Grist 06 - The Bone Polisher (26 page)

“You don’t think they were his?”

“I don’t think he’s old enough to have been in the military. And I think they belong to someone he hates.”

Eleanor had decided on Typhoon, a modishly upscale pan-Asian restaurant that occupied the old control tower of a private airport and drew an unnaturally good-looking, semicelebrity clientele. It had been crowded when we arrived, full of people who were certain they’d be better known tomorrow and had decided to pick at sashimi and Burmese chicken while they watched the planes glide in and waited for a segment on
Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous
. We didn’t have a reservation, but the manager had taken one look at Eleanor and led us straight to the best table in the house, overlooking the runway and far enough away from the semifamous to allow conversation. Eleanor always gets tables like that. She thinks everybody does.

“If the tags are so dangerous, why would he fool around with them in the first place?” She was really tucking into a plateful of steamed vegetables, which the restaurant insisted on calling Buddha’s Delight; she’d wolfed down two forkfuls in only fifteen minutes.

“Schultz says they’re a totem of some sort.”

“Schultz,” she said, making what she probably thought was an ugly face. She hadn’t liked him the first time they’d met, and he hadn’t much opportunity since to exercise his dreadful charm on her.

“He knows his stuff, although I wish he’d speak English. He says they’re ‘imprinted objects.’ ”

She interrupted her feeding frenzy, suspending in midair a fork containing a single snow pea. “I know about imprinted objects. They’re superreal, like objects in a dream, usually associated with a trauma of some kind. They attain a kind of ritualistic importance.”

“You should be eating with Schultz,” I said.

She batted her lashes at me. “He didn’t ask me.”

“ ‘Ritual’ is the word he used. He also used ‘fetish.’ Those are the ones I can pronounce.”

“Why do you enjoy acting stupid?”

I poked through the shredded remains of my Filipino Beef Strings or whatever it was, looking for something I could chew. “I’m good at it. We all like to do things we’re good at.”

“Fetishes enable some people sexually,” she said. “I wonder if he means that these dog tags enable your kid from Nebraska to commit murder.”

“They are,” I said, paraphrasing Schultz, “essential accessories to the act.”

“Dog tags are a kind of identification. They probably turn his victim into the person he really wants to kill.”

I looked under the table for Schultz. “You know,” I said, “you could make small amounts of money and work unreasonable hours assisting the police.”

“And put up with people like Spurrier? Thanks anyway.”

I stole a forkful of her vegetables. “You like Al and Sonia.”

She watched her vegetables all the way to my mouth. “They’re different.”

“No,” I said. “Spurrier’s different.”

Eleanor caught a man at a nearby table staring, and gave him a smile that made him drop his spoon into his soup. “What are you doing about Nebraska?”

“Nothing yet. Post office is closed on Sunday. I’ll call tomorrow and see what I can find out. For all we know, though, he sets up shop in a new town every time he decides to go back into business.”

“What a life. It’s almost enough to make you feel sorry for him.”

“Spend it on someone who deserves it,” I said. “Are you going to finish those?”

“Give me your plate.” I passed it to her, and she slid most of the vegetables onto it and handed it back. “You’re not drinking,” she observed.

“Only in secret.”

“It wouldn’t do you any harm to cut down.”

“Right,” I said. This was familiar territory.

“For heaven’s sake. You should see yourself. Your face is all squinched shut. You look like you’re chewing an aspirin.”

“I’ve quit aspirin. It leads to Anacin, and eventually to Excedrin.”

“Be that way,” she said. I was good at stupid, but she was superlative at indifferent. I probably bore some of the responsibility for that.

I stabbed my fork into the center of the mound of vegetables and left it standing there. “After he scared the shit out of me,” I said, “I got drunk, and it made things worse. I was half-drunk when he phoned me, and he scared me then, too. Somehow, getting drunk doesn’t appeal to me.”

“So you’re inviting him to a party.”

“With a million people around.”

“All in costume.”

“If it weren’t for the costumes, I
know
he wouldn’t come.”

“Sort of
Catch-22
, isn’t it? If people aren’t costumed he won’t come, but if they
are
costumed you won’t know which one he is.”

The restaurant was octagonal, windowed on all sides, and jammed. About a third of the tables were made up exclusively of men: couples, foursomes, one large and ecstatically raucous birthday party, complete with paper hats and noisemakers. The birthday boy was made up like a cat, and when he’d gotten up to go to the bathroom—something he did with a frequency that indicated a small bladder or large nostrils—I’d seen that he had a long black tail protruding from the seat of his trousers.

“Halloween,” I said, making the connection.

“Wednesday night. And you ain’t seen nothing yet,” Eleanor said, following my gaze.

“There should be a lot of people there,” I said idly. “Tuesday, I mean.”

A small plane coasted in, its frail-looking wings seesawing up and down before it evened off and hit the blacktop. “You haven’t said much about Ferris Hanks.”

“He’s orange and he’s little and he keeps his house colder than a meat locker and he laughs like this.” I gave her my version of Ferris’s
heek
noise. “For someone who probably thinks of
Justine
as a training manual, he acts pretty normal. Los Angeles normal, I mean. Anywhere else, I’m sure, they’d put him in a jar in some medical museum.”

“Does he seem evil?”

“I’m not sure I know what evil is any more.”

“Horsefeathers.” Eleanor rarely swore. “You knew it when you met it at Max’s house.”

“Because it was aimed at me. And because he was so damned joyful. If I’d been in his position, I would have stayed in that closet or wherever, or maybe crept up and cut my throat from behind. Instead, he spoke to me, gave me warning, and
then
tried to cut my throat.”

“More fun that way?”

A chilly little ripple ran over the skin on my arms, and I rubbed at my sliced left forearm with my right hand. “Maybe. Maybe he wanted to incapacitate me and ask me some questions. I don’t know.”

“You weren’t wearing the dog tags.”

“There’s that,” I said. “But I know he meant to kill me. I can rationalize it all I want, but he was going to kill me in that room.”

She tucked her hair behind her right ear. “Do you dream about it?”

“I’m not sure. I can’t remember my dreams, but they’ve been pretty vile.”

“You should try to process them,” she said. “Write down everything you remember as soon as you wake up. There might be something in them you need to know about.”

“I’ll do that,” I said. I had no intention of focusing on those dreams.

“Or phone me,” she said. “Call me the minute you wake up, no matter what time, and we’ll talk them through. Don’t go back to sleep, just pick up the phone.”

I reached over the table and tugged her hair back down so it fell over her cheek. “You’re okay,” I said.

“Careful,” she said, sitting back. “We might start to chat again.”

I started to say something, stopped, and started again.

“Look, it’s a toll call,” she said. “Why don’t you just come home with me?”

My dream was right out of “The Masque of the Red Death.” A castle somewhere, dwarves and nuns and executioners and comic-book superheroes, wet cobblestones and candles everywhere, candles the size of a man that shed an elusive light that made people shrink and grow with every flicker. A figure in scarlet with a face like torn paper and eyes like broken glass, who was Christy somehow, and somehow not, and a wall either being raised or falling down and horses stampeding through the crowd, leaving a heap of empty costumes crumpled on the floor behind them. I began to fling the costumes aside, looking for the people, or for something buried beneath them, and they flew into the air and came down with people in them—different people—and the people stood stock-still where they landed, staring at me, their faces cut and battered by the hooves. One of them had cobblestones pressed into the bloody Oedipus holes in his head where his eyes should have been, stones round and rough and black, and a dumb joke came to me in the dream:
Oedipus Rocks
, and Eleanor shook me awake.

“You were laughing,” she said.

“Yeah?” I said, sitting up to get closer to the square of moonlight on the foot of the bed. “Well, it wasn’t very funny.”

“Tell it to me.”

When I’d finished, I said, “And I don’t want to hear any nonsense about the big candles.”

“It seems pretty straightforward. It’s an anxiety dream about the wake, about searching through costumes to find someone. And you’re ambivalent about Christy.”

“What about the horses?”

She put an index finger on the bridge of her nose and rubbed it slowly up and down. “They came from behind a wall. They had tremendous strength. They, ah, they dispelled illusion; when they trampled the people in costumes it turned out they weren’t actually people at all, and then they were different people.”

“And?”

“You made a joke in the dream, which is pretty unusual in itself. A pun, a reversal of meaning. I’d say you know something that you’re not acknowledging. Something you’ve put behind a wall, and when you raise or lower the wall, some of the people in the landscape surrounding Max aren’t going to be who you think they are.” She passed both hands, cupped, through the moonlight as though she could scoop some up and drink it. “That’s pretty literal, but it’s the best I can do.”

I put my arms around her. “You could soothe me,” I said.

I woke at eleven in Eleanor’s bright bedroom, feeling rested for the first time in days. A note had been neatly safety-pinned to the pillow beside me.

At the library until 2. Coffee’s ready
—
just pour water into the thing at the top of the maker.

What are you going to wear to the party?

The coffee maker, an Insta-Brew, had been named by someone who apparently didn’t own a watch. By the time the coffee was finally ready I’d showered with lime-scented soap and Japanese camellia shampoo—a combination of smells that brought more memories than there was room for in the shower stall—and slipped into my jeans from the previous evening, rancid with Typhoon’s cooking oil, plus a clean T-shirt Eleanor had laid out at the foot of the bed. I padded barefoot into the bright little kitchen and poured a cup to the brim and carried it carefully into the living room, full of furniture I’d once lived with, and settled into a chair that knew me well.

I’d never been alone in Eleanor’s house before, and it was a peculiar feeling, both familiar and new. Things I recognized from our time together stood out here and there: a vase, a small painting we’d bought in San Francisco, the lacquer and mother-of-pearl end tables her mother had hauled all the way from China. Most of the objects in the room, though, had come into Eleanor’s life after we’d parted company. I had a sudden pang of—of what? loneliness? regret?—imagining her bringing these new things home, finding the right place for them. To a stranger they would have been indistinguishable from the things I’d bought her, the things we’d chosen together.

Next to the window on the opposite wall, framed in sober black, hung Eleanor’s bachelor’s and master’s degrees. I didn’t have the faintest idea where mine were, but Eleanor’s were on display. For years she’d deprecated their value, the value of her own achievement, hanging the degrees on the wall only when her mother came to visit. Her mother, like most Chinese parents, was fierce about her children’s education, and if the degrees weren’t in full sight when she came for dinner she embarked on a long harangue in Cantonese. Five minutes after she left, the diplomas came down again.

At some point, though, Eleanor had apparently decided to leave them up, and I’d missed the change. One of hundreds I’d missed, probably, over the years. She’d pointed out during our interrupted chat that I’d changed and, with her usual tact, hadn’t mentioned herself, but she wasn’t preserved in amber, as much as I might like to think she was. She wasn’t the woman who’d earned those degrees, any more than I was the puzzled kid with all the scholarly initials after his name who hadn’t a clue what to do with his life. She’d undergone her own changes. So far, she still kept a place of some kind for me in her life, but there were no guarantees. She’d had relationships with other men, and I’d handled them in the stolid, approved American-male fashion, hiding both the pain I felt when they began and the relief that had flooded over me when they ended. There wasn’t anything decisive I could do; I’d waived my rights in that area when I’d let her walk down my driveway on the last day we lived together. Let her go because marriage would disrupt my life.

And what was so swell about my life, anyway? I was moving in patterns that had once had meaning, had given me pleasure, but now they were just habits most of the time, like a role in a play that has been running for years. Show up, do the old stunts, collect the money or applause or thanks, go home. A week later I didn’t know what I’d done on any particular day. I drank too much, I didn’t talk enough. I was lonely. Like most people faced with the challenge of getting through a life, I’d developed a bag of tricks that took care of my needs on a few levels and left me unsatisfied on all the others. And when the time came to learn some new ones, I screamed and dug in my heels and hung on for dear life to all the things that didn’t satisfy me.

So what was I protecting against all that love?

The answer presented itself with that peculiar clarity that unwelcome answers usually have. Nothing.

Schultz was right. I should see a shrink, if only to force me to focus on the walls I’d built in my head.