Hymn (10 page)

Celia lifted her right glove and unbuttoned it, tossing it aside. Then her left glove. Her hands were as pale and as smooth and as grey as her face. Deftly, she unbuttoned her raincoat, all the way down, and slid out of it. Underneath the raincoat she was completely nude, except for her tightly-wrapped black turban, her black high-heeled shoes, and a wide black leather belt, cinched tightly around her waist. The skin of her naked body was the same pearly-grey—a grey that gleamed in the shadows of Sylvia's kitchen like softly-polished aluminium, or the skin of a baby, three days dead.

She took hold of Sylvia's hands, both of them. ‘Come on, Sylvia,' she coaxed her. ‘Come on, Sylvia, up.'

Sylvia stared at her, wide-eyed. ‘You're naked. You're dead. . . .

Go away.'

‘Come on, Sylvia, up you get.'

‘Ms Cuddy!' the man's voice repeated. ‘This is Ramone the Super, Ms Cuddy? Is everything okay?'

‘Everything's fine, thank you, Ramone!' Celia called, in a fair imitation of Sylvia's Bostonian accent.

Sylvia was standing with her knees slightly bent, as if she couldn't find the strength to stand up straight. ‘What are you going to do to me?' she asked, in a voice as scattered as a burst-open bag of dolly-mixtures. ‘What are you going to do to me? Please! I won't tell! I promise you, Celia! I promise you!'

Celia held Sylvia close, wrapping her arms around, pressing Sylvia's cheek close to her breast.

Slowly, almost sensually, she began to stroke Sylvia's hair.

‘You feel hot,' Sylvia muttered. ‘I thought dead people were supposed to be cold.'

‘Ah, but I'm not dead,' Celia told her, still stroking her hair, over and over. ‘I'm very much alive. I'm so much alive that I shall never die.'

‘Celia, you're so hot. Don't hold me so close. I can't bear it.'

Pale grey fingers stroked her hair, over and over. A first wisp of smoke, from the top of her scalp. A first smell of burning.

‘Celia, please! You're hurting me! You feel so hot!'

But Celia's eyelids closed over those empty eye-sockets as if she simply didn't choose to hear, and she kept on stroking Sylvia's hair, her fingers running deeply and sensually into her

curls. Another wisp of smoke, a small sharp crackle of burning ends.

‘I shall never die, Sylvia, my darling, and nor shall Marianna, nor David, nor Leonard, nor Carmen, nor Julie, nor any of us. We're all pure now, every one of us. Salamanders! And we shall find more to purify, thousands more.'

Her fingers stroked and stroked. Sylvia tried to struggle free, but Celia held her even more tightly. Celia's arms were so hot now that Sylvia's silk blouse began to scorch, and the flowery fabric shrivel up. Smoke was pouring from Sylvia's hair, and filling the kitchen with an acrid, eye-watering stench. Suddenly, her hair burst into flame, and she shouted in pain. Celia instantly clamped her hand over Sylvia's mouth, and her fingers were so hot that Sylvia's lips sizzled and seared, like raw steak pressed against a red-hot skillet.

Sylvia twisted and writhed and thrashed, but she couldn't get free. Celia's body temperature had risen so high that Sylvia's blouse and skirt had scorched through and her first layer of skin had actually fused to Celia's, breast and hip and thigh, so that for all practical purposes the two women were actually welded together.

Sylvia breathed in superheated air: it burned the hairs in her nostrils and dropped into her lungs like blazing petrol. She had burned herself badly only once before in her life, six or seven years ago, when she had dropped a panful of scalding water on her foot, and she had thought that what she had suffered then was agony. But she understood now that what she had suffered then was simply pain, and that true agony was so intense that it was beyond physical description. It was a spiritual experience, so unbearable that it was beautiful, so devastating in its effect on her central nervous system that she felt as if she had discovered at last the full implication of what it was to be a human being.

In Celia's incandescent arms, she understood that God had created His children with the ability to be able to suffer to such a degree that death would seem like blessed relief. That was the horrible beauty of it.

She was incapable of screaming out loud. But inside her mind she was screaming and screaming until she couldn't even think any more.

Celia held her tighter, caressing her shoulders, caressing her back. Celia's hands left wrinkled, blistering tracks wherever they touched her. Blistering sheers of skin dropped from her back, until she looked as if she was wearing a ballet-skirt of curled-up crackling.

Sylvia lifted her puckering blistered face to Celia, and Celia opened her black empty eyes. Even though Sylvia couldn't speak, she communicated with every shrivelling nerve in her body: Kill me, kill me, please. Don't make me suffer any more.

Celia stared at her with terrible black blindness, and then closed her eyes again. It was at that instant that Sylvia exploded into flame. Her lungs swelled, and then burst apart, and blood and flesh geysered out of her mouth. Chunks of burning muscle flew from her shoulders, her legs collapsed like charred chair-legs; her intestines fell through her cracked-apart pelvis in a roar of fatty flame; her skull detonated.

The whole kitchen was strewn with burning ashes and lumps of shrivelled flesh.

Sylvia's remains blazed on the kitchen floor with ever-intensifying glare and heat. Celia stood watching, naked, unmoved, even when the ceramic floor-tiles began to break, one by one, with a gritty popcorn crackle.

Smoke filled the entire apartment, although it was slowly beginning to drift out through the open balcony door. Celia paced slowly around, as if she were reluctant to leave, tense, anxious, almost angry. She kept returning to the kitchen to look at the last guttering flames. It was extraordinary how it took nothing more than heat to reduce a living, talking human being to a small heap of oily ashes, in which flames fitfully burned.

Celia wondered if she felt sad, or regretful. She wasn't sure. She felt sorry that Sylvia was gone, yet Sylvia had brought it on herself and Otto had always said that we must all accept the consequences for what we do, no matter how painful those consequences might happen to be. In a way, she felt that she had saved Sylvia from something far worse, although she knew that Sylvia's soul would suffer and suffer for all eternity.

She approached the antique mirror next to the front door, and stared at herself. She knew how much she had changed. She looked the same, but she wasn't the same at all. She was purified, utterly purified. She could never again be swayed by lies or deceit or broken promises. She would never again succumb to any kind of weakness. She was one of the chosen, one of the truly eternal.

Her empty eyes, which had horrified Sylvia so much, were the symbol of everything she had now become. The eyes are the windows to the soul, somebody had once said. She needed no windows. She was all spirit, all soul, made flesh by the smoke of her own sacrifice. She had no need of eyes.

She cupped her hands over her small bare breasts. Her skin was cool now, the burning had passed. She thought of Lloyd and her nipples stiffened between her fingers. She knew how much pain she had caused him. She had known from the very beginning that he would have to suffer. But when the time came, they would be back together again, whole, perfect, and their passion would last for ever.

‘My dear, you will never die,' Otto had told her, with a thin smile, clasping both of her hands between both of his.

She reached down and twined between her fingers and thumb the fine curly hair that grew between her legs. She watched herself in the mirror. She had always been highly sexed. She hadn't realized how much she would miss Lloyd's lovemaking, even though they had been apart now for only three days. It would be wonderful, after the solstice, when she could take him back into her arms.

It was then that the phone rang. She hesitated for a moment or two, then she walked back into the smoke-filled kitchen and picked it up.

A voice said, ‘Sylvia? Sylvia? Is that you?'

Lloyd, she thought, closing her eyes. She was almost tempted to answer, although she knew that she mustn't.

‘Sylvia . . . I had a call about five minutes ago. I thought it was maybe from you.'

She didn't answer, but she placed the receiver against her lips, and kissed it, slowly and lingeringly.

‘Sylvia?' she heard him say.

She pressed the earpiece against her breasts, touching her nipples against the tiny holes from which his voice was emerging.

‘Lloyd . . .' she murmured.

‘Sylvia . . . can you hear me? Are you able to talk? Should I call you back? Can you hear me okay?'

Now she massaged the receiver against her stomach, and between her legs. She rubbed it slowly around and around against her vulva, until the plastic was slippery and shiny. Bending her knees slightly, she opened herself with the fingers of her left hand, and pushed the end of the receiver inside herself. Cream plastic, shiny pink flesh.

‘Who's there?' asked Lloyd, right inside her.

‘Your lover,' she replied, and then laughed. But all the time the tears were running out of her empty eyes.

She forced the receiver up even harder, gasping, churning it around. She hadn't felt so desperately frustrated for years. She pushed it and pushed it, sinking gradually on to her knees, and pressing her forehead against the ash-strewn kitchen floor. Then, in the silence of Sylvia's smoke-filled apartment, she heard the telephone click, and whine, as Lloyd rang off.

She drew the receiver out of herself, and clutched it in her left hand, and screamed at it in fury. Blue smoke began to pour from between her fingers, and the receiver started to soften and twist. She screamed and she screamed, a scream of fear and frustration and dark black anger, and the telephone burst into flame. Molten plastic dripped and crawled down her wrist, and dropped flaring on to the tiled floor.

At last, she threw it away, a smoldering knot of polystyrene on the end of a twisted telephone cord, and she knelt on the floor, shaking with emotion.

She had understood right from the very beginning that she would have to suffer. She had understood that she would be one of the first—different, and dangerous, and difficult for her friends and her lovers to understand.

But she hadn't been prepared for the strangeness of it, nor for the huge surges of anger that she would feel. She was immortal. She had inherited the whole world, for ever. But what had she lost? What had she lost?

She stood up, picked up her raincoat, and hung it over her shoulders. Then she carefully replaced her smoke-black glasses. She would have given anything to see Lloyd that evening, but she knew that she couldn't trust him to keep her secret, and most of all she couldn't trust herself.

She collected the Wagner libretto, let herself out, and closed the door behind her.

‘That's me for tonight, folks!'

Bob Tuggey tossed his apron into the linen-basket, balled up his paper hat, and gratefully unhooked his old tan leather jacket from the peg. He reached into the pocket and took out a crumpled pack of Lucky Strike Lights, and tucked one into the corner of his mouth. He was just about to light it when Sally bustled past and said, ‘Unh-hunh, Unca Tug. No smoking in the kitchen, corridor, washrooms, or staff recreation areas. Besides, the Surgeon General has determined that smoking cigarettes is bad for your self-image.'

‘You're a goddamned Tartar,' he retorted. ‘Besides, I don't have a self-image. I sold my self-image in Paris, about twenty years ago, for a plateful of calves' kidneys, a bottle of Rully and twenty Disque Bleu.'

‘That was pretty cheap, for a self-image.'

Unca Tug put his arm around Sally's shoulders and gave her freckled cheek an affectionate smackeroo. ‘In those days, my darling, we were more interested in peace and love and wondering what the hell we were fighting for.'

‘I know, I know. “Come On Baby Light My Fire”, all that stuff.'

‘See you tomorrow, Tartar,' Bob grinned, and left the building. He took two or three steps into the car-park, and then paused to light his cigarette. He hoped Stan Kostolowicz wouldn't have any trouble getting out tonight. His daughter-in-law could be something of a pain in the ass. She didn't like Stan drinking, that was the trouble. When he drank, he always got up in the middle of the night and flushed the toilet and made himself Polish sausage sandwiches and drank milk out of the carton and messed up her perfect kitchen.

Bob reckoned that there was quite a lot to be said for living on your own. You could come in when you chose, go out when you chose. You could smoke in the john. You could eat Kettle Chips in bed and nobody complained about the crumbs. You could blow off whenever you pleased, and nobody wrinkled their nose up or started spraying lavender air-freshener around the place.

He tugged up his collar and began walking across the car-park. His pale-blue ‘69 Pontiac Grand Prix with the tattered vinyl roof was parked close to the exit. He had been meaning to repair the roof for nearly four years now. He still liked the car. It was old, but it had plenty of muscle and, as he was fond of pointing out to anybody who would listen, it had the longest hood in GM production history.

He didn't even glance at the Mercedes with the darkened windows. The soft crunch of car doors being closed behind him didn't register. Even when he heard footsteps close behind him he didn't turn around.

But when a woman's voice called, ‘You're Bob Tuggey, yes?' Bob stopped, and slowly turned, one eye closed against the smoke of his dangling cigarette, and said, ‘Who wants to know?'

Who wanted to know was an overpoweringly tall, heavily built woman in a short black sleeveless leather dress. Her eyes were the colour of green seedless grapes. Her white-blonde hair was scraped mercilessly back from her broad pale forehead, and braided into a rope-like Teutonic crown. Her nose was straight and short, her jaw could have cracked walnuts. She wore fine black fishnet pantyhose, and short black high-heeled boots. Altogether she looked like a dominatrix out of a masochist's favourite nightmare.

Not far away with his hands in his pockets stood a painfully thin man in a loose grey business suit and a wide-brimmed hat. He was taller than the woman, but where she was robust and well fleshed and stocky, he was sere and fragile, and looked as if one healthy smack on the back would crumble him up like ashes.

His face was long and oval, with a generously bulbous nose, but collapsed cheeks, criss-crossed with dry wrinkles, and eyes that swam around in his face as if he couldn't make up his mind what to look at or what to feel. His shoes were as bulbous as his nose: old-fashioned Oxfords, with toecaps, from a generation of shoemakers long gone.

‘You're Bob Tuggey, yes?' the woman repeated, without answering Bob's question. She sounded as if she had an accent of some kind, Swedish or German, something like that. Bob could talk Viet Namese like a native, and French like a Belgian, but he couldn't speak any of those hurdygurdy Nordic languages.

The woman came closer. She was at least six-foot-two, and her breasts were gigantic. Yet she walked with the ease of total fitness. Close up, she smelled of leather and cigar-smoke and Chanel No. 5.

‘You have something that belongs to us,' she told Bob.

Bob meticulously took the cigarette out of his mouth, and blew smoke sideways. ‘I have something that belongs to you? How do you work that out? I don't even have anything that belongs to myself.'

The thin man in the grey business suit raised his hat, revealing a soft mat of white crewcut hair. ‘Otto Mander, at your service, good sir. And this is Helmwige von Koettlitz. We have no desire to alarm you. But of course we must insist that you return our property.'

‘What property?' Bob demanded. ‘I don't have anything that belongs to you.'

‘I think, a small charm. An amulet,' Otto told him.

Bob glanced at the woman called Helmwige. ‘Are you the lady who called the restaurant today?'

She didn't smile. ‘How do you think I knew your name?'

‘Well . . . I'm real sorry,' Bob told her, ‘but I picked up that little charm thinking it belonged to the girl who was burned here a couple of days ago. Did you hear about that?'

‘Yes,' said Otto, ‘we heard about that. The question is, what did you do with the charm?' ‘I'm real sorry. It was a genuine mistake. I gave it to that girl's fee-ants.'

‘What?' Helmwige demanded, sternly.

‘I told you, it was a genuine mistake. The guy didn't know whether it was hers or not. He'd never seen it before. But he took it anyway in case it was.'

‘I see,' said Otto, as if he hadn't really been listening. A moth flickered past, caught in the floodlights that illuminated the car-park. Without appearing to look at it, he snatched it out of the air. Then he opened his hand, and inspected it.

‘Pretty quick reflexes,' Bob smiled at him.

Otto stared at him as blankly as if he had said something in

Czech. Then he pushed the still-fluttering moth between his lips, sucked it in, chewed it for a moment, and swallowed it.

Bob found this distinctly unsettling. ‘Bit of a damned nuisance, right, moths?' he joked. ‘Good thing they're full of protein.' He let out a short, abrupt laugh, then stepped away. ‘Listen, I'm calling the guy tomorrow. I'll get your charm back for you, even if I have to drive up to La Jolla myself.'

‘That's all right' Otto told him, raising one hand. ‘That won't be necessary. We'll drive up to see him ourselves.'

‘Well, if you want to go to all of that trouble . . .'

‘Believe me, Bob,' Helmwige told him, in a deep, operatic voice, ‘it will be no trouble.'

Bob waited for a moment. Neither Otto nor Helmwige appeared to have anything to say, so he shrugged and said, ‘Good night, then. Unless there was anything else.'

‘Wait!' said Otto. ‘Before you leave . . . may I make an impertinent demand on you?'

‘I don't know,' Bob replied, cautiously. ‘Depends what it is.'

‘You will say nothing about us, to anybody.'

Bob drew slowly and suspiciously on his cigarette. ‘Why should I? I don't care whose charm it is, so long as the real owner gets it back.'

‘But, you will say nothing?'

‘Listen, mister,' Bob told him. ‘It's a free world. If I want to talk about it, I'll talk about it. If I don't, I won't.'

‘Helmwige?' Otto suggested.

Helmwige smiled. ‘There was no charm. That would be easy to accept, nicht wahr? that there was no charm?'

Something told Bob that this confrontation had just gone beyond the parameters of acceptable everyday wackiness. He sensed danger, the same way that he had sensed danger in Saigon. Avoid the wacky like the plague, William Trueheart had once told him. They can go from hilarious to homicidal as quick as a blink.

‘Sure,' he nodded, taking his cigarette out of his mouth. ‘Sure, that would be easy to accept.'

Otto approached him. The breeze blew from Otto's direction, and smelled like milky Dutch cigars and lavender and death. Otto licked his middle finger and picked a tiny spider from Bob's shirt-collar, and bit it between his teeth. ‘Arachnid caviar,' he remarked. ‘Their little black bodies . . . they make the same sharp pop! when you bite them.'

‘Listen,' said Bob, uneasily. ‘I don't know what the fuck this all about.'

‘You don't have to,' Helmwige insisted. ‘All you have to do is to say nothing. Is it so difficult to forget?'

‘What's so damned significant about this charm that I have to forget it anyway? If I'm going to forget it, I'd sure as hell like to know what I'm supposed to be forgetting it for.'

‘Bob . . .' replied Otto, with great middle—European courtesy. ‘This affair is really nothing that should concern you. You are better off accepting that there are things which happen in this world which are not for the likes of you. Go about your business. Say nothing. You are an ant, that is all.'

Bob was already tired and irritable from a long shift cooking hamburgers. ‘Wait up here,' he snapped. ‘Who are you calling an ant?'

‘You're so sensitive, about the lowly reality of your existence? You are an ant. That is not an opinion. That is a fact.'

‘At least I'm not a fucking stick-insect.'

Helmwige came around and stood in front of him. She gave him a quick little shake of her head. ‘You are not to speak to Herr Mander in that way.'

‘Pardon me, lady, but I can speak to him any way I please. And if you think I'm going to keep my mouth shut about this lucky charm, or you, or this little charade we're playing out here, you've got another thing coming. Special delivery.'

He lifted the two fingers in which he was holding his cigarette, and gave Otto a disrespectful salute.

‘Well, be seeing you,' said Otto, with a smile as thin as the edge of a sheet of paper.

‘Not if I see you first, Bob replied.

He stepped around Helmwige and carried on walking toward his car. Jesus Christ, he thought to himself, wackos wasn't the word for those two. Those two came from the Planet Bananas.

He was halfway to his car when he suddenly began to realize that the soles of his feet felt hot. Not just tired-and-sweaty-from-cooking-all-afternoon hot, but really hot, like walking barefoot across the beach on a midsummer day.

He half hopped, and walked more quickly. It had been warm today, for sure, but not warm enough to heat the car-park up to this kind of temperature. His feet almost felt as if they were burning.

He glanced behind him. Otto and Helmwige were still standing where he had left them, except that Otto was shading his eyes with his bony hands.

Suddenly Bob's feet hurt so much that he shouted out loud, and danced from one foot to the other. ‘Jesus! I'm on fire!' he yelled. ‘Jesus! What have you done to me?'

He dropped to the ground, and yanked at the laces of his worn-out Keds. Smoke was dribbling out of the laceholes, and out of the ventilation holes at the sides. His feet were actually on fire!

Panting with effort and pain, he dragged off his sneakers and tossed them smoking across the car-park. God almighty, that Helmwige woman must have given him a double hotfoot! Even his socks were scorched! But he was just about to stand up when both feet actually burst into flame, flaring and spitting like candle wax.

He screamed, and tried to beat at the flames with his hands. But then his hands caught alight, too, and started to blaze just as fiercely.

‘Help me!' Bob screamed. ‘I'm burning! Help me!'

But neither Otto nor Helmwige moved a muscle. Otto remained with his hands shading his eyes, as if he were thinking very intently about something inconsequential, like his nephew's birthday present, or what he was going to have for lunch. Helmwige simply watched, with her arms folded under her breasts—not pitiless, but not particularly interested, as if she saw men burning every day.

Bob struggled to his knees, his hands melting in front of his eyes. At first, the pain in his blazing fingers and blazing toes had been excruciating, but then they became numb, and the pain encircled his wrists and his ankles instead. He didn't realize that the fire had burned away his nerve-endings, and that his hands and feet were approaching sixth-degree burns, which meant their complete destruction.

They're not going to help me, he thought, with an overwhelming dullness. They're just going to stand there and watch me burn.

He shuffled forward on his knees. The flames from his feet licked up his back, and abruptly his trousers and the back of his tan leather jacket caught fire. My ass, for God's sake, my ass is on fire!

He could see his Pontiac parked only twenty feet away. The dull handpainted fenders, the shredded vinyl roof. There was a fire-extinguisher under the passenger seat, if only he could . . .

Blazing, he stumbled on his knees toward his car. A fiery penitent, a man lurching in flames toward his God. He suddenly thought that he had been doomed to die this way, ever since he had first seen that monk burning himself in Saigon. It was one of those bizarre twists of destiny in which he had become inextricably entangled, the moment he had stepped out of his car on the Cholon Road and tried to prevent that monk from doing what he believed he had to do.

Cars and buses whished past, this way and that, on Rosecrans Avenue, only thirty or forty feet away from him. What their occupants thought when they caught sight of a man burning in the car-park, he couldn't even guess, but none of them stopped.

‘Oh, look, Morton, there's somebody on fire.'

‘That's all right, dear, it's nobody we know.'

Bob's back was burning furiously now, and tongues of flame licked up between his legs. He staggered forward on his knees. It didn't seem to hurt any more, he couldn't think why. It was like kneeling in a very hot wind, that was all. It was almost funny.