Ivyland (16 page)

He said, “Hormone balance,” and pointed at the stuff.

“Right,” I'd said.

Next time, I think, ask about the ring.

Hank starts up the porn where we paused it.

“She needs to shut up. Porn actresses are never funny.”

“Women period aren't funny,” says Pitts from the corner before violently realizing that Vivian is still here, eyes fixed on my blank screen.

“Pitts,” she says carefully, “that's the first smart thing to escape your mouth unharmed.”

“Thanks,” says Pitts, actually pleased.

*

The pharmacy is closed early for some reason, so I head home, where Aunt Margot is topping herself. She yaps, barely even using words, until the Wombat interrupts.

“When I die and get to Heaven, Imma talk to Elvis,” he says. I says Elvis ain't gonna want to talk to you any more'n he would if you was both alive.

“Imma talk to Elvis in Korean,” he decides. A moth comes through the window and lands on his shoulder. Soon followed by a friend.

“And what makes you think a southern gentleman like Mr. Presley would speak that vile language?” Aunt Margot wants to know.

“Ain't vile, Ma,” the Wombat says, shooing his moths. “Munna go there one day.”

I step into the kitchen to grab food and a shot from the fridge. Something pauses me at the top of the basement stairs. I push through it, rush down, and trip on what's left of the step I broke last time. With my face on the floor, I pick up these breathy sounds. Breezes blowing every which way. A soft papery life slides up my arm and explores an ear. Then a screech from Gersh gets my eyes shaking. I look up.

The basement isn't supposed to be white, or alive. I almost puke right away—the room rippling, no hard surface. Like everything's made of them.

Moths. Millions. Blanketing the walls. Spilling out of old cabinets and crashing in waves against each other. Tornadoing around Gersh, who thrashes smack-dab in the middle, screeching louder when he sees me. I crawl over and hold him, try to be a shield, but we're buried. Ragged lights and breath beat through nonstop wings. At some point, as a creeping fur of them spreads inside my clothes, I realize the Gersh-sound isn't a scream. It's his laugh.

I struggle to my feet, emerging from the swarm just as the Wombat appears on the stairs, asking if everything's okay. I almost say aloud: When It Rains. His owlish eyes crank open behind their greasy lenses now, taking in the portrait: me holding a dirty, oddly hairy, maniacally laughing nine-year-old with a rope around his neck. In a swirling cloud of ghostly bugs. Just to prove things can always be worse, Gersh takes this wordless eternity to seize and eat a whole bunch of them, chewing open-mouthed for our viewing pleasure.

The Wombat's eyes get an empty look. A sickness that, as long as things have been like this, guts me. When Gersh gnaws off a bloody nail whole, or beats the shit out of his shadow and raws his knuckles in the bargain.

“He—what'd you?” the Wombat asks.

Please, I says as I put him down on his feet, he won't hurt you if you—he might hurt you but please know he doesn't mean it, he's your cousin, just like me. Gersh swings his fists through the rivers of moth, in a kinda dance you might call it.

“He got bigger,” the Wombat says, coming the rest of the way down the stairs. “How did all these bastards get in?”

“Stop,” I says.

“Aht-dut-dut-dut-dut,” the Wombat says, pushing me away. He walks past me, into the moths. “This tickles.”

His expression turns.

“Hey!” he yells. I follow his accusing finger, pointing through the window onto the backyard, and see someone watching us. As soon as I realize it's the tiny pharmacist, he's gone.

And then so is the Wombat.

I turn back to Gersh, who's biting his lip as he ties to peel a pressed moth carcass off the floor. Hate to leave him, but can things really get worse if I do?

Dashing upstairs and through the living room, I hear Aunt Margot demanding to know what's happening in the basement and why the Wombat threw himself outside in such a hurry. I burst through the front door and spot him shoving the pharmacist into lawn ornaments two houses down. He waits for him to turn over, shouts something not really English but certainly threatening. I haul my bruised ass over, get tangled up with a plastic flamingo.

“Those are my
cousins
you're peeping on, freak,” the Wombat is saying as I get to them.

It's okay, I says, kicking the flamingo off. A moth tumbles out of my pant leg in the process.

“It isn't,” the Wombat says. “That's my
family
. You ever been head-butted in the solar plexus?”

“Please!” the pharmacist squeaks.

“You did something to Gersh,” I says, “the needles, you could've had me injecting him with something new every day.”

“Wasn't my idea,” the pharmacist goes.

“Then whose was it, friend?” asks the Wombat.

The pharmacist tries to bolt, but wouldn't you know, the Wombat has a stubby little gun and sticks him with the barrel.

“Wom,” I says, “you got a fucking gun?”

“Cool, huh?” he says, grinning. “I got this special custom finish on the handle—see how it's that mahogany flavor.”

“Uh,” I says, “I think he's getting away.”

“One sec,” says the Wombat, giving chase. Pharmacist goes down not far off with a tackle, the pair getting soaked by automatic sprinklers.

“It has to do with that ring,” I says when I catch up again, “I know it.”

The Wombat says, “Does it have to do with the ring?”

“What ring?” says the wet pharmacist.

“What ring?” says the wet Wombat, to me.

*

The three of us tear through downtown in the Volvo, me driving, the pharmacist (Reginald, he says) in the front passenger seat, the Wombat behind him, poking his head with the revolver every time I need directions. Directions that take us right to his pharmacy.

“Well, Reginald,” I go, “you could have just said.”

“Ever gotten really high off cough syrup?” the Wombat asks him. “Cause that's so nuts.”

“You know,” I says, “they sell better stuff than that now.”

“Don't tell me what to like.”

Reginald unlocks the door and leads us through a dark aisle (the Wombat: “I can't see where the cough syrup is.”), opening a second door at the back. Candles light up a spiral staircase leading down to the basement.

“Kinky,” the Wombat says.

“Gentlemen,” says Reginald. “This is not some den of iniquity.”

“Who asked you?” I says.

“Yeah,” says the Wombat. Then he pistol-whips Reginald.

“Jesus,” I says over Reginald, who rolls back and forth in strings of blood. The Wombat's already clomping down the spiral staircase, muttering threats. I follow. It winds on for way too long, makes me queasy. Along the walls are paintings of people with organs glowing through their skin, pinned-up butterflies, photos of scales with I guess meat on them. There's a drawing of a cut-off head with a clock face staring out of the mouth.

At the bottom is a great green room with a big fire and drinks set out and three red leather chairs like we had in the old house, plus a man in seersucker for each chair. One really old, and a pair of middle-aged twins. They all wear the fat logo rings, which are creepier on them than Reginald.

“Some nice threads, boys,” says the Wombat.

“Mark By Mark Twain,” says one twin, sipping brandy.

“You could say we're big fans of the spring line,” says the second, standing near this picture of an old-timey boat in a storm, tugging at the moustache his brother is missing.

“That's what we say, anyway,” says the old one, who ashes a cigar over the fire.

“Fine, just fine,” says the Wombat, drinking right from their fancy glass thing of brandy, wiping his mouth on a sleeve and plopping onto a sofa. It's like he owns the place. Over the fireplace a giant gold Φ is screwed into the wall.

“We assume Horace arranged adequate transport?” asks Brandy.

“He's the help you can't get these days,” Moustache tells us.

“Uh, yeah,” I says, “Horace.”

“Haven't met before, have we?” says Cigar, standing up and flipping a switch next to the fire. A whirring starts somewhere above.

“I look like someone famous,” says the Wombat.

“I meant you,” Cigar says to me. “Hired you for a different extraction, I thought.”

“One of those faces,” I says.

A half-dozen screens start to scroll down from slots in the ceiling.

“Primetime,” the Wombat goes. The three of them chuckle.

“We might've waited decades for one like this,” says Brandy. “An especially poetic fit, considering his origins.”

“Has to be tonight,” says Cigar. “The mechanics are up to you.” He takes a long drag, smiling as he blows it out over bottom teeth. “Family won't be any trouble.”

“Families never are,” says the Wombat, taking the brandy again.

The screens snap to life. The first shows Aunt Margot peering out the front

window, all nerves; the second looks like the bathroom radiator's POV, and then comes everything else in the house. My blood gets thick. But what grips like every hand in the world at once is Gersh, or what little I can see of him through the moth-cloud, looking around for someone. For me. Cigar taps the screen with his cigar.

Taps Gersh.

“Incredible pheromone we gave him,” says Moustache. “Holding up, isn't he.”

“That'll change,” says Brandy.

Meaning, it gets worse?

The Wombat's squinting at the screens over his glasses, and I'm like, God, keep him blind a bit longer. And me too, while we're at it, because now I'm seeing what look like human leg bones lining the mantle, and plungers of needles sticking out of Mark By Mark Twain pockets. I'm seeing this … business cult sawing Gersh's head off and stuffing a clock in his mouth for kicks.

I'm seeing Gersh on TV, wailing without sound.

“Questions,” says Cigar.

“Francis?” says the Wombat. “Isn't that our house?”

They look at the screens, then back at me, putting the unpleasantness together.

There's one screen all the way to the side that doesn't show our home but a clearing in a forest in daytime, a stump squatting in the middle as an altar of sorts, and Φ is carved in the bark of every tree. Like a ring of pinned-up white moths.

It's when Cigar reaches for a needle that I give up talking this one through.

*

Sprinting up the stairs, we both trip over Reginald.

“What now?” the Wombat asks when we get in the car. “MexiLickin'Surf Hog is still open.”

“Wombat,” I says, “I don't know how you made it this far in life.”

I rip the Volvo out of the pharmacy lot and point it home, praying we beat them there. A white limo pulls into the rearview. I thread a maze of crummy strip malls and do donuts in shuttered gas stations to switch directions. I go down alleys too narrow for either car, but they follow, sparks and squeals all running together.

“I'm tired of this,” says the Wombat.

If ever somebody didn't get it, I think, here he is.

“Could be wrong here, Francis, but don't cops handle stuff along these lines?”

Yes, I think, the cops. But Gersh.

“You have your gun,” I says.

“Here somewhere,” the Wombat says, rooting around in the back. A shot goes off, blowing my right eardrum.

“Holy Fisting Jehosophat!” I shout, trying to hear myself.

“I'm okay,” the Wombat shouts, strapping himself back into his seat and wagging the smoky gun in my face. “I'm the real fucking deal.”

There's a sharp suck from outside, something that shatters the back windshield, exploding through his mouth and splattering the dash pink.

“Wom,” I says.

The crash is something dry and airy, like our bodies floated into an already wrecked car. My face is slick, stinging. I see red splotches on a telephone pole. They keep on shrinking but won't disappear. A body slumped forward against its seatbelt, dripping.

Wom,
I think,
which cruel uncle started everyone calling you that? Why were you even here? Why happy to be whatever you were?

I picture him teasing Aunt Margot and getting me to smile. I see the old house. I remember Gersh gasping with joy when we get to the page of
Goodnight Moon
with the red balloon, and do you blame me for finding a hope there that everyone told me was gone forever?

“Goodnight nobody,” I realize, is the furthest he and I ever got.

Cigar opens my door and I'm looking down the barrel of a fancy old shotgun I could swear was Pop's. The one he used to off himself when he realized Gersh was stuck the way he was. Pretty autumn weekends for hunting, he'd leave the house with it ‘cross his heart, saying This Is A Day The Lord Has Made.

Overkill, really. They'll get their way anyhow. They could just keep driving, and I'd stay here bleeding the rest of my blood. They could scare the bejesus out of the remaining freak at my house, or put holes in her. They could probably just ask. Do I think he'll be hard to take? With me not there?

You don't need to hurt him,
I'm trying to say. That's all I ask. But deep down I imagine that Gersh won't need their mercy. That today's the day he's finally learned, after so many demonstrations, how to undo the bowline knot that's keeping him there.

CAL /// LUNAR ORBIT

Emma: barely coherent. What you'd expect. Extra bitter about sharing her death with me, I gather. Laying blame at the only available feet.

Try any control. Nothing. You'll notice a bottomless click—the gutted verb of sterile circuits. Finger sliding off the gathered moisture of its surface. Made me realize: people don't use the Door Open button in elevators. They stick out their arms. Which confirms the fact that buttons are relatively new and haven't quite earned our trust.

I toured a submarine in port on a school field trip. They wouldn't shut up about not touching anything. So I twisted all the knobs, hit any switch within reach. Saved the fat red doomsday button for last. No torpedoes were fired. The sub didn't launch or sink. I didn't get in trouble, either—a parent chaperone walked right up behind me as I yanked a lever above a row of frozen gauges.

“Interesting, hm?” being all he said before moving on to the next compartment.

You'd like to make the game evolve. Poke the universe and see it bristle. When you can't even screw things up, and the world ceases to balance your wrongs? Or: could be the world's only just caught up, its doomsday button slow to respond.

Adrift, letting things divide how they may. Waiting. I would smash everything in sight, leave myself sore and bloodied. I would strangle Emma, and she might not fight. I would lie back and watch it all fold in. We, me, her, this clunking killer time capsule, are done. So why this prolonged farewell to the senses?

Emma is praying at this point. Of course. Someone who prays only in desperation, only for deliverance. The agnostic-in-peril's tradition: appeal to God for one last chance. I don't bother. I never asked questions. If I end up standing opposite some divine light, I'll have a lone curiosity to express: why do good things happen to the worst people?

“Will you please, please say something, please? Please. Please? Please.”

Emma won't quit. She tries to squeeze a note of calm from the jumping throat, but it catches right there. It squirms. Imperfections uncurl, webbing her face. Brilliant within the gritty empirics of math, but in a way enfeebled by her skill, like she saw through overpowering glasses. I count each full pore in her colorless skin, the knotted strands in unwashed hair.

She's sincerely begging. We are darkside, and I cave.

“If it makes you happy,” I say.

She turns away, and a few seconds later I notice the twitch in her shoulders. She does a decent job of disguising each sob. I unwrap and start on some freeze-dried ice cream. Emma hears the crinkling, the powdery crunch, and faces me again.

“Are you eating the last ice cream?”

“Looks that way.” I lick some from the corner of my mouth.

“I was saving that,” she manages.

“For what? The afterlife?”

A response gurgles in her chest, and one rogue tear flits down her cheek.

“Don't do that,” she says.

“Ooooo,” I say spookily.

“I was saving it, and you ate the rest, so it only seems fair I would get the last.”

“Is this any way to spend your last hours?” I ask, offering the half-eaten pack.

She looks away again, out the window. We hurtle through the system for an hour or three.

“I feel sorry for you, Cal,” she says at last.

“Me too.”

“Being incapable of commiseration.”

“Take it. Kill yourself. We're all waiting.”

“You don't know what it's like.”

“For once, I agree.”

She cries again; soft whimpers leak through the shield of her hands. Uneasy with the spectacle, I stare down into my lap, exhausted.

Her sniffles and tiny moans lull me into my first sleep in two days with their strange polyrhythm and muzzled pleas. Antipathy and regret charge my dreams with weird meanings, but I won't recall them. The unrehearsed spasm when weightless sleep drops in. Who knew it'd be the same up here?

*

Head snaps up, pulling my face from a pool of images whose impressions are lost like embers gone dark. Truth is, I've never been able to remember my dreams, not one. When I go hunting for them in the morning, there looms instead a smudge of canceled brainwaves.

We are coming out of the dark, and the curtain of blue is dawning inside.

Emma is asleep.

She's new. The blue plays on her face, reflected in parts and absorbed by luxurious darkness in others, nebula of hair turning like a drugged octopus. Her lids are closed in the easy way that suggests easy sleep. Lips slightly parted. Curved fingers of one hand spooning together in a rainbow.

“Emma,” I whisper, wanting not to wake her. The weight of the word coasts from me to her and pushes her head to the right, slumping it shyly into her shoulder.

I turn away, ashamed.

Look again.

And with no time between the second glance and next instant, no interval for actual movement, we meet. Free-floating in this blue, she's a water nymph. Any movement, any breath, is locked in her suit. She's motionless. Eyes wet. Crying only moments ago.

We kiss, and I receive the lingering warmth of kissing someone whose tears are fresh, remnants of hot slick anxiety, a subtle saltiness of lips. Her mouth is faultless on mine, shaping to it. I pull back, dizzy, eyes refocused. Emma doesn't move.

Her other hand has been open the whole time, but I notice for the first time again, with the clarity of film. Fingers unfolding endlessly as she slips from consciousness. A drained and slack-petaled flower, its plastic bubble core coming loose in space.

The bloom droops and stiffens. The bubble is empty. Emma is dead.

Or, life and death no longer a binary, she has started across the spectrum.

I rip a pocket open and find my own suicide dose. The case is tough to open—gives you time to reconsider. I pull the pill's plastic halves apart, escaped white dust like grains of purity that fade into the ship's darkest corners.

“I'm glad,” I finally say.

I kiss her again.

And in that moment I see my kiss spun toward its base extreme: one body working, the other simply there. The dry penetration, a quiet contraction of only one set of muscles. Movement of only two eyes. Her body not done shutting down, cells flickering out in domino chains, touching earthly velocities of the condemned. The gatekeeper cell that, when done expiring, released her fully. Finally.

I picture her dead ribs under the suit. She's not a person. She's a skeleton with skin. Her body wrongly acquiescent. Lips dead blue. I picture it against my will, my mouth pressing hers into what I want, a second of warmth in a world of chills. Everything pliant, yielding. Elasticity gone. No resistance left to spur. And in the coldest caves of my mind, I've done it.

I kissed her, and she was dead.

 

Hard to say if I feel more alone.

 

It's a decaying orbit we're in.

 

The moon will catch up.

 

A matter of time.