Loss (6 page)

“I ought to mock you just for saying ‘you mock me,’ asshole. People really let you get away with talking like that?”

He ignored me. He’d started to slip away. “I can’t rest. They don’t let me sleep. They work their way into the pages and ruin whatever I’m writing. Isn’t it the same way with you? Tell the truth. How can you find clarity with all the noise? All the tension and weight of their bearing and closeness.”

Even if I had the pity to spare I wouldn’t throw any his way. “You’ve got a beach house out in Southampton, a mansion in Beverly Hills, and a villa in Italy, right? So why don’t you leave and go spend some time someplace else? Take a trip right after you tell me where your wife is.”

“I can’t leave, Will. I’m not sure I can ever leave here again. Stark House won’t let me go.”

“What happened to Gabriella?”

He dropped back into his chair and sat there blankly, withdrawing further into himself, gulping his drink. The ice rattled loudly. He snorted like a pig. A part of me wanted to beat the hell out of him and force him to talk, but I knew it wouldn’t do any good. I wasn’t going to get any answers from him. He was willing himself to shut down.

“Lay off the sauce,” I told him. “I want you clear-headed. I’ve got more questions and you’re going to answer them. We’ll talk again soon.”

“What was her name?” he asked.

“Who?”

“The one you took away from me in college. Mary? Maggie? Melanie?”

“I don’t remember.”

“She visits me too,” he said. “She’s dead but she asks about you. She doesn’t remember your name either.”

~ * ~

The next afternoon, on the second floor, I saw a young handsome man and a beautifully delicate woman walking up the corridor, holding hands. I’d never seen them before. He was in a tux and tails, and she wore a lace dress that looked straight out of the twenties. They came toward me and the hair on the back of my next rose. A warm, comforting draft swept across my throat. They both smiled and nodded to me. I couldn’t quite get my lips to work but I managed to nod back. I wanted to ask if they’d seen Gabriella but the words wouldn’t form. They went to the stairway and began to move down it. I held myself in check for about three seconds and then started after them. I knew what I would see by the time I got there. No one would be on the staircase.

I was wrong. They were still slowly proceeding down it. They murmured back and forth. He said something and she tittered mellifluously. It was a warm and enduring sound. They walked across the lobby floor and out the front door onto the street. Something touched my ankle and I nearly yelped.

Mojo stood at my foot and said, “Ook.” The chain that had connected him to Ferdi was gone. He held a piece of paper up to me. I took it.

It was blank.

He chittered and grinned and shoved his cup out against my shin. I tossed him a quarter and he danced back to Apartment 2C.

I went downstairs and stood out on the stoop listening to the world chase itself. Four rapes and two murders had happened in a five-block radius of the building in the last month. There were plenty of suspects but no leads.

I should be looking for Gabriella. I should be beating the piss out of Corben. But I went back to the screen and forced out more sentences. What I wasn’t making up I was dredging up. I called up my most shameful moments and laid them on my characters. They all loved Gabriella, they all wanted to smash her husband. I made apologies too late. It was a third-rate redemption at best. I waited for a man made of aluminum foil to climb out of the closet. When it happened I didn’t want to jump out of my skin.

I started awakening in the middle of the night to see my old man sitting at the foot of the bed. He always faced away from me, but I recognized his shape, the heft of his hand. When I dared to call to him he hitched his shoulders and began to turn to face me. It was a turn never completed.

Of course he couldn’t face me, he was dead. He’s been dead most of my life. He wouldn’t even recognize me now. I was nine the last time he saw me. Now I look just like the way he did. The heft of my hand is the same. Imagine him now, finding himself at the foot of a stranger’s bed, a man he’s never met before, who might call out to him, “Dad?” No wonder he vanishes. If it was me, looking back at me, seeing me, a live me facing me, plaintively urging some unknown request of me, I’d run too.

Who the hell wouldn’t?

The phone rang and no one was there. It happened more and more.

I kept bleaching the blood stain and finally it faded enough so folks could walk over it again. I got another royalty check, this one for $12.13. In a moment of spite I grabbed the end of it and flicked my lighter. The corner started to brown but I dropped it before there was any real damage. There was no point in ruining what little of mine they were actually sending through. I should be happy the Danes or the Portuguese or whoever the fuck were reading my books. We all make our deals with the devil.

A private investigator hired by the parents of one of the rape victims came around asking questions. He eyed me up good. A handyman with no set hours, no clock to punch. He’d asked around and found out about the murder. He tried to brace me and I held onto my dwindling cool. He lacked subtlety and hoped to push my buttons, whatever they were. He ran out scenarios where I couldn’t get laid so I waited in dark hallways and leaped down onto teenage girls. I let him talk the talk because it was for a good cause. I wanted him to hunt down the bastard in the area.

I awoke to laughter outside the basement window. Mojo pressed his face to the glass and waved to me. I saw the feet of boys and girls go by. A breeze blew the stalks of weeds and wildflowers against the pane. I got dressed, took the back door, and went out to the garden.

~ * ~

Ferdi and the kids were following Mojo around, all of them in a line and sort of dancing the Conga. They went around and around while I watched. Mojo’s little bag around his neck, stuffed with the pad and pen on a string, bounced as he jumped onto the vines and the lower limbs of a couple of gnarled trees bursting up from brick.

I turned and saw a man with eyes like a dull metal finish. He whispered something I didn’t understand. It wasn’t English. I thought maybe it was German. My stomach tightened but I could feel myself smiling. The mysteries of life and death, baby, and everything in between.

A sweet moist aroma wafted from him, and suddenly I knew what the Rhine Falls must smell like.

“Nobody uses ice picks anymore,” I said. “So he lied. So what? He just wanted to meet girls.”

Dr. Lauber held his hands up to show me they were empty. He seemed eager to explain to me that his intent was friendly and forgiving. He said something else I couldn’t understand. I approached and the sunlight shimmered off him.

I said, “It wasn’t you?”

Dr. Lauber firmed his lips. He shook his head. He reached out to touch me but the touch never came. He had a lot more he wanted to say. The words poured out of him. He had admissions and apologies and declarations to make. We all did. I knew I would die before making all of mine too. It seemed nobody could do any differently. I listened, thinking about Gabriella. By the time the chain of children came around again he was gone.

Mojo skipped by and then the kids, one after the other. As Ferdinand the Magnifico was about to pass, I reached out and grabbed hold of his coat sleeve.

He stopped and faced me. “My good friend, the wonderful writer Will Darrow! Is it not a glorious day!”

“Why’d you do it, Ferdi?” I asked. “Why’d you kill the aluminum foil guy?”

Our eyes locked and I watched the real person slip out from beneath the costume of his caricature. I saw a sorrow and a resolve there that I hoped I would never have to experience. A strength that had been thoroughly hidden and an anguish that would never depart but had been recently muted. He was trying to regain his soul.

He spoke in a quiet voice for the first time since we’d met. “He murdered my wife in Denmark fourteen years ago. You don’t need to know the details.”

He was right. I didn’t.

I knew he’d told me the truth. We can go our whole lives believing we’ll recognize the cold hard truth when we hear it, but when it finally arrives it’s like nothing that’s ever come before. It strikes a chord that’s never been hit, and my head somehow rang with it. Ferdi waited for me to make a move. He appeared ready for any judgment.

The aluminum foil liar had told me he’d done terrible things. He had struck his mother. He had broken the hearts of his children. He had made a woman bleed. He didn’t think he deserved to be forgiven.

I shrugged and let go of Ferdi’s sleeve. He nodded with a slightly accepting, thankful smile. I lit a cigarette and he rushed to catch up to the kids, and the dance continued around the garden.

~ * ~

I saw someone crouched at the foot of my bed. It was my old man again, facing away from me like always. He held his fist up, and in it was clutched a note. I threw the covers aside and walked to him. Maybe now he would talk to me.

But he couldn’t turn around, no matter how close I came. Of course he couldn’t face me, he was dead. Without looking at me, he stuck his arm out and offered me the note.

It was five pages long and read:

~ * ~

We have come to a spot where the tissue is thinnest and already torn. It is a destiny feared and worshiped. There are those who desire and cannot own, those who die in need. The heart swells and fails. I have seen her, in the depths of this house, in these rooms, lost and at a loss but still retaining that luminescence of life. She is light itself to some. We cannot afford this loss. She haunts the halls, eager to reach out to us as we pass. Can you make sense of it? I have tried but I am indisposed by the part I must play. Surely you have heard her in your dreams? Your name called. How bright she is in the dark places. She speaks of you still. She understands your love. It is not too late.

MOJO

~ * ~

When I looked up again my old man was gone. There was a knock at the door. I opened it and there stood Mojo, smiling, holding his cup, his little hat askew. I looked out into the lobby for Ferdinand, but he was nowhere in sight.

I glanced down at the chimp and said, “Okay, Mojo, fess up. I need to hear it. If you really know how to talk, buddy, then now’s the time. It’ll be our secret, I swear. But this is important. What happens next is going to change the course of a life or two around here, I think.” I went to one knee and got in close. He cocked his head and did a dance and put a paw out to touch my nose. “So I want to hear it from your own lips. Talk to me. Did you see it happen? Did you see Corben kill Gabriella?”

Mojo went, “Ook.”

I stared at him and he stared at me.

I nodded and said, “Fuckall, that’s good enough for me,” and went to confront my oldest friend, my only enemy.

~ * ~

I was wired and hot and ready to break bones, but when he opened the door all my rage left me. Almost all of it.

He hadn’t shaved or eaten in days. He’d been steadily losing weight and his sternum stuck out like a spike. His eyes had sunken in even further, his lips crusted and yellow, and his breath stank like hell. He hadn’t quit the sauce. His sweat was stale and smelled like whiskey and disease. There was a time I would’ve gloated and been filled with a sick joy. Now I just wanted to know what had happened to his wife.

“I want to talk to you,” I said.

“All right.”

We sat in his living room again. He hadn’t opened a window in ages. The dust swirled in the rays of the sun lancing down through his windows. He’d been drinking too much but I didn’t know what else to do for him, so I mixed him a screwdriver. At least he’d get a little orange juice in his system. He looked just a little closer to death than the aluminum foil guy had with the ice pick vibrating in his head.

His eyes kept wandering to a spot on the wall behind the couch. I couldn’t help riffing on Poe’s “Cask of Amontillado” and “The Black Cat.” But he wasn’t checking the place where he’d might’ve stuck Gabriella’s corpse and sealed it over with and stucco. He wouldn’t keep her so close at hand. He was writing behind his eyes.

“I know you killed her,” I said.

“You’re a fool.”

“The monkey saw you do it.”

It made him open his mouth so wide that the hinges of his jaw cracked. “What?”

“Mojo told me what you did.”

“The chimp...?”

“You shouldn’t have left any witnesses. You didn’t think the world’s first talking writing monkey would tell somebody? He knows his business. Knocks ‘em dead in South Dakota.”

“I was wrong. You’re not merely foolish. You’re insane.”

The word caught in his throat. He almost didn’t get it out. It wasn’t an easy one for him to say aloud. I usually had a hard time with it too. Anyone who spends that much time inside his own head had to be extra cautious of tossing words like crazy and insane around. But in this building, in this city, on this day and during this particular conversation, it seemed even more reckless than usual.

“Where is she?” I asked.

He finished his screwdriver and set the glass aside. “Visiting her mother in Poughkeepsie.”