures, entrances, unknown to the electric world. Neither one of them was wearing any clothes.
Head angled thoughtfully, she appraised him without comment.
"What?" he shouted, patience and pose both beginning to melt.
"Oooh, you moved. You ruined it." She spoke with the feigned petulance of a spoiled child.
"So what am I here?" he asked, attempting to retain whatever attitude he was supposed to be holding. "You tell me."
"A little that way." She motioned with her hands, conscious of the director's role. "This way, no, more that. . . good, no, okay, good, over, over -- stop!"
"Having fun?"
"There now," she declared, "look at you," casting a triumphant finger wallward at his anatomically correct umbral self. "Enormous. You're one big guy."
"Mister Goodyear." He shimmied his hips in pleasurable sync with the exaggerated double bobbing upon the plasterboard screen.
"Watch out," she warned through her laughter, "you're gonna burn yourself."
"And now, ladies and gentlemen" -- he manipulated himself with his hands -- "a talking giraffe. Thank you. Now don't go away, because when I come back I'll show you my ducky and my goosey, too." He moved to the open doorway and, reduced to singular fleshy size, turned away from view.
"Hit the bowl this time," she shouted after. "I'm sick of stepping in your piss."
The curtainless windows were flung wide, and hungry mosquitoes drifted in on the heat, the summer drone of smothering humidity and long sleepless nights. The air-conditioning, along with the rest of the power, had failed hours earlier at the exact wrong moment: right in the middle of the climactic scene of
Fiend Without a Face,
the final assault on the few remaining characters (your no-nonsense military hero, your scientifically inclined love interest, your average monster fodder of doomed villagers and enlisted fools) by a marauding army of mental vampires, disembodied brains scuttling about on spinal cord tails like jumbo inchworms, the diabolical spawn of a doddering professor's experiments in the materialization of thought. What did they want? More brains. How do they get them? By leaping onto their victims' necks and sucking at the base of the skull. Someone had to get to the reactor and cut off their power source! Then the TV went flash! pop! as if snapping their picture and the next second they were sitting in darkness. What the fuck? She couldn't believe it; she cursed and whined. He stumbled around in the basement for a while, floor grit cutting into the soles of his bare feet as he fiddled ineffectually with the circuit breakers. "The bill, fuckhead, you pay the fucking bill?" her voice as nasty as she could make it. He said he had. She said he spouted outrageous lies from a filthy sewermouth. She jumped onto his back, pummeled his shoulders with her fists. He tossed her off onto the mattress. "You fucking idiot. You fat shit." Quietly, he told her to shut up. "You frog-faced freak." Pause. "I can't live like this." Pause. "And I'll shut up when I feel like shutting up." Then she didn't speak until he produced a box of broken candles from God knows where, arranged them in the present configuration, and solemnly touched a match to each wick while intoning a mock votive to her charms. "All right," she said, "but you're still a fuckhead."
While he was in the bathroom, she reloaded the pipe, hastily smoked it down. She loved the good-fer-what-ails-you taste, the express hydraulics of going up, the simultaneous visual of something tangible flying out the top. And the exhale. She thrilled to see the magic pouring from her face, from dark profundities of her, glittering pixie particles of me-stuff scattering over the world, and she didn't have to
do,
she didn't have to
be
anything more than a sprawled body on a yellowing mattress in a hot room for all to be changed around her. She had already changed herself and she had changed her name and the sound of her rechristening was: Latisha Charlemagne.
"Whaddya doing?" sounded his voice, slurred, gross, sarcastic, and, concentration broken, she almost went down. She was hopping around on one leg, trying to jam her stupid clown feet into a laddered pair of black leotards. "I'm going out," she explained logically. "Jogging." She didn't know this was what she was about to do until she said it.
"The hell you are."
She turned away from him, the claims of his nakedness, his disapproval, his wattled cock. Tackling hands were on her hips in an instant and over she went into the closet beneath a soft cascading of suits and shirts, a clattering of loose hangers. They struggled there a while atop the shoes, a boot heel digging into her back. "Get. . . off," she warned, pushing clawed fingers into the pliable stuff of his face until, sensing her determination, "all right, all right," he let her go to resume the task of inserting leg tabs A into leotard holes B, refusing to recognize her engagement in a vain tussle of mismatched parts.
"Okay," he said, "I want to see this." He stretched out on the floor, assumed the expression of an appreciative spectator ready to enjoy the elaborate "business" of a professional comedian. But after several minutes of her slapstick, he reached out a restraining hand. "Please," he begged, "no more. Don't make me laugh. Don't give me a heart attack."
She couldn't stop, though, having glimpsed, she was certain, the obvious solution to this temporary problem in nonalignment on the physical plane. If she could lean against the wall with one leg extended straight out and then bend forward with the leotards in both hands. . . "I need my exercise," she insisted.
"You get all the exercise you need right here in this room." And then hands were on her again, fastened to the nice places they knew she couldn't resist, and then he was on top of her, he and his shadow, commencing this mutual abrasion he couldn't seem to get enough of, scratching an itch, rubbing the one spot that had to be rubbed and rubbed for the genie to appear, the true genie, not the fake one with the paste jewels and backfiring wishes, but the happy turbaned soul rising up out of the muck of eternity with all the answers, Latisha's raw breath tickling at the hairs of his ear, "Oh, you're big, you're so big," straining against the harness, yes, of course it was a race, too, close field pressed in on either side, moving as fast as he could, riding hard the heart he hoped wouldn't dare betray him, blind chase toward a finish that couldn't or wouldn't or shouldn't come. Mister CD was in love.
"You're the kind of guy," she remarked later, "who should put his dick on a leash and take it for a walk around the block."
He had rolled over and his arm was sliding around under the maturing mounds of dirty clothing planted like exotic mushrooms along his side of the mattress. "Where's the damn stem?"
She pretended to search, then slipped it from her ashtray and handed it over.
"Well, babe," he declared, clicking nervously on the yellow Bic, "you should have known me in the days when I was Mister LP."
"You were hot."
"I was dangerous, I was burning up."
The smoldering pipe passed between them in a volitionless glide, like an object at a seance, each repetition a reenactment of their meeting one bright windy afternoon, sizzling white clouds blowing past in pieces, carrying with them, for this one day at least, that late summer malaise of extended-mode lives and wilted options thousands of vacations were designed to avoid. Lately, he took his lunch break out behind the store (biggest inventory, lowest prices in greater Windy City area), an ugly cinder-block bunker he shared with Software Plus, manager Herb Blair or Nair or Nerd, good guy he succeeded in avoiding but for accidental encounters here at the Dumpster, where on this particular afternoon he was seated on a plump garbage bag in his usual dollar daddy uniform of pink polo shirt, gray pants, and gold-plated aviator frames, refreshing himself with the tonic fumes from his glass pipe, when a distinctly nonconsumer-type woman in a bowling shirt and ripped jeans rounded the corner and caught him in the act. He tried to palm the evidence, but fearing she had seen him anyway, he got mad, he came at her with a board in his fist.
"Chill out, buddy." She reached into her pocket and showed him her pipe. She had been casing the store for a possible burglary attempt and was as surprised as he was by this crossing.
His eyes kept going up and down her body. He invited her to join him behind the Dumpster, and without even bothering to exchange names, they settled into the serious business of racking up a few pipes, riding out on private currents, staring wordlessly on this involved backdrop of crumbling brick and cracked asphalt, the solitude deepening like the sky at dusk, and as beautiful, this silent sharing of isolates. In a profane world the passing of the pipe was a sacramental act.
When he felt like speaking again, Mister CD said, "They found a body back here couple years ago. Back here with the trash. Some woman. All cut up. Face and hands burned almost all away."
"Yeah?"
"Just dumped here sometime during the night. Never did identify her, far as I know. Never found out who did it, either."
"Bad." She ran her tongue around the inside of her mouth, checking for the umpteenth time this past minute her teeth, which felt, oddly enough, like gums.
"Right here. Right where we're sitting."
"Maybe you should put up a plaque."
He looked at the insolence in her face, he looked at the nipples outlined on her shirt. "I like you," he said.
So she met him for "lunch" back of the garbage the following day and the day after that and then a week and a half ago he moved her into his "bachelor pad." They were going on a mission together.
Now she was holding in her hand an empty CD box, gazing into the cover (a leather-gloved fist brandishing a boy's dream of compressed firepower, the cannon-sized barrel a sleek chrome sculpture of naked cartoon womanhood) as if it were a pocket mirror. She opened the box and read the liner notes. She read the liner notes. She read the liner notes.
He said something. He said something else. "Hey," he called, "I'm talking to you."
She showed him the cover,
9mm Love
by Burning Sore. "Did you know Axl Rose plays tambourine on this cut of 'Blood Depot'?"
"Fucking Axl Rose. Forty-six with a bullet the first week and how many copies I order?"
"I don't know."
"I don't either."
She weighed the little box in her hand. "Sure would like to hear it."
"I'm working on it, okay? Tomorrow." He glanced around at the wadded sheets, feeling under his legs. "Okay, so where's the damn stem?"
She was having thoughts and her thoughts were having thoughts, a regular birthing frenzy in the old cranium tonight, strangled cries and organic mess and a horde of deformed infants crawling like advancing troops over the rocks and nails and broken glass in her head, and suddenly she couldn't seem to determine with any certainty which was more pressingly real, these bloodied babies hunting for a way out, or the besieged voice most anxious to preserve its status as the imperial "I" that was looking for a way in -- a dilemma admitting neither easy response nor the measured pace of judicial deliberation, since the moment the question was posed she was engulfed by a wave of pure panic, as if nerves were being raked with a steel comb; she experienced a sense of being peeled away, ushered toward a revelation she wasn't capable of bearing, as when one stands too long before a mirror and the images shift toward the unrecognizable, the ultimate horror of simple things.
She jumped up, ran to the window, the skin on her face tightened against the bone like a cat's ears gone flat, she glared out at the darkness, defying the night, the machinery of its desire.
"What?" shouted Mister CD, swiveling startled between window and door. "What?"
"Did you hear something?"
"What?" He joined her at the window to listen. They heard only the reassuring sound of crickets, patiently sawing their way through prison bars.
"Stay here." He retrieved the .44 from under the mattress and, fashionably armed and as dangerous as a full magazine could render him, stole through the darkened house as through an enemy wood. At the entrance to the living room he stopped, waited. When he dared to venture a peek around the corner, the deep moonlit vista framed by the front window was astonishingly vacant: no one at the door, no one in the bushes, no one on the street. He remained in place, however, eyeing the suspicious oak planted conveniently in the dead center of the lawn. Either the trunk was moving on its own or there was somebody incorrect lurking behind it. He watched for more than an hour. Unconsciously massaging the soft flesh below his left nipple. Breath whistling audibly through the upper reaches of his nose. Until silver grass dissolved into a storewide russet expanse of industrial carpet ruined by incompetent vacuum cleaning, the inability of part-time adolescent help to comprehend the simplest order, "Up and down, Denise, and back and forth, see, like mowing the infield," not these haphazard clusters of short stabbing strokes scattered like angry doodles about the floor, the radius of each mark limited to the full extension of her lazy arm from rooted-to-the-center feet, god, he hated walking in in the morning on such a sorry spectacle, worth a good ten-point hike in blood pressure. Gradually, he became aware of the gun in his hand and the quiet carpetless scene in his eyes and he whirled abruptly and retreated toward the inviting glow of the bedroom.