Smoke and Mirrors (30 page)

In the small hours he was woken by a cold sensation around his loins.

He wiped himself off with his dress shirt and returned to sleep.

Simon was unable to masturbate.

He wanted to, but his hand wouldn’t move. It lay beside him, healthy, fine; but it was as if he had forgotten how to make it respond. Which was silly, wasn’t it?

Wasn’t it?

He began to sweat. It dripped from his face and forehead onto the white cotton sheets, but the rest of his body was dry.

Cell by cell, something was reaching up inside him. It brushed his face tenderly, like the kiss of a lover; it was licking his throat, breathing on his cheek. Touching him.

He had to get out of the bed. He couldn’t get out of the bed.

He tried to scream, but his mouth wouldn’t open. His larynx refused to vibrate.

Simon could still see the ceiling, lit by the lights of passing cars. The ceiling blurred: His eyes were still his own, and tears were oozing out of them, down his face, soaking the pillow.

They don’t know what I’ve got,
he thought.
They said I had what everyone else gets. But I didn’t catch that. I’ve caught something different.

Or maybe,
he thought, as his vision clouded over and the darkness swallowed the last of Simon Powers,
it caught me.

Soon after that, Simon got up, and washed, and inspected himself carefully in front of the bathroom mirror. Then he smiled, as if he liked what he saw.

Benham smiled. “I’m pleased to tell you,” he said, “that I can give you a clean bill of health.”

Simon Powers stretched in his seat, lazily, and nodded. “I feel terrific,” he said.

He did look well, Benham thought. Glowing with health. He seemed taller as well. A very attractive young man, decided the doctor. “So, uh, no more of those feelings?”

“Feelings?”

“Those feelings you were telling me about. That your body didn’t belong to you anymore.”

Simon waved a hand, gently, fanning his face. The cold weather had broken, and London was stewing in a sudden heat-wave; it didn’t feel like England anymore.

Simon seemed amused.

“All of this body belongs to me, Doctor. I’m certain of that.”

Simon Powers (
90/00666.L SINGLE. MALE
.) grinned like the world belonged to him as well.

The doctor watched him as he walked out of the surgery. He looked stronger now, less fragile.

The next patient on Jeremy Benham’s appointment card was a twenty-two-year-old boy. Benham was going to have to tell him he was HIV positive.
I hate this job,
he thought.
I need a holiday.

He walked down the corridor to call the boy in and pushed past Simon Powers, talking animatedly to a pretty young Australian nurse. “It must be a lovely place,” he was telling her. “I want to see it. I want to go everywhere. I want to meet
everyone.
” He was resting a hand on her arm, and she was making no move to free herself from it.

Dr. Benham stopped beside them. He touched Simon on the shoulder. “Young man,” he said. “Don’t let me see you back here.”

Simon Powers grinned. “You won’t see me here again, Doctor,” he said. “Not as such, anyway. I’ve packed in my job. I’m going around the world.” They shook hands. Powers’s hand was warm and comfortable and dry.

Benham walked away, but could not avoid hearing Simon Powers, still talking to the nurse.

“It’s going to be so great,” he was saying to her. Benham wondered if he was talking about sex or world travel, or possibly, in some way, both.

“I’m going to have such
fun,
” said Simon. “I’m loving it already.”

V AMPIRE S ESTINA

I wait here at the boundaries of dream,

all shadow-wrapped. The dark air tastes of night,

so cold and crisp, and I wait for my love.

The moon has bleached the color from her stone.

She’ll come, and then we’ll stalk this pretty world

alive to darkness and the tang of blood.

It is a lonely game, the quest for blood,

but still, a body’s got the right to dream

and I’d not give it up for all the world.

The moon has leeched the darkness from the night.

I stand in shadows, staring at her stone:

Undead, my lover. . . O, undead my love?

I dreamt you while I slept today and love

meant more to me than life—meant more than blood.

The sunlight sought me, deep beneath my stone,

more dead than any corpse but still a-dream

until I woke as vapor into night

and sunset forced me out into the world.

For many centuries I’ve walked the world

dispensing something that resembled love—

a stolen kiss, then back into the night

contented by the life and by the blood.

And come the morning I was just a dream,

cold body chilling underneath a stone.

I said I would not hurt you. Am I stone

to leave you prey to time and to the world?

I offered you a truth beyond your dreams

while all
you
had to offer was your love.

I told you not to worry and that blood

tastes sweeter on the wing and late at night.

Sometimes my lovers rise to walk the night . . .

Sometimes they lie, cold corpse beneath a stone,

and never know the joys of bed and blood,

of walking through the shadows of the world;

instead they rot to maggots. O my love

they whispered you had risen, in my dream.

I’ve waited by your stone for half the night

but you won’t leave your dream to hunt for blood.

Good night, my love. I offered you the world.

M OUSE

T
hey had a number of devices that would kill the mouse fast, others that would kill it more slowly. There were a dozen variants on the traditional mousetrap, the one Regan tended to think of as a Tom and Jerry trap: a metal spring trap that would slam down at a touch, breaking the mouse’s back; there were other gadgets on the shelves—ones that suffocated the mouse, others that electrocuted it, or even drowned it, each safe in its multicolored cardboard package.

“These weren’t quite what I was looking for,” said Regan.

“Well, that’s all we got in the way of traps,” said the woman, who wore a large plastic name tag that said her name was
BECKY
and that she
LOVES WORKING
FOR YOU
AT MACREA
’
S ANIMAL FEED AND SPECIALTY STORE
. “Now, over here—”

She pointed to a stand-alone display of
HUN-GREE-CAT MOUSE POISON
sachets. A little rubber mouse lay on the top of the display, his legs in the air.

Regan experienced a sudden memory flash, unbidden: Gwen, extending an elegant pink hand, her fingers curled upward. “What’s that?” she said. It was the week before he had left for America.

“I don’t know,” said Regan. They were in the bar of a small hotel in the West Country, burgundy-colored carpets, fawn-colored wallpaper. He was nursing a gin and tonic; she was sipping her second glass of Chablis. Gwen had once told Regan that blondes should only drink white wine; it looked better. He laughed until he realized she meant it.

“It’s a dead one of
these,
” she said, turning her hand over so the fingers hung like the legs of a slow pink animal. He smiled. Later he paid the bill, and they went upstairs to Regan’s room . . .

“No. Not poison. You see, I don’t want to kill it,” he told the saleswoman, Becky.

She looked at him curiously, as if he had just begun to speak in a foreign tongue. “But you said you wanted mousetraps . . . ?”

“Look, what I want is a humane trap. It’s like a corridor. The mouse goes in, the door shuts behind it, it can’t get out.”

“So how do you kill it?”

“You don’t kill it. You drive a few miles away and let it go. And it doesn’t come back to bother you.”

Becky was smiling now, examining him as if he were just the most darling thing, just the sweetest, dumbest, cutest little thing. “You stay here,” she said. “I’ll check out back.”

She walked through a door marked
EMPLOYEES ONLY.
She had a nice bottom, thought Regan, and was sort of attractive, in a dull Midwestern sort of way.

He glanced out the window. Janice was sitting in the car, reading her magazine: a red-haired woman in a dowdy housecoat. He waved at her, but she wasn’t looking at him.

Becky put her head back through the doorway. “Jackpot!” she said. “How many you want?”

“Two?”

“No problem.” She was gone again and returned with two small green plastic containers. She rang them up on the cash register, and as he fumbled through his notes and coins, still unfamiliar, trying to put together the correct change, she examined the traps, smiling, turning the packets over in her hands.

“My lord,” she said. “Whatever will they think of next?”

The heat slammed Regan as he stepped out of the store.

He hurried over to the car. The metal door handle was hot in his hand; the engine was idling.

He climbed in. “I got two,” he said. The air-conditioning in the car was cool and pleasant.

“Seatbelt on,” said Janice. “You’ve really got to learn to drive over here.” She put down her magazine.

“I will,” he said. “Eventually.”

Regan was scared of driving in America: it was like driving on the other side of a mirror.

They said nothing else, and Regan read the instructions on the back of the mousetrap boxes. According to the text, the main attraction of this type of trap was that you never needed to see, touch, or handle the mouse. The door would close behind it, and that would be that. The instructions said nothing about not killing the mouse.

When they got home, he took the traps out of the boxes, put a little peanut butter in one, down at the far end, a lump of cooking chocolate in the other, and placed them on the floor of the pantry, one against the wall, the other near the hole that the mice seemed to be using to gain access to the pantry.

The traps were only corridors. A door at one end, a wall at the other.

In bed that night Regan reached out and touched Janice’s breasts as she slept; touched them gently, not wanting to wake her. They were perceptibly fuller. He wished he found large breasts erotic. He found himself wondering what it must be like to suck a woman’s breasts while she was lactating. He could imagine sweetness, but no specific taste.

Janice was sound asleep, but still she moved toward him.

He edged away; lay there in the dark, trying to remember how to sleep, hunting through alternatives in his mind. It was so hot, so stuffy. When they’d lived in Ealing he’d fallen asleep instantly, he was certain.

There was a sharp scream from the garden. Janice stirred and rolled away from him. It had sounded almost human. Foxes can sound like small children in pain—Regan had heard this long ago. Or perhaps it was a cat. Or a night bird of some kind.

Something had died, anyway, in the night. Of that there was no doubt at all.

The next morning one of the traps had been sprung, although when Regan opened it carefully, it proved to be empty. The chocolate bait had been nibbled. He opened the door to the trap once more and replaced it by the wall.

Janice was crying to herself in the lounge. Regan stood beside her; she reached out her hand, and he held it tightly. Her fingers were cold. She was still wearing her nightgown, and she had put on no makeup.

Later she made a phone call.

A package arrived for Regan shortly before noon by Federal Express, containing a dozen floppy disks, each filled with numbers for him to inspect and sort and classify.

He worked at the computer until six, sitting in front of a small metal fan that whirred and rattled and moved the hot air around.

He turned on the radio that evening while he cooked.

“. . . what my book
tells
everyone. What the liberals don’t
want
us to know.” The voice was high, nervous, arrogant.

“Yeah. Some of it was, well kinda hard to believe.” The host was encouraging: a deep radio voice, reassuring and easy on the ears.

“Of
course
it’s hard to believe. It runs against everything they
want
you to believe. The liberals and the how-mo-sexuals in the media, they don’t
let
you know the truth.”

“Well, we all know that, friend. We’ll be right back after this song.”

It was a country and western song. Regan kept the radio tuned to the local National Public Radio station; sometimes they broadcast the BBC World Service News. Someone must have retuned it, he supposed, although he couldn’t imagine who.

He took a sharp knife and cut through the chicken breast with care, parting the pink flesh, slicing it into strips all ready to stir-fry, listening to the song.

Somebody’s heart was broken; somebody no longer cared. The song ended. There was a commercial for beer. Then the men began to talk again.

“Thing is, nobody believes it at first. But I got the
doc
uments. I got the
pho
tographs. You read my book.
You’ll
see. It’s the unholy alliance, and I
do
mean unholy, between the so-called pro-choice lobby, the medical community, and how-mo-sexuals. The how-mos
need
these murders because that’s where they get the little children they use to ex
per
iment with to find a cure for AIDS.

“I mean, those liberals talk about
Nazi
atrocities, but nothing those Nazis did comes in even
close
to what
they’re
doing, even as we speak. They take these human fetuses and they graft them onto little mice to create these human–mouse hybrid creatures for their experiments.
Then
they inject them with AIDS . . .”

Regan found himself thinking of Mengele’s wall of strung eyeballs. Blue eyes and brown eyes and hazel . . .

“Shit!” He’d sliced into his thumb. He pushed it into his mouth, bit down on it to stop the bleeding, ran into the bathroom, and began to hunt for a Band-Aid.

“Remember, I’ll need to be out of the house by ten tomorrow.” Janice was standing behind him. He looked at her blue eyes in the bathroom mirror. She looked calm.

“Fine.” He pulled the Band-Aid onto his thumb, hiding and binding the wound, and turned to face her.

“I saw a cat in the garden today,” she said. “A big gray one. Maybe it’s a stray.”

“Maybe.”

“Did you think any more about getting a pet?”

“Not really. It’d just be something else to worry about. I thought we agreed: no pets.”

She shrugged.

They went back into the kitchen. He poured oil into the frying pan and lit the gas. He dropped the strips of pink flesh into the pan and watched them shrink and discolor and change.

Janice drove herself to the bus station early the next morning. It was a long drive into the city, and she’d be in no condition to drive when she was ready to return. She took five hundred dollars with her, in cash.

Regan checked the traps. Neither of them had been touched. Then he prowled the corridors of the house.

Eventually, he phoned Gwen. The first time he misdialed, his fingers slipping on the buttons of the phone, the long string of digits confusing him. He tried again.

A ringing, then her voice on the line. “Allied Accountancy Associates. Good afternoon.”

“Gwennie? It’s me.”

“Regan? It’s you, isn’t it? I was hoping you’d call eventually. I missed you.” Her voice was distant; transatlantic crackle and hum taking her farther away from him.

“It’s expensive.”

“Any more thoughts about coming back?”

“I don’t know.”

“So how’s wifeykins?”

“Janice is . . . ” He paused. Sighed. “Janice is just fine.”

“I’ve started fucking our new sales director,” said Gwen. “After your time. You don’t know him. You’ve been gone for six months now. I mean, what’s a girl to do?”