Man of Wax (Man of Wax Trilogy) (12 page)

The second time came three years later when I approached him to ask for his permission to marry his daughter. He’d simply shaken his head and said no, walked away without a glance back. I had stood there stunned, speechless, unsure what to do next, but then Jen’s mother came to the rescue. She told me of course I had permission to marry her daughter; as long as I made Jenny happy, then she didn’t care what we did.
 

Unfortunately Claire Abele never attended our wedding, which was in Pennsylvania. She was killed in a hit-and-run only a few months later. I’d gone with Jen to the funeral, which was the third place I saw her father, and which afterward he’d taken me aside and handed me the check for five hundred thousand dollars. It was more money than I would ever see at one time in my entire life. More money than my parents would ever hope to earn even if they worked every day of their lives and saved every dollar and penny. I briefly thought about all the debts my parents had, about all the debts I had, and how even a tenth of this check would help improve things. Then, with these thoughts running tandem in my mind, I ripped the check up right in front of him. For some reason I hadn’t wanted to tell Jen, but she’d gotten it out of me sensing I was holding something back, and from that day forward she cut off all ties with her dad. Refused to speak to him again. Suffice it to say on our wedding day, her side of the chapel was quite sparse, so our guests had been encouraged to sit wherever they pleased.

•
   
•
   
•

I’
M
NOT
SURE
what else I want to say about Jen. Obviously I could go on forever, and that doesn’t even include the three and a half years after Casey was born and our family really became complete.
 

But there, speaking of completeness, I should mention about the night, only a month before we got married, where Jen and I were lying in bed and I said something about us being soul mates. I don’t know what we were talking about but I said the words and immediately felt stupid, thinking they were beyond cheesy.
 

“Soul mates don’t exist,” she whispered. We were spooning, my arm around her, holding her close.
 

I said, “Oh,” a little more than just disappointed (wanting to kick myself, really), and she had turned over so we could stare at each other. Around the room were a half dozen scented candles, and in the soft light I stared at the curve of her face, her dimples, the slight birthmark just beneath her chin.
 

She said, “Don’t say it like that. We’re so much more than soul mates.”
 

And then in the dark and quiet of our apartment bedroom, Jen told me the story of Plato’s Symposium, which was a recreation of a discussion among Greek philosophers concerning love. One of the philosophers there, Aristophanes, said that originally there weren’t two sexes, but three. That at the beginning of time there had been men, women, and beings of both man and woman, an androgynous sex. All of these creatures were round, with four hands and four legs and two faces on opposite sides of one head. They were strong and mighty, and it was said they dared to challenge the gods. Naturally Zeus wasn’t too pleased about this, and he came up with a plan to stop these creatures. He decided he would allow them to exist, but would weaken their power by cutting them all in half. When he did this the male creatures he cut apart became homosexuals, who pursued other males. The same with the female creatures. But the androgynous sex was split up so one half was male and the other half female, and pursued each other. So, according to the myth, we search the world for our other half, so when we find each other we can become whole again.
 

“But isn’t that just like soul mates?” I asked, once she was done speaking. I loved listening to her talk, the soft lilt of her voice, the way she always knew which words to speak and in which order to say them. It was what made her such a great lawyer, because it never took her long to formulate her argument, and to stick by it no matter what.
 

“Maybe,” she whispered. She leaned forward and lightly kissed me on the lips; I could taste the lip-gloss she’d applied earlier, still present after our lovemaking. “Either way you’re my other half.”
 

“Oh yeah? And how do you know that?”
 

“You laughed at my stupid elephant manure joke when no one else did.”
 

The next day I went to the jewelry store and asked if I could change the inscription. I didn’t even know if it would be possible. If it was possible, I figured it was going to cost a lot, probably more than I could even afford, but luckily they hadn’t done Jen’s yet, which had been a simple and generic:
TO
JEN
WITH
LOVE
and our wedding date. Instead I had them change it to:
TO
JEN
,
MY
OTHER
HALF
.
 

It was the first thing I looked for that Tuesday morning, sitting in my room on the seventh floor of the Grand Sierra Resort, as I held my wife’s finger in my hands.
 

I gently took off the ring the same way I’d first put it on, not trying to squeeze it over the flesh that had been so savagely cut off. It had gone pale in the hours it took to ship and didn’t feel like a living human finger at all. But still I knew it was hers, and when I finally slid the ring off and set the finger down on the bed, I moved close to the lamp on the bedside table to check.
 

And yes, there it was, the inscription I’d had put there the night after Jen told me the story she’d heard in one of her classes at school. That had also been the same night she woke from just one of her many nightmares. It was the first time I became aware of them at least, and she said she hadn’t had them for the longest time, not since we’d been together. She had assumed, or maybe just hoped, being with me kept them away.
 

While we’d been together almost four years she finally came out with something she had been holding back, what she said had been a dark period in her life. How in high school she’d been heavily into drugs, so much so that one night she actually tried to kill herself. Her parents had gotten her help, forced her to talk to psychiatrists, but all that eventually happened was that she was put on permanent antidepressants. Just a chemical imbalance in her head, the doctors told her, and that imbalance combined with the medication sometimes caused her to have nightmares. These nightmares would, over the course of the next eight years, become as much a part of my life as they were Jen’s, because it would be my job to wake her up in the middle of the night when she began thrashing around. No bogeymen attempted to kill her in these nightmares, no obscene monsters chased her down endless dark passages. In these nightmares the monsters were those of the real world, serial killers and rapists who chased her, and who I eventually had to save her from. I’d wake her and hold her and tell her everything was okay, just as I soon ended up doing with Casey when she would cry out in the middle of the night. Though my daughter never told me what chased her in her nightmares, I began to suspect they were not the unnatural kind. That really, in all nightmares, the bogeymen and monsters are not unnatural at all, but are merely façades for the real monsters of the world. And to each of them, to Jen and to Casey, holding them and comforting them as best I could, I had told them that the monsters weren’t real, that they couldn’t hurt them, that everything would be okay.
 

But now it seemed I’d been lying to them this entire time, because the monsters had come. They had come and now they’d taken my family, they had cut off my wife’s finger and sent it to me in a box. Only God knew what else they’d done, what other packages were just waiting to be shipped my way. And the worst part was these monsters wanted me to do things, do these terrible things to save my family, and the more I thought about it, the more I was beginning to believe I would never see them again.

23

Exhaustion must have knocked me out. The last thing I remembered was sitting on the bed and holding Jen’s ring and crying. This was followed by darkness, a darkness which thankfully brought no dreams. Then, in that darkness, the soft and faint ringing of a telephone.
 

I opened my eyes.
 

I was lying on top of the comforter, still in the clothes from last night. I’d put my tie back on when I left wherever Juliet had taken me, something I didn’t even remember doing. Jen’s ring was on the comforter, just inches away. At the foot of the bed were the cardboard box and Styrofoam peanuts. And a finger, which from this far away didn’t even look real—though I realized a second later why this was: I wasn’t wearing my glasses.
 

The lamp beside the bed and the lamp in the corner were still on, but their light was now enhanced by the sun, which was fighting to get past the closed curtains for all it was worth.
 

The phone continued ringing, in the same spot as yesterday—to my right, on the bedside table, right next to the alarm clock.
 

I sat up but immediately lay back down. My head, which had been pounding since I opened my eyes, began pounding even harder. I rolled over and squinted at the clock. Almost noon.
 

The phone continued to ring, almost the same pitch and tone as the one back at the Paradise Motel. When I answered this one, I didn’t expect to hear a desk clerk’s voice giving me my wake-up call. Score one for me, I was right.
 

“Well, well,” said Simon, his voice sounding joyous and refreshed, “good afternoon to you, Ben. Did you sleep well?”
 

Despite the drums beating in my head, I slowly sat up. “You fucking cut off my wife’s finger.”
 

“Again, semantics. Physically yes, I did cut off Jennifer’s finger, while technically no, you did. Remember what I said about following the rules? You just needed a little, let’s say, unfriendly reminder. By the way, we were also going to include her engagement ring but it was just so ... pathetic. Seriously, what did you spend on it, fifty bucks? I really can’t believe she accepted it.”
 

“Fuck you.”
 

Simon chuckled. “Speaking of which, did you enjoy yourself last night? I’d wanted to call you when you got back but liked watching you cry even more.”
 

I was silent, refusing to give him what he wanted. Out in the hallway, I heard the soft shushing of footsteps, the murmur of voices. The pounding in my head had subsided some, bringing on the pounding in my entire body. My back, my legs, even my arms: they were all sore.
 

Simon said, “It is a shame what happened to that poor girl. She seemed like such a sweetheart, didn’t she? I mean, underneath all that moaning and grunting.”
 

“What the hell are you talking about?”
 

“Turn on the TV. Channel six.”
 

I hung up the phone and in one fluid motion got up and made my way to the television. The remote was lying on top, right beside the black and white photograph of Jen and Casey. I paused just momentarily, staring at the picture for a couple seconds, before realizing I couldn’t really see them at all. Not without my glasses, which I had to go back to the bed for. They’d come off sometime during the night, and at first I couldn’t find them. A few moments later I spotted them on the carpet, in the space between the bed and the wall, and I grabbed them and put them on and went back to the picture.
 

My wife and daughter, both staring at the camera, their mouths gagged, tears in their eyes and running down their faces. Had they cut off Jen’s finger then, or had they merely promised her it would happen when I failed to comply with whatever crazy demands they gave me? What had they promised would happen to Casey?
 

Hands shaking, I replaced the picture on top of the TV, grabbed the remote, and seconds later had tuned into channel six. The news was already in progress. But it wasn’t Juliet’s face that was currently on the screen as a newscaster spoke.
 

“Police have already identified the man as Gerald Newcomer, a thirty-three-year-old cab driver. The victim, a young woman who police haven’t yet identified, was brutally assaulted and then strangled to death.”
 

Gerald’s face—it was there only briefly, what looked like his driver license’s photo—disappeared as the second newscaster went on to the next story. I had missed most of the segment that Simon wanted me to see, but I had seen enough.
 

I lifted the remote—my hand still shaking—and turned off the TV just as the phone on the bedside table began to ring.
 

I made it there in five strides, tearing the phone out of its cradle, and growling, “You piece of shit.”
 

“Careful now, Ben. For all you knew I was room service asking if you wanted your burger medium or rare.”
 

“Why did you kill her?”
 

“Simply tying up loose ends.”
 

“And Gerald?”
 

“His unfortunate demise is all thanks to you.”
 

I sat down on the edge of the bed, facing the closed curtains. The little lines of sunlight that fell on the carpet and walls had stretched.
 

Simon said, “He was supposed to drop you off right at the Sundown Saloon. Those were his instructions, plain and simple. But greed changed his mind.”
 

“He had a wife and two daughters.”
 

“You say that like I should give a shit.”