Lasher (37 page)

From Frankfurt they flew to Zurich. He went with her to the bank. She was now weak and dizzy and her breasts were full of milk and ached continuously.

At the bank she was quick and efficient. She hadn’t even
thought of escape. Protection, subterfuge, those were her only concerns, oh, fool that she had been.

She arranged for enormous transfers of funds, and different accounts in Paris and in London that would give them money, but could not likely be traced.

“Let’s go now to Paris,” she said, “because when they receive these wires they’ll be looking for us.”

In Paris, she saw for the first time that a faint bit of hair had grown on his belly, around his navel, curling, and a tiny bit around each of his nipples. The milk was flowing more freely now. It would build up with incredible pleasure. She felt listless and dull-minded as she lay there, letting him suck from her, letting his silky hair tickle her belly, her thighs.

He continued to eat soft food, but the milk from her breasts was all that he really wanted. He ate the food because she thought he should. She believed his body must require the nutrients. And she wondered what the nursing was taking out of her, if it was the reason she felt so weak, so listless. Ordinary mothers felt that, a great slothful ease, or so they had told her. The small aches and the pains had begun.

She asked him to talk of a time
before
the Mayfair Witches, of the most remote and alien things he could recall. He spoke of chaos, darkness, wandering, having no limit. He spoke of having no organized memory. He spoke of his consciousness beginning to organize itself with…with…

“Suzanne,” she said.

He looked at her blankly. Then he said yes, and he spun off the whole line of the Mayfair Witches in a melody: “Suzanne, Deborah, Charlotte, Jeanne Louise, Angélique, Marie Claudette, Marguerite, Katherine, Julien, Mary Beth, Stella, Antha, Deirdre, Rowan!”

He accompanied her to the local branch of the Swiss Bank and she arranged for more funds, setting up routes so the money would go through Rome and even in one case through Brazil before it came to her. She found the bank officials very helpful. At a law firm recommended by the bank, he watched and listened patiently as she wrote out instructions, entitling Michael to the First Street house for the rest of his life, and to whatever amount of the legacy he wanted.

“But we will return there, won’t we?” he demanded. “We will live there, someday, you and I. In that house! He will not have it forever.”

“That’s impossible now.”

Oh, the folly.

An awe fell over the members of the law firm as they fired up their computers and put the information out on the wire, and soon confirmed for her, yes, Michael Curry in the city of New Orleans, Louisiana, was ill and in intensive care at Mercy Hospital, but definitely living!

He saw as she hung her head and began to cry. One hour after they left the lawyer’s office, he told her to sit on the bench in the Tuileries and be still and that he would never be out of sight.

He returned with two new passports. Now they could change hotels and be different people. She felt numb and full of aches. When they reached the second hotel, the glorious George V, she collapsed on the couch in the suite and slept for hours.

How was she to study him? Money wasn’t the point; she needed equipment she herself could not operate. She needed a medical staff, electronic programs, brain scan machines, all manner of things.

He went out with her to buy notebooks. He was changing before her very eyes, but it was subtle. A few wrinkles had appeared on his knuckles, and his fingernails now seemed stronger though they were still exactly the color of flesh. His eyelids had the first subtle fold, which really gave his face a little maturity. His mustache and beard were coming in. He let them grow though they were prickly.

In the notebooks, she wrote until she was so tired that she couldn’t see, cloaking all her observations in the most dense scientific language. She wrote of his need for air, that he threw open windows everywhere they went, and sometimes gasped, and that his head sweated when he slept and the soft spot was no smaller now than when he’d been born, that he was insatiable for her milk and that she was sick with exhaustion.

The fourth day in Paris, she insisted they go to a large central-city hospital. He did not want to do this. She more or less enticed him, making bets with him as to just how stupid human beings were, and describing the fun of sneaking around and pretending to be regular inmates of the place.

He enjoyed it. “I get the hang of it,” he said triumphantly, as if that phrase had a special meaning for him. He said lots of such phrases with delight. “Lo, dear, the coast is clear! Ah, Rowan, bubble bubble, toil and trouble.” And sometimes he just sang rhymes that he had heard that were sort of jokes.

He went into great peals of laughter at such things. Mary Beth had said this one, and Marguerite had said that. And Stella said: “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers!” He said it faster and faster until it was a whistling whisper and no more.

She began to try to amuse him, testing him with various little verbal tidbits and such. When she hit him with bizarre English constructions, like “Throw Mamma from the window a kiss,” he became damned near hysterical. Even alliteration would make him laugh, like the song: “Bye, Baby Bunting! Mamma’s gone a hunting, to get a little rabbit skin, to put her baby bunting in!”

It was as if the shape of her lips amused him. He became obsessed with the rhyme, told to him by her, “Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater, had a wife and couldn’t keep her. Put her in a pumpkin shell, and there he kept her very well!” Sometimes he danced as he sang these songs.

In the realm of the spirits, music had delighted him. He could hear it at times when he could hear no other emanation from humans. Suzanne sang as she worked. A few old phrases came out of him, sounded Gaelic, but he really didn’t know what they were! Then he forgot them. Then once he broke into plaintive Latin and sang many verses, but he could not repeat them when he tried.

He woke in the night talking about the Cathedral. About something that had happened. He was all in a sweat. He said they had to go to Scotland.

“That Julien, that clever devil,” he said. “He wanted to find out all those things. He spoke riddles to me, which I denied.” He lay back and said softly, “I am Lasher. I am the word made flesh. I am the mystery. I have entered the world and now I must suffer all the consequences of the flesh, and I do not know what they will be. What am I?”

He was by this time conspicuous but not monstrous. His hair was now loose and shoulder length. He wore a black hat, pulled down over his head, and even the most narrow black jackets and pants fitted him loosely as if he were made of sticks, and he actually looked like one of the crazed bohemian young people. An acolyte of the rock music star David Bowie.
People everywhere seemed to respond to him, to his mirth, to his innocent questions, to his spontaneous and often exuberant greetings. He struck up conversations with people in shops; he asked questions about everything. His enunciation had taken on a sharpness with a touch of French to it, but could change while he spoke to her, back into her pronunciation.

When she tried to use the phone in the middle of the night, he woke up and tore her hand off the receiver. When she rose and tried to go out the door, he was suddenly standing beside her. The hotel suites, from now on, had bathrooms without windows or he found them unacceptable. He tore out the phones in the baths. He would not let her out of his sight, except during that time when she would lock the bathroom door before he reached it.

She at last tried to argue with him. “I must call and find out what happened to Michael.” He struck her. The blow was astonishing to her. He knocked her back on the bed, and the entire side of her face was bruised. He was crying. He lay with her, suckling her, and then entering her, and doing both at the same time, the pleasure washing through her. He kissed the bruise on her face and she felt an orgasm moving up through her even though his cock was no longer inside her. Paralyzed with pleasure, she lay with her fingers curling up, her feet to the side, like one who is dead.

At night he talked about being dead, about being lost.

“Tell me the earliest thing you remember.”

That there was no time, he said.

“And what did you feel, was it love for Suzanne?”

He hesitated and said that he thought it was a great burning hatred.

“Hatred? Why was that?”

He honestly didn’t know. He looked out the window and said that in general he had no patience with humans. They were clumsy and stupid and could not process data in their brains as he could. He had played the fool for humans. He would not do it again.

“What was the weather on the morning that Suzanne died?” she asked.

“Rainy, cold. It rained so heavily they thought for a while they would have to delay the burning. By noon it had settled. The sky was clear. The village was ready.” He looked baffled.

“Who was King of England then?” she asked. He shook his head. He had no idea. What was the double helix, she wanted
to know. Rapidly he described the two twin strands of chromosomes which contain the DNA in the double helix, our genes, he said. She realized he was using the very words she had once memorized from a textbook for an examination in childhood. He spoke them with cadence, as if it was the cadence of them that had impressed them through her into his mind, whatever his mind was…if you could call it that.

“Who made the world?” she asked.

“I have no idea! What about you? You know who made it?”

“Is there a God?”

“Probably not. Ask the other people. It’s too big a secret. When a secret is that big there’s nothing to it. No God, no, absolutely not.”

In various clinics, talking authoritatively, and wearing the de rigueur white coat, she drew vials and vials of his blood while he complained, and those around her never realized that she did not belong in the large laboratory, was not working on some special assignment. In one place she managed to analyze the blood specimens for hours beneath the microscope, and record her findings. But she did not have the chemicals and equipment she needed.

All this was crude, simplistic. She was frustrated. She wanted to scream. If only she was at the Keplinger Institute! If such a thing were possible, to go back with him to San Francisco, to gain access to that genetic laboratory! Oh, but how could they do it?

One night, she got up thoughtlessly to go down to the lobby and buy a pack of cigarettes. He caught her at the top of the stairs.

“Don’t hit me,” she said. She felt rage, a rage as deep and terrible as she had ever known, the kind of rage which in the past had killed others.

“Won’t work with me, Mother!”

Nerves frayed, she lost all control and slapped him. It hurt him and he cried. He cried and cried, rocking back and forth in a chair. To comfort him, she sang more songs.

For a long time she sat beside him on the floor, watching him as he lay there with his eyes open. What a pure marvel he seemed, his hair black and flowing, facial hair thickening and the hands still like baby hands except they were bigger than her own hands, and his thumbs though well-developed were slightly longer than normal thumbs. She felt dizzy. She was confused. She had to eat.

He ordered food for her, and watched her eat. He told her she must eat regularly from now on and then he knelt down before her chair, between her legs, and tore open the silk of her blouse and squeezed her breast so the milk came as out of a fountain into his mouth.

At other medical establishments, she managed to breach the X-ray department, and twice to run a complete brain scan on him, ordering everyone else out of the laboratory. But there were machines she couldn’t use and those she didn’t know how to. Then she became bolder. She gave orders to
people
, and they helped her. She was masquerading as herself: “Dr. Rowan Mayfair, neurosurgeon.” Among strangers she took over as though she were a visiting specialist and her needs took priority.

She picked up charts and pencils and phones when she needed them. She was single-minded. Record, test, discover. She studied the X rays of his skull, his hands.

She measured his head, and felt that soft skin again in the very middle of his skull—the fontanel—bigger than that of an infant. Lord God, she could put her fist through that skin, couldn’t she?

Sometime in those first few days, he began to have some consistent success with his writing. Especially if he used a fine-pointed pen that nevertheless glided easily. He made a family tree of all the Mayfairs. He scribbled and scribbled. He included in it all sorts of Mayfairs whom she did not know, tracing lines from Jeanne Louise and Pierre of which she’d been unaware, and over and over again, he asked her to tell him what she had read in the Talamasca files. At eight in the morning, his handwriting had been round and childish and slow. By night, it was long, slanted, and at such a speed that she could not actually follow the formation of a letter with her eyes. He also began the strange singing—the humming, the insectile sound.

He wanted her to sing again and again. She sang lots of songs to him, until she was too sleepy to think.