Stories From the Plague Years (9 page)

“I loved it.”

“Hmmph.”

“Did
you
like it?”

“Seen it before.”

We walk half a block in silence. She still leads me with that tireless quickstep of hers, under lights that paint the city the color of an old man’s fingernails. A pain creaks where my jaw hinges the skull. I’m grinding my teeth. I relax my jaw as best I can. Catherine has told me she doesn’t like the sound. She speaks, mostly to the sidewalk before her.

“There’s a lot in that movie I don’t understand.”

I’m relieved. We can talk without her becoming more upset with me.

“Me too.”

“I don’t know why that policeman acted the way he did.”

“Well, he was a figurehead. A symbol for the Vichy government. He’s really not a character, just a stand-in.”

“Hmmph. Just a stand-in. I see.”

She casts her gaze further downward and then to her right toward shop fronts we pass, looking at things that she would just have without even the bother of purchasing them, if the world were fair.

I risk speaking.

“What I didn’t understand was what a refugee Czech resistance fighter and his wife were doing with all those expensive clothes. I don’t think too many guys in the underground were drinking champagne cocktails in white dinner jackets, back then.”

She stops and stamps her foot . . . makes a sound like someone who has crushed a leech with a bare hand.

“Goddamnit, Dean! Why are you so fucking cynical?”

“I wasn’t being cynical. I was mentioning something that didn’t make sense.”

“You’re too cynical to let a beautiful movie like that be beautiful.” She looks at me as if I’d wrung the neck of a child’s pet for the pleasure of hearing the child scream.

“Barbara was right,” she says in a harsh whisper, and snaps to her quick march again. I take long strides to catch up.

“What’re you talking about?”

“Barbara Jameson.
Remember her
?”

Barbara is a friend of Catherine’s. She proclaims herself a poet, but lives off the interest of her trust fund. Barbara doesn’t like me, and makes plain her feelings at every opportunity. Catherine has told Claire that Barbara thinks I’m the classic abusive boyfriend, that I isolate Catherine from her true friends so I can control her. I felt touched to be mentioned to Claire at all.

“I remember Barbara.”

“She says you’re too bitter and cynical. That you have a lot of hostility in you. She’s right.” Catherine speaks as if this is something she’s told me many times before, the way one would explain something to an idiot. I assume she has. Why else would she take that tone?

“I’m sorry if I’m cynical. It’s just the way I am.”

“Hmmph.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You wouldn’t be cynical if you didn’t want to be.”

This rings as a maxim Catherine has purchased from Claire, spoken as an invocation of infallible authority. The air around Catherine seems to tremble, as if it waits to be changed by the act of Catherine crossing herself.

We reach the bus stop. Cold wind surges here. Catherine assigns me blame for this with a glance, and then, like a child coming to her mother’s skirts, presses her body against mine, both her arms hugging my right arm, her head nestled on my shoulder. Another couple stands here, young and very much in love. Things must be perfect between us when other couples are near . . . at parties we seem the happiest lovers in the world. My hand still aches from the happiness we shared in the theatre, though I’m thankful for the charade. At least now I can touch her.

A woman approaches, just as Catherine lifts her head from my shoulder as if to kiss me in imitation of the other couple’s intimacy. The woman is in her fifties and wears only jeans and a purple T-shirt. A garbage bag is slung over one shoulder and autumn’s dead leaves swirl at her feet. The woman reminds me of someone . . . a friend from high school’s mother, or maybe a neighbour from long ago. Her features look sunken in the dim light. She speaks to Catherine and me, standing some five feet away, not wanting to invade our space with her less worthy presence, not wanting to interrupt the kissing of the other couple.

“What bus goes to Washington Terrace?”

“The sixty-three,” I say.

Catherine hugs my arm tighter, afraid of this possession-less ghost of a woman, of the effrontery of her poverty and perhaps her age. The woman drifts her gaze to the edifice of the bank we stand before. The bank clock flashes that it is 10:09, and forty-eight degrees Fahrenheit. The wind churns more leaves our way that whisper-flow over the sidewalk.

“I’m not going to make it,” she says, her voice like cracking stone.

“What?”

Catherine shakes my arm, the way someone kicks another person under the table who’s making a terrible
faux pas
.

“I’m not going to make it to the shelter. They close the doors at 10:30.” The woman turned her head about, as if trying to gauge by sound which alley nearby would be most sheltered from the wind. I wonder how old she really is. Living on the street ages people. She might not yet be forty. Worry and sorrow have slackened her face. Her hair is clean. Her clothes are clean. She’s trying to live with dignity.

I free my arm from Catherine’s grip, and hear a small gasp from her.

I reach into my pocket and pull out twenty dollars.

“Take a cab,” I say to the woman, and hand her the money. “There’s a taxi stand around the corner.”

I don’t hear what the woman says. It could be “Thank you.” All I’m aware of is her eyes, because they’re suddenly empty of despair. The change in her eyes makes me feel warm and human as she turns and walks away.

When I meet Catherine’s eyes, they brim with fury I’ve never seen before.

Our bus comes, stinking of soot, the brakes making an asthmatic grunt as it pulls to the curb. She boards without paying, takes a seat in the rear. I pay for us both and join her.

Her gaze is fixed on the inky view of the window. I look at the back of her head as the bus pulls out and the other couple at the stop is left behind, fading to shadow.

“You want an Oscar, or something?” she says to the glass, her words misting the window with each syllable.

I say nothing.

“For your theatrics.”

“I wasn’t being theatrical.”

“Don’t you be condescending to me . . . don’t you dare!”

She turns to me. The soft blues of her mascara run in streaks down her face.

“You did that to embarrass me. Did you enjoy embarrassing me? I hope it was worth it.”

“No.”

“Then why did you do it?”

“Do what?”

“Give that woman money for a cab? While we take the
bus
? Was it because of what I’d said about your cynicism? You had to do something nice and humane to show me wrong, didn’t you? Well that’s the most cynical fucking thing you could have ever done, you fucking misanthrope!”

In her apartment, in the prison of her possessions, in the Victorian four-poster bed that had been a graduation gift from her grandmother, to the tune of the sound machine mimicking the fauna of an endangered rainforest, we lie naked and distant from each other, invisible barriers raised against each other’s touch.

I feel awful, and wonder what I can do to make amends.

—Catherine had a victim in you, but you’ve had victims yourself.

With the sudden absence of the dusk-world I’d been defining with
hard and shadowed words
, the room seemed naked as I felt. Our stage hollowed itself to the brutally minimalist.

—I’ve taken eyes for eyes and teeth for teeth.

The echo of my voice returned from a greater, emptier distance than it had before, a distance void of props. My hypocrite twin, sheltered by his curtain of silvered glass, felt further away as well. He was our audience, who himself had yet to be cast in the role I now played.

—You’ve victimized people to feel better about yourself. You and Catherine are the same.

To deny what he says would lead to a too-deep and detailed reiteration of the chess games of our First Act. I needed to push forward our drama, and so surrendered a pawn to him. I had no interest in his insights to make me well. How was there any possibility for the years of therapy it would take to make me well by his standards? Why bother? Life’s too short.

—How they victimized me was more insidious than what I’ve done. They each betrayed a trust, abused power I’d given them. I just killed them.

Doctor Johansson leaned back. I envied his ability to move that way, to make leather cushions creak and groan. His eyes narrowed. He was drawing something into focus, as would a good actor playing Sherlock Holmes, weaving strands into a solution for the crime. Was this a
new
role he played? Or a new layer to the role he’d been playing?

—Dean, I have to be direct. Everyone deals with abuses of power and trust. But not everyone does what you have. I need specifics. Contexts. The D.A. wants a preliminary hearing in the next two weeks. So I have to ask, were you an abused child?

His asking this long-expected question was invasive, despite his decorum and the shift in his demeanour that told me he was about to ask that very question.
Of course
I’d been abused. Even if I hadn’t been, the enchanted cloak in which I’d mantled myself would require me to say I was. Parthenogenesis of monsters without human fault diminishes their power. Doctor Johansson held the question of my abuse over me as he would the crown at my coronation as an archetype.

Yet I didn’t want to split open the old and bone-deep scars, and in so taking the crown, feel the stigmata of my past bead through my skin. I’ve been afraid of this question, of its potency. But I decided to answer for the sake of my epitaph, the wizard’s glyph that will free me from my self-devouring body, and for the sake of my twin’s craft.

—I . . . I was a neglected child. My parents didn’t want me, so they didn’t acknowledge me as a living thing.

—Neglect is a form of abuse.

—Then I was abused.

—Do you want to tell me about it?

How do you articulate a void? How do you speak absence?

—My parents wanted a baby, but not a child of school age or older. Then a kid isn’t cute and helpless, like a pet. It’s a responsibility. I was only wanted as a plaything. So I became an object they grew to hate, because it wouldn’t be owned the way they wanted it to be. Despite the neglect, they prodded me, to keep me in line. And they punished me, too, for things I was expected to know, but was never told. At any moment, I was punished for doing something I wasn’t allowed to do . . . something simple as making a cup of hot chocolate. Fear of being punished kept me . . . paralyzed. I didn’t dare do anything.

I’d never mentioned this to anyone before. Nor consciously articulated it to myself in thought, though I’ve known it to be true. I’ve held this Truth close, keeping it as a secret engine I could harness to become what I have. The grammar of what I’d just said was a string of incantations too potent to utter before this moment, like the revelation of a secret Name. The mythic killer needs a mythically wretched childhood, just as surely as Tricksters must be youngest sons. Loki is my brother; cloaked, we inflict mischief on the worlds our parents made.

—Did they hit you?

—I hope no more than most kids are hit.

—Did they lock you up?

—They ignored me. Put me in a figurative closet, I guess.

—That made you angry?

—Only later. Back then, I’d rot in my room wondering why I was such a horrible kid that my parents hated me. They knew I wanted their approval, and they used it as a weapon to make me follow their unspoken laws and not be a problem.

. . . And in not being a problem, in not
being anything
, I lived in a dead world from which I resurrected myself. So many tales of childhood tell of kids who wander through portals to other worlds of magic and wonder. I found magic and wonder, but not the kind of Nursery Magic that would whisk me to Narnia, or bring stuffed animals to life. I trod an undiscovered country in which I found the strength to make metaphor real, to give poetry flesh I could twist and hurt, so that later, I could twist and hurt flesh through the poetry of Justice.

—Did you avoid your parents?

—As much as I could.

—Did you leave the house, to get away?

A pressure clenched my throat. The room was now so clear in its glassy translucency, my eyes hurt, as they do just before they brim.

—I couldn’t leave the house, or the yard. It was a prison for most of my life. For all their impatience with me, they were over-protective. If they gave me independence, they’d have to worry about me skinning my knee, or just being a kid. They locked me in their realm to minimize their responsibility for me. They hated unknown quantities, and by keeping me mousey and afraid of the outside world, they controlled me as a variable, compensated for me not being an . . . not being an infant.

My voice cracked. My eyes pooled their first betraying hint of blurring, and a cold grey cloud turned in my chest. The spectre of the child I’d been was folded within that cloud, speaking its un-fleshed rage and hurt.

Please, God. Don’t let me cry. Not now, while the videotape runs and my hands are shackled and I can’t wipe the tears. Please spare me that humiliation.

I swallowed down my grief, quieted the child I’d been through suppressive will. The twin inside me fell still, while my future twin, who will take up my standard in his role, answered my plea for strength as a saint would answer the plea of a black-shrouded grandmother.

—Did you understand all this about your parents at the time?

—No. Later. I was a teenager. I was walking with a girl I liked when we ran into her mother on the street. Her mother was happy to see her and walked up to her and kissed her. They smiled at each other. I was shocked. Parents could love their children? It wasn’t TV myth? It was like meeting a blue fairy or a troll on the street.

I paused, tasting the silence unbroken by the gnawing and scratching I expected. Though my eyes still hurt, they welcomed the absence of the red dusk that heralded those sounds.