The Sleeping and the Dead (32 page)

“I'm the artist, honey. I'm the only one I have to please. But I also like the novelty of this. In Thespis's time, there was only one actor on the stage, plus the chorus. Aeschylus added a second actor and Sophocles a third. Phrynichus was the first to include female roles, but all the parts, male and female, god and demon, were played by men. Even in Shakespeare's time, all the parts were played by men. That's as it should be and the only way I've ever worked, until tonight.”

“What about Ashley St. Michael?” I countered.

“What about her?”

“You killed her.”

“No, that was James.” He picked up the syringe and drew a full load into its chamber, then nudged the hot spoon off the candle flame, scorching a knuckle in the process.

“Bullshit,” I said.

He winced and sucked his burned finger. “No, seriously. I've known them ever since they bought Martha Ritter's house. Ever heard of her? She was Cole Ritter's mother. I used to play at her house when I was kid, back behind the garage. It was a great place to hide things.” He giggled again,
tee hee
. “Cole sold the house to James and Ashley after his mother died. I bet James didn't tell you that. Anyway, because Ashley was a society photographer and my grandfather was Memphis society, James and I saw each other about once a month and one thing led to another, as they sometimes do.”

“You're telling me you and James were lovers.”

“He is so good-looking!” he cackled. “I did things for James his wife wouldn't do. I told him things about myself I had never told anybody. I confessed all the terrible things I had done when I was young and confused. Then he got in trouble and needed money, so he asked me to break into his house and steal his wife's cameras so he could file an insurance claim. He told me where to find the spare key in the flower box and everything. But when I got there, she was dead on the floor. He had a camera set up in the closet to take my picture with her body, but I saw the camera and took the memory card. That ruined it for him because he couldn't collect her life insurance until I was convicted. But like an idiot, I had told him of my plan to stage
Richard the Third
at the Playhouse. So he was waiting for me there and took my picture with the Duke of Clarence. He's been blackmailing me ever since. Well, not anymore,” he finished with a soft laugh.

Endo scooted until he was sitting in front of me, stark naked with his black clown face, holding the syringe like a dart he was about to throw for triple points. I turned my head so I wouldn't have to look at him. I looked at James lying on my bed with his mouth open and his eyes half closed like he was waiting for something amazing to happen. I couldn't believe I had been so wrong about him. I refused to believe it.

Endo continued, “Why do you think I tried to go straight? Why do you think I waited two years to do
Edward the Second
? When I found out the other day that James was trying to sell his dead wife's cameras, I put this production together to get back at him. I'm sorry I had to use you, but I needed somebody close to him. You go to war with the army you have, not the army you wish you had. This is the final act of the play. He won't blackmail me now.”

I laughed, even though it hurt like Christ on the cross. Endo was lying again, of course. James was innocent. Endo fabricated the whole story. Truth was totally meaningless to him. But I wasn't ready to give up yet.

“James had no idea those photos were in the camera until tonight. If he was blackmailing you, he'd never have sold me the camera with the pictures still in it.”

Endo laughed at me, that fake, falsetto cackle, sounding more like Michi than ever. “OK. You got me. But it makes a good story, doesn't it? That's what's important, a nice dramatic twist at the end. How am I doing, by the way? Convincing performance? Do you fear for your life?”

“Not really,” I said. Not anymore, anyway. He was going to kill me. Nothing would change that. I wasn't about to make it easy for him.

“Good. I hope you're enjoying every moment of this. This is real theater, what theater should have always been. You probably think we're performing a tragedy, but this is Comedy with a capital C. If this were tragedy, some fault or flaw, some hubris would have led me to this point, but I've done nothing wrong. I grew up in the most ridiculous of circumstances. It's really quite funny.”

He laughed harder and wiped his eyes with the heel of his palms, leaving two, upward-slanted teardrop eyes in his black face, completing his comedic mask. I saw nothing funny about it.

“My father was ruined in business and committed seppuku. My mother tried to follow him by holding me in her arms and jumping in front of a bullet train at Arihata Station. But the bullet hit her and missed me.
Why?
you ask.”

I hadn't asked. I didn't care, but he was going to tell me anyway. It was part of the script he had written for himself. “Why did my mother follow an ancient Japanese tradition no longer kept by even the most traditional of Japanese women, especially since she was only half Japanese and could pass for white? What's more, why did I survive? If you can answer that, I defy you to believe in a just God. There is no such animal. So after mama killed herself, they mailed me off to America like a cheap plastic blow-up doll to be raised by my dear, demented old grandfather, Michi Mori, who hated me. He tried to give me away to anyone who feigned the slightest bit of interest in me, as though I were no more important to him than a stray cat who wandered through an open door into his kitchen. The happiest moment in my life was the day you took me away from him. I thought you'd come to save me. So why did you let them send me back?”

“I didn't know. I'm sorry.”

“It's a little late for sorry, don't you think, Jacqueline? You knew what kind of monster Michi was. How could you send me back to him?”

“The charges against your grandfather were dropped,” I said. Social Services returned custody of Endo to Michi. They never consulted with me about it. “I couldn't stop them.” I hadn't even tried. What did I care about Endo? My life fell apart after that case, the department was riding my ass and I was using hard. Endo had been the last thing on my mind.

“I could have given you all the evidence you needed to put Michi away forever, but no one would listen to me!” he shouted, and rammed his fist into the floor. “I have photographs of the boys who were funneled through Michi's house, traded or bought and sold for the personal use of senators, CEOs, Arab sheiks and mobsters, all kinds of famous people. Some of those boys even ended up in the White House. They'd kidnap kids from all over and bring them to Michi's house until buyers could be found. My grandfather used me like a steer. He'd send me down there to talk to the boys, calm them down and pretend everything would be ok as soon as we could find their parents. Then a white van would pull up, they'd take a few
boizu
to the airport and load them on a private plane and you'd never see them again.”

I looked at him. In the red of the traffic light outside the window all I could see was the comedic smile painted on his face, but he wasn't smiling. It was the face of the Gacy clown hanging on the wall of his apartment. His dead black eyes glimmered with tears. “Are you serious, Endo?” I asked.

His façade cracked with yellow teeth. “Not!” he shrieked hysterically as he tied a nylon stocking around his left bicep. He pulled it tight with his teeth. “God, you are so easy. I made that up. Michi was a pervert but he was a decent one. He had no interest in little boys and he didn't trade them. That bit about kidnapping and the White House was something I read on the internet. Michi's only interest was himself. But isn't that enough to make him a monster? Did he have to bugger children and sell them into slavery before you people would try to stop him?”

“I did try to stop him.”

“You're right,” he agreed. “You did try. I owe you a debt of gratitude.” He held up the syringe and squeezed a drop from its point, then stuck it in his arm and pushed about 5cc's into his vein. He undid the knot in the hose. I watched the muscles of his face relax, the smiling mask fall slack.

“That'll take the edge off,” he sighed. He scooted his naked butt across the floor until he was behind me. I felt him push the stocking between my arm and back. Then he pulled my spit-soaked panties down over my face. I couldn't see until he tugged the leg hole around and uncovered my right eye. He said, “False face must hide what false face doth know. So this is comedy. But for you, it's tragedy. This will have to do for a tragic mask. Faceless, you can be whoever I want you to be. Tonight, you are Lady Macbeth.”

“The cops are looking for you. We were at your apartment today,” I said through my mask.

“Yes, I know. I saw you there.”

“Someone probably heard that gun shot downstairs.”

“In this storm?” The thunder was so loud, we were almost shouting.

“Killing me won't change anything.”

“No, it won't change anything. But how am I going to set up the scene properly without Lady Macbeth? I have Banquo there on the floor. There lies Duncan on the bed—he was a goodly king. I myself will play the role of Macbeth.” He twisted my arm around to get at a good vein. “Historically, Macbeth is the last play a theater will show before it goes bankrupt or burns down. The play is cursed. So let the police come. If it must be done, let it be done swiftly.
Macbeth
will be my last performance.”

I barely felt the needle go into my arm. There had been so many there before it, what was one more? So what if Endo killed me? How many times had I tried to kill myself? How many more times had I been too scared to do it but hoped the junk would get me. Yet now, at the end of all things, I clung to my pathetic life, casting about for a bit of flotsam, all my rescuers floating facedown around me. But there I was, bobbing up again, trying one more time for a gulp of air.

“This isn't your style, Wayne. Lady Macbeth dies offstage by her own hand. She wasn't murdered. All the others were perfectly staged. They were works of art. You don't want to do me this way.”

“Oh, but I do.”

“Please don't. Please please don't.”

“It's the only way.”

He loosed the nylon and released his load into my arm, then broke the needle off and left it in my vein. He pulled me to my feet and shook me, then showed me the butcher knife. I don't know where he'd been hiding it. He stood me up in front of him as the drug found my brain and curled around it like a purring cat. He seemed to recede while his arms grew impossibly long. “Please don't,” I repeated, though I was already starting not to care. “It's not too late.”

“Nay, m'lady. I am in blood; stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as to go o'er.”

I struggled with the demon throb of the drug dulling all the sharp feeling places. I fought to remain myself, clinging to the needle in my arm, which had begun to burn like a lit cigarette into my flesh. “But this isn't a theater. It's just an apartment over a store.”

He smiled. His smile seemed to stretch across the thundering pillars of the sky. The tempest had come inside the room and was clashing over our very heads. “Oh, but it was a theater, once upon a time. They used to show gay porn in a little shop downstairs. My first boyfriend, Richard Buntyn, brought me here one night and let five of his friends rape me on stage. I paid him back for that one with a red hot rod up his ass.”

“But that wasn't Buntyn, that was Chris,” I said thickly. The rain hissed on the roof, passing in waves like an avant-garde a cappella chorus whispering
wish-wish-wish-wish-wish
.

“Doesn't matter.” He sliced up through the bra binding my arms and down through the ones wrapped around my legs. “But enough about me. This moment belongs to Lady Macbeth.” I leaned back against the glass window and banged it with my head, hoping to break through and fall to the sidewalk below. I was so weak, I couldn't even do that. He jerked me away and dragged me to the center of the room.

“You must let the blood spurt upon your hands, m'lady, so the audience can see. Hold them close to your throat, like this.” He took both of my wrists in one hand and pulled them up to my chest, then touched the edge of the butcher knife to my throat under my right ear.

The room vanished. We stood in an empty black box, in the center of a single spot of brutal red light. We were both naked, me with my tragic panties, he with his clown mask of blackened flesh. He lowered his head and began to speak, no longer in his weird castrato, but in a deep, roaring howl that merged with the storm, invoking the monster within the rattling cage of his own monstrous heart:

Come you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, and fill me from the crown to the toe top-f of direst cruelty! Make thick my blood; stop up the access and passage to remorse, that no compunctious visitings of nature shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between the effect and it!

The storm outside ceased, and I wondered if there ever had been a storm. I wondered if anything had ever happened before this moment, if I were not merely one of Endo's spirits conjured from his mind to act upon his stage, say my lines, and disappear.

Another voice, a woman's voice began to speak. I was frozen with horror, because she sounded like me.
Come to my woman's breasts, and take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers, wherever in your sightless substances you wait on nature's mischief! Come, thick night, and pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell, that my keen knife see not the wound it makes, nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark, to cry ‘Hold, hold!'

There was a flash of light from the kitchen. Endo glanced over his shoulder at the interuption and shouted “No cameras!” at our unruly audience of grim and silent critics. The theater drew back from around us like a curtain, but not completely. I could still smell the murderously sweet smoke of cooked heroin hanging in the air, feel the velvet black horsemen of the drug galloping through my veins and the rough wooden planks of the floor slick with blood beneath my naked feet. There were people surrounding us, an audience of grim, pale, disembodied faces. Seven white masks and three black masks and one little yellow one like an uncarved jack-o'-lantern.
The twelfth member of the jury is missing
, I thought, but I didn't know who or why. Something cold and hard touched my foot and I recoiled.