Mother, of course, has always had a different opinion, insisting I keep my dress and hair as plain as possible (this in a family where more is spent per annum between her and my brother on plumage than a low-income family’s total expenditure). But not as some arbitrary tyranny, no: out of concern that any attention I call to myself—even the audacity of wearing the costume of a normal person—would only expose me to unneeded ridicule and heartache. It is only my happiness she has in mind in extinguishing the notion of dressing the part of anything but a pitiful grotesque. Without question the kinder of cruelties.
So you might picture her face. Not half a day after retrieving her son from the sheriff’s office, this new sedition. The shock and blow to her sovereignty.
“What,” she said, once words returned, “have you done to yourself?”
Lacking a credible response, I vainly and foolishly bowed my head and covered my ears with my hands. She strode over and pried them off, taking one lobe between her fingers with furious delicacy.
“You perfectly idiotic creature,” she said. “You great, lumbering
dolt
.” She turned to Roman and demanded if he had had any hand in this.
He appeared conflicted, as though tempted to share and thereby ameliorate guilt but ultimately knowing his own standing too unsteady. He denied it, and of course I was partially disappointed he did not come to my rescue, but glad also: I had made a decision and it was my own.
“I—” said Mother, her attention back on me, “I am simply perplexed. You want to make a mockery of yourself? You would
connive
to demean yourself? At least I thought you had a [EXPLETIVE DELETED]
brain
. At least I thought you had that.”
In the past there have naturally been times when I have caused Mother’s frustration to flare, but never, quite unlike Roman, with deliberate forethought. And Mother, for whatever shortcomings she may possess, has made an effort of patience and consideration with me that is a great strain on her nerves. It must be said this is not easy on her.
She has never yelled at me.
I sobbed, helpless. She continued.
“Do you know what true
deformity
is, Shelley? The most intolerable and repellent of them all? Stupidity. Do you think for a moment I thought you were too young to understand what your father used to call you?”
The “abortion.” She used to tell him not to call me that.
“This travesty ends now,” she said. “Remove the [EXPLETIVE DELETED] things.”
I fumbled for my ears, but my fingers, not the nimblest in the best of circumstances, had no hope the way they were shaking. She watched, her impatience excoriating as my clumsy efforts became all the more pitiable. Mercifully her vexation overtook her and she seized my wrists to do it herself.
And that’s when it happened: the entire edifice of our home dissolved in one word:
“Stop.”
Stated, not vehement, but with what I believe could fairly be described as heartbreak, Roman told her to stop.
“Stay out of this,” said Mother dismissively.
But Roman repeated himself. Looking at neither her nor me, his face lacking in affect like some ventriloquist’s tool.
“Let go of her,” he said.
“Excuse me,” said Mother, less dismissively, “was that a
command
?”
He folded his hands on the table and now he met her face. “Leave her alone,” he said.
Mother laughed like a nail. “Amazing,” she said to some imagined and equally unbelieving audience and reached once more with that terrible delicacy for my ear. “Hold
still
.”
Roman put his hands flat on the table, pushed himself back, and came around to us. He clamped his fingers around Mother’s forearm. My head was a helium balloon that had slipped its knot and my breath came in shallow gasps.
“Let. Go,” said Mother.
“Leave her alone,” said Roman.
She struck him with the back of her free hand. He closed his other fist around that arm. She tried to wrench free, but he held. My head fell and I began rhythmically to lift it an inch, two, and let it drop on the table. Dishware rattled.
“So help me,” said Mother, “you will end up in the gutter, you [EXPLETIVE DELETED] little rodent.”
A spherule of blood beaded at the corner of his mouth from where he had been struck.
“I’ve seen the will,” said Roman.
Mother was quiet. My percussions sent a glass over the end of the table and it shattered.
Roman released her but she did not move. I held my head suspended, confused by the significance of this admission.
“Last year,” said Roman, “when you didn’t like the settlement Annette got you for the Black Derby incident.” (Referring, in case you have forgotten—or, for that matter, were not in her company—to legal complications arising from Mother, dissatisfied with the service at a cocktail bar, entering into a dispute with the bartender requiring stitches for the latter.) “Do you remember what you called her? Not everyone likes being talked to that way. She called me into her office and showed me the will just to spite you, you psychopathic [EXPLETIVE DELETED]. I
know
.”
Mother sank into his empty chair and he said the words that unglued what mutual understanding had ever existed among us.
“It’s all mine,” he said. “I’m sole beneficiary. And on my eighteenth birthday I gain control of the entire trust. Everything is mine. It’s my house and my money and it always was.”
He picked up a napkin—
his
napkin—and dabbed the blood from his lip. She looked past him. A fragment, a small diamond rainbow, flickered on the table—
his
table—refracted from the chandelier. This is what held her attention.
He backed away from her and lit a cigarette. Cigarette smoking was never tolerated in the dining room. Mother looked at that diamond and Roman smoked his cigarette. I wanted instinctively to reach for her, but in that moment it was understood by each that Roman alone had freedom of movement. He dropped his cigarette on the floor and stubbed it out. He was as afraid as the rest of us of where we went from here.
Outside, a cloud must have passed over the sun and the diamond vanished. Mother’s head snapped as though she’d been nodding off. We remained there in a silence that had begun some time before the beginning of the world, and though Mother adjourned wordlessly to her (or, Roman’s) room where she remains, and I am in my (Roman’s) attic, and Roman off to devices of his own in his fiefdom, in that binding silence we remain, just as I remain
Yours,
S.G.
* * *
Roman stood in the doorway. She sat on the top mattress hunched and facing the window. Her back was as broad as a child with fully outstretched arms, and a glow under her shirt evanesced with her breathing. She did not turn to him. The mattress curled around her in a smile.
“That’s not what I wanted,” said Roman. “I didn’t want to do that.”
She didn’t respond.
“I would never do anything that would hurt us,” he said. “You know that, don’t you?”
She turned now and looked at him. It was the first time she had called him a liar.
“I’ll go,” he said.
She grunted no. He went to the bed. She lay back and he lay behind her, working his arm under her head. She knew his arm would be crushed numb in moments but he could live with it. He saw she had removed the earrings. He shut off the bedside lamp and the star and moon stickers glowed.
Later, when her breathing had become a regular saw, Roman extricated his arm and rose. He went to the door, shaking the needles from his arm. The easel caught his eye. She’d been working on this one awhile, it seemed nearly finished. A single vertical white bar against a dark muddle of night, and directly beneath it some subterranean chamber within which was a ring with a sort of node at the top.
A snake—a snake eating its own tail.
Roman took his hand from the door and went back to the bed and climbed on with his arms outstretched and laying his cheek flat against the echo chamber of her heart.
A Measure of Disorder
The phone rang, ending a brief and halting sleep. Dr. Godfrey picked up.
“Okay,” he said finally. “Okay, calm down. I’ll be right there.”
In the dark he found a pair of jeans and a sweater.
“Was that Olivia?” said Marie.
“No,” he said absently. At some distance he was aware how treacherous and truthful it was that in a semilucid state this was the first thing to occur to his wife. But he could worry about that later; it would have to take its place in the queue. He looked out the window. There was a misting of dew that made the night outside look like wine through a glass and he had the strange and pleasing thought: No time like the present for a swim. It occurred to him he may actually have said this out loud, but he wasn’t sure and Marie gave no indication. He laced his shoes.
Down the hall, Letha was in the bathroom. She heard her father’s descending footsteps and quiet exit, and waited another few moments for any sign her mother was going to stir. Then she crept down to the study and knelt at his file cabinet.
* * *
The police were already at the Neuropathology Lab, waiting for Godfrey’s arrival. Nurse Kotar came to him. Her eyes were red and her hair looked like she had just been given a serious going-over in the bedroom, an appearance so unlikely it could only spell disaster. He put his hands on her elbows and told her to go home and take a few days off.
She nodded docilely, then abruptly clung to him tightly and shook like a child.
“Go home,” said Godfrey again, his gentleness of tone hiding his resentment that to some this remained a solace.
Sheriff Sworn waited for her to leave, then approached Godfrey with a smile meant as a frown.
“Some funny math here,” he said. “You have a highly disturbed individual and a straightforward—or at least these days close enough—suicide, whole thing caught on camera. But. The security situation here, it’s no joke, right?”
It was a rhetorical question, but Godfrey nevertheless confirmed no joke.
“Thing is,” said Sworn, “you watch the tape, this wasn’t a break-in, but there was no assisted entry either.” He paused in considered disapproval of a world that had once held up its end of what he’d considered an understanding. “The door, it just opens up for him. As if … well … as if to say, Come on in, pilgrim.”
Dr. Godfrey looked to the floor of the far end of the Brain Barn. Francis Pullman lay on the floor. There was the plunger of a syringe in his hand. There was the splintered needle of the syringe in his temple. What was that Dorothy Parker line?
I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.
Godfrey stifled the only sane response to this tableau, the latest somewhat dramatic addition lying at the wall of three thousand orderly Tupperware-housed specimens. The only response a certifiably sane person could have in this asylum. But it would not be appropriate for a man of your position to laugh.
* * *
At first light the master bedroom door opened and Olivia emerged. She wore a white satin robe and passed down the hall and stopped at the door with the Dragon on it and entered. The room was dark; morning light visible around the edges of the curtains. He was still sleeping. She came forward and stood over him. His bare chest and neck were long and lean and white. She placed the backs of her fingers to his neck and felt the living miracle of the young heart in his chest, the conduit between it and her own. His eyes opened. She caressed his face and his scalp.
“We’ll need to bleach you soon,” she said. “Your roots are showing.”
* * *
On his way to homeroom Peter stopped at his locker and found sticking through the slats a folded page of notebook paper. He looked at it and he knew in his Swadisthana that it had been delivered by the same hand that had sent Lisa Willoughby the invitation. He took the page and unfolded it. There was no writing on it, only a picture. A crude drawing of the severed head of a brown wolf. The head lay in a pool of dried blood that in color and texture was clearly real blood, and the head itself seemed at first appearance to be brown shoe polish but no. He realized, after a moment, that’s not what it was. Peter grimly folded the picture and placed it in his backpack. He looked at a poster on the wall of a hand with an extended index finger with the caption
WHEN YOU POINT ONE FINGER, YOU POINT THREE BACK AT YOURSELF.
“Shit,” he said.
He turned to head down the hall but saw Roman approaching.
“Shit,” he said again.
But this had all the trimmings of one those days. They stepped out an eastern exit next to the loading zone and overlooking a steep embankment over a housing development. They kept the door open a wedge with a half brick to keep it from locking behind them and Roman lit two cigarettes and handed one to Peter and said he had a lead.
Peter looked out. It was the sort of day that had the birds all in a dither. They gathered by the dozens on high wires like dark clothespins against slate sky only for some mysterious birdbrain impetus to send all of them into drunken wild flight, God shaking pepper into a whirlwind, and then just as suddenly to alight once more on the same wire, but facing now in the opposite direction. Whatever it is that gets into birds on days like today.
“I think something is going on at the White Tower,” said Roman.
Peter smoked and watched the birds.
“I don’t know if it’s connected or not, but I can get us in,” said Roman.
Crosshatching the sky were gauzy tendrils of black. Rain later.
Roman saw it in his face. “What?” said Roman.
“No,” said Peter.
“What do you mean, no?” said Roman.
“It’s over,” said Peter.
“What are you talking about?”
“This is over. We’re done.”
Roman looked at him and saw he was serious. Suddenly he wanted to rip that faggot fucking ponytail out of his head. He wanted to find whatever words it would take to make him change his mind.
“Why?” said Roman.
Peter did not answer. He hated that he was having this conversation; this sort of thing was no less suffocating to him than when he was younger and an older cousin would trap him in a blanket and sit on him and it felt like the worst of all possible deaths. Getting mixed up in other people’s feelings, only himself to blame. Also he blamed Roman.