The Captive Condition (26 page)

His faith began to waiver. He pressed his ear against the earth and listened.

From within the coffin there came a high-pitched, tremulous wail that filled the blustery air, a shrill and lamentable voice that made him shudder.

“Oh, my darling. What has he done to you? What has he
done
?”

As in a dream the words seemed to metamorphose into the wedding toast delivered long ago by that inebriated jester now beating his fat fists against the wooden casket, a toast not simply to the Gonk's blushing bride but to her singular beauty, to her high cheekbones, to her full lips, to her generous and accommodating mouth, a toast so unabashedly vulgar it drowned out the gasps of the scandalized guests and the sheepish laughter of the groom.

The Gonk now set the shovel aside, unzipped his pants, and sent a wide parabola of urine onto the shallow grave, where it pooled and glittered in the moonlight. He heard the distant sounds of fireworks, car horns, church bells, but he was no longer in a celebratory mood. The euphoria he'd been anticipating was slow in coming. His lungs burned, his back ached, his head pounded with wretched sobriety. He thought of Colette Collins and wondered what she was doing tonight. Finally, he raised a jar and made his own lunatic toast to the happy couple, but his voice sounded so weak and false that he barely recognized it.

“For all eternity,” he said, “may you each enjoy the other's foul evacuations and gruesome decomposition.”

Martin Kingsley concentrated on keeping down the carrot juice, and he very nearly succeeded, but then made the terrible mistake of focusing on the long strands of black hair and the discarded bits of tissue paper on the restroom floor. “Don't puke, don't puke, don't puke…” He dropped to his knees, and all at once the
jazar
burst from his lips, splattering the toilet with superhuman force. He marveled at the bright orange streaks dripping down the sides of the bone-white bowl, believing that this was what a man must experience in the seconds after he has been decapitated, his broken body reaching blindly for his severed head floating in a shallow pool of foul water.

“Best to get it all out, eh?” Colette Collins produced a cigarette from her hip pocket and struck a match. “That juice you've been drinking is well laced with formaldehyde.”

Kingsley gasped, “I have a weak constitution, that's all.”

“Yes, I gathered that from the speech your wife delivered tonight.”

Startled by the amount of strength it took, Kingsley lifted his head and through bleary eyes peered up at her. He hadn't realized the old woman had followed him into the restroom. He wiped his mouth on his French cuffs and said, “Marianne must have copied every word out of some trashy romance novel.”

“Did you see the guests staring at her? Like cows in a meadow.” She gave him an arch look. “I understand you're writing a book on
Madame Bovary.
”

Even though he wanted to curl into a ball and remain on the floor for as long as possible, he struggled to his feet, his abdominal muscles cramping, his whole body shaking as with a fever. Using both hands he clutched the paper towel dispenser and then went to the sink to wash his hands. “I think it's time I abandon that project,” he said and splashed cold water on his face. “You would make for a far more interesting subject.”

Colette Collins took a long drag on her cigarette until the jets of smoke streaming from her flaring nostrils became the coiling twin serpents of a caduceus. “I'm afraid that after years of diligent research, you'd be quite disappointed by what you'd find. Oh, I suppose you could tell potential readers how I went through three husbands, one after another, a fact which is sure to raise an eyebrow or two, and you could tell them how much I smoked and drank each day, a fifth and a pack, respectively.”

“If nothing else,” said Kingsley, “people might enjoy reading about your theories of art.”

“Oh, I'm not dogmatic. My ideas are in a constant state of flux. In a world that operates on one basic principle—the law of evolution, of incremental and ineluctable change—to believe in a single, permanent reality means to be content with self-delusion. Consistency reeks of ideology.”

“Hmmm, yes, yes,” said Kingsley, but he was no longer listening to her. After straightening his tie, he went to the door, only to find that it was locked.

“If readers insist on a manifesto of some sort, there is one important thing they need to know. It isn't complicated, and it certainly isn't a secret. I believe art serves one purpose: to wake people from the world of illusions. To startle them out of their silly daydreams, fantasies, phobias, demented fixations. But this turns out to be something of a paradox, don't you think, Professor, since art itself is also a kind of dream? We dream that we're awake, then art wakes us from our dreams, but then we discover that we're in a dream again, and so forth and so on, ad infinitum, until we arrive at the only logical conclusion: that we are all captives of a hallucination from which we can never truly escape.”

“Goddamn lock,” he muttered. A ferocious heat poured in from under the door, turning the cinder block cell into an oven. Unable to disguise his own scorching sarcasm, he said, “At least you have the consolation of knowing that your work will survive long after both of us are gone.”

Now the old woman's face, blazing red as a torch, swung toward him. “Don't count on it, Professor. Much of my work is housed in this gigantic firetrap.” She tapped more cigarette ashes on the floor and watched the warm draft scatter them around the white tiles. “But nature has a way of performing a stress test on itself, destroying its own dangerous surplus. Wildfires rage in part because the landscape has become burdened by trees that are old and vulnerable. But people focus far too much on the destructive rather than restorative power of the inferno, forgetting that new and beautiful things, remarkable and unanticipated things, always emerge from the flames.”

The old woman jabbed her finger into his chest, and Kingsley felt she was threatening to do him bodily harm. His head started to spin all over again. He heard a countdown followed by whumping blasts, bloodcurdling screams, the persistent scratching of a frenzied animal after it has eaten a maddening weed. Deciding death would be preferable to remaining in this claustrophobic restroom and enduring the old woman's nauseating oration, Kingsley managed to turn the lock and twist the knob, and with many a gasp and twitch he prepared himself to face whatever unspeakable horrors awaited him on the other side of the door.

In the furnace heat of the bistro, red confetti and silver streamers spiraled through the air like little licks of fire, and a smothering blanket of black balloons fell like volcanic ash from the rafters. Martin Kingsley watched it all with horror, and right away the words “psychotic episode” popped into his head. Unsure if this arresting vision was real or the broad burlesque of a terrible delirium, he staggered from the restroom and pushed his way through the thrumming nest of bodies. Professors and their spouses, formerly isolated like enemy camps, having fled the social ignominy of being seen at a swanky party with their partners, now joined hands and sang in a spirit of camaraderie. They danced and whistled and wept with joy, and one of the musicians in the band put aside his steel drums and brought out a hurdy-gurdy. He began playing French folk songs, daft little ditties about love and heartbreak, but the charming
chansons à boire
soon became bawdy
chansons paillarde,
the lyrics of which were so filthy they beggared description—all involved the most unnatural forms of love between merry milkmaids and braying donkeys.

The guests boldly joined in the chorus, and Kingsley, casting strobic glances around the bistro, listened to the mingled roar of words and laughter, the droll banter, the casual innuendo, the hilariously raunchy conversation. In the smoke-laden lamplight, he spotted Marianne shamelessly flirting with his former pupil. They stood beside the giant clay sculpture, and between them there was much tittering, ear nibbling, massaging, stroking, fondling. Kingsley burned with jealousy. He'd never known humiliation like this before, and he understood that he was about to do something awful, something he could never take back, something that would never be forgotten or forgiven—the irrevocable action. Like a rampaging animal, his head lowered, teeth barred, fists flying, he charged across the crowded room, but before he could land a single blow he stumbled on a discarded bottle of champagne.

His wife gave a hearty laugh and effortlessly put him in a headlock. Dangerously close to the new sculpture, slapping and squealing like a pair of children, he and Marianne engaged in a clumsy wrestling match. With a gasp of collective shock, the guests scuttled away from the bedlam and watched in disbelief as the snarling couple struggled against the bar. Marianne knocked over a glass of the Red Death, and a bright borealis of wavering blue-green flames raced across the bar with a loud and sudden whoosh. The highly combustible punch bowl exploded with the force of a fifty-five-gallon drum of gasoline. The fire ignited the dry kindling of cocktail napkins and the blizzard of confetti. Within seconds the whole bistro was in the grip of disorder.

Kingsley stumbled through the fluted columns of smoke, gray and chambered in turbid hoops of orange firelight, and made his way to the nearest window. He smashed a pane of glass, and the fire sucked the cold night air like a gigantic vacuum. In an instant the bistro became an immense, sacrificial pyre, a brazier of people bursting into flames, their faces peeling like curled sheets of bark from beechwood trees after a powerful windstorm, and in mindless confusion they stampeded blindly through an impenetrable hell. Wearing halos of fire, men and women beat frantically at their hair and careened into one another at top speed, everyone, that is, except the elderly artist, who tore a blazing white wig from her head and hurled it to the floor, where it burned like a hairball coughed up by a hacking dragon.

Kingsley looked into the fire as if searching for portents. Rather than rescue his wife from this epic conflagration, he decided to save only himself. He ran across a fantastical hellscape of blackened bodies and charcoal ruins, but before he could dash to safety, he heard a loud crack. The floor was splintering, giving way, and the ceiling threatened to smash them all beneath the heavy timbers. The building burned bright and clean, as if the fire had been locked within its very walls like sparks within flint. Minutes later the entire structure was reduced to an unstable skeleton of steel beams that came crashing down one by one.

Through the rippling heat, Kingsley thought he saw the giant sculpture swinging its clay arms. From two perfectly symmetrical holes in its head, the thing emitted a low hiss, a mighty beast disturbed from a deep slumber, and then it all became perfectly clear to him: this wasn't a sculpture but an extraterrestrial that Colette Collins had found in the valley after the Perseids made their annual summer flyby, the scattered meteors damaging the church steeple. With grandmotherly kindness she had nursed the creature back to health for the sole purpose of bringing it here tonight and setting it loose on the people she most despised. It could move, it could speak, and in a spectacular basso profundo it demanded that Kingsley bow down and pay homage to its unique majesty.

His eyes widened. “The children!” he pleaded. “I must go home and check on the children!”

The sculpture teetered back and forth, vomiting liquid fire from the black portal of its mouth, and when he saw that it might topple over and crush him under its immense weight, Kingsley pressed his back against the brick wall and cringed. There was no time to scream, and he watched helplessly as the old woman's masterpiece came crashing down, trapping him inside its superheated shell like a bull of Phalaris, gorging itself on his roasted flesh and slowly digesting his incendiary soul.

Happy to be liberated from that oppressive, professorial gulag, Madeline and Sophie Ryan sang and danced at the stroke of midnight. After fifteen minutes of twirling and spinning and doing clumsy cartwheels, the girls became bored, but even with the heavy drapes pulled shut they knew it was much too risky to sit on the couch and watch the strange and violent images on TV. Someone might detect the distinctive blue glow of the screen and become suspicious. All of their hard work that night had made them hungry, and they searched the kitchen for something to eat. Unfortunately, before shipping out on the
Rogue,
their father had tossed every bottle, box, can, and gnawed gobbet of greasy meat from the cupboards and refrigerator, and the few crumbs that remained in the breadbox had been hauled off long ago as booty by an army of black ants.

When they grew tired they went to the crawl space under the basement stairs and hid behind a fortress of cardboard boxes. They struck matches and in the penumbra of orange light found themselves surrounded by dozens of tiny bugs scurrying blindly in and out of the cracks in the cinder block walls, their bodies plump and translucent. Using their father's discarded mason jars, screeching with revulsion and delight, the girls trapped the bugs and dared each other to eat them. As they were about to drift off to sleep, they thought they heard a persistent scratching coming from inside the walls. For a moment they wondered if the sounds might actually be the growling of their empty stomachs, and then they remembered the bats.

“Maybe we should leave,” said Madeline. “When they come home the Kingsleys will look for us over here.”

Sophie nodded. “Yes, they'll notice the key is missing.”

The girls gathered up their coats, boots, and dolls and on tiptoe hurried to a door at the side of the house. Without looking back to see if the other neighbors had observed them, they sprinted through the nighttime streets and alleys. Suddenly they found civilization, with its glaring sodium lights, backfiring cars, and lonely train whistles, an alien and unwelcoming place, and as they swerved in and out of the shadows and sidestepped overturned garbage cans, they felt exposed and vulnerable like a pair of feral cats. Thinking what to do next, they recalled the abandoned barn in the valley, a secret place that over the years had served as a refuge for innumerable runaways and drifters.

“But we can't go there,” said Madeline.

“Why not?” Sophie asked.

“Because Lorelei's a werewolf, remember?”

“No, she said she would never hurt us. She said if we ever felt sad or lonely, if we needed anything at all, we could always go to the barn.”

Madeline seemed doubtful.

The moon, burning white and clear, had reached its apex, and snow spouted and whirled above the skeletal treetops. The girls bucked the wind and traversed a series of steep and narrow ledges. Deep in the forest they looked like a pair of wraiths, their hair long and tangled, their clothes hanging like rags from their thin and pale bodies. They made their way along a snow-covered trail beside the river, its frozen surface telling of skittish coyotes, their tracks veering into the buckthorn and knotweed. In the highest branches of the gray-haired pines, a murder of crows assailed them with a loud, mocking chorus. Such was the salutation of the night.

The twins battled ever onward. After crossing the desolate fields, they could see in the clearing the steepled outline of the roof. They raced inside and barred the door, pleased to find the barn largely unchanged since their last visit in the fall. One at a time they climbed the ladder, and in the loft they found stowed in their proper places all of Lorelei's prized possessions—the dog-eared paperbacks, the stuffed animals, the cooking utensils, a butane lighter, and, lined neatly against a far wall, a dozen mason jars filled with wild berries. Only the gun seemed to be missing. Lorelei had warned them that some of the berries might be unsafe to eat, but it had been hours since the girls had enjoyed a meal of any kind, and the Kingsleys, confident of their own sagacity, had taught them that it was only through trial and error that intelligent people learned the important things of this world. Unable to stave off their hunger any longer, the girls opened the lids and plunged their frostbitten fingers into the jars.

“Maybe she'll come back,” Madeline said.

“Or maybe she's out hunting,” countered Sophie.

Each argued her case, but minutes later the preserves started taking a terrible toll on their empty stomachs. Even though they felt nauseated, they did not vomit. Hunched over and moaning, struggling to keep warm, hoping Lorelei would soon return and nurse them back to health, the twins clutched their dolls and thrashed on the mattress. They cried in agony, and after much panting and writhing they both lay perfectly still and grew very quiet, their febrile eyes fixed on the blue stars that sparkled between the cracks in the warped and rotted planks of wood.

Gradually, the sickness subsided, but now a strange and terrible sensation came over them, an unfamiliar combination of desperation and hopelessness, two particularly communicable emotions that, once they had wormed their insidious way deep into the soul, often mutated into something dangerous and even fatal. The girls had witnessed how, in the final months of her life, their mother had fallen prey to these feelings, and for her the damage proved to be irreversible and incurable. Regrettably, she'd tried to treat herself with the wrong kinds of medicine.

Now they called upon their mother for help, but the falling snow seemed to deaden the sound of their fervent prayer. Their breathing became shallow, their vision grew blurry, but instead of fear they experienced a profound sense of tranquillity, so much so that they no longer seemed to be corporeal beings subject to the unremitting pains and pleasures of life. Like their dolls they felt immortal, indestructible, unbanishable, and soon they slept soundly, eternally, their faces blue and motionless in the sub-zero temperatures, their lusterless eyes staring with curious abstraction into the night, their tiny mouths twisted and puckered as if, before taking their final breath and being carried off into the huge darkness, they had tried to whisper to each other in a dream language unique to them alone, and though their hearts were no longer beating, they felt a satisfying warmth drape over their bodies.

Some people, when they pass away, leave behind fond memories and wonderful legacies of love, but many more leave long trails of misery and despair, and when the bereaved claim to sense a presence floating along dark hallways or glimpse hooded figures rising up in shattered mirrors or witness fantastic apparitions advancing and receding above bogs and fens and festering swimming pools, they likely are perceiving the enduring gravamen of the dearly departed, a disappointment so profound that it somehow transcends death. So who could say for sure if the spectral figures that emerged from the barn and floated above the streets of town were in fact ghosts or illusions conjured up by the drunk and disorderly revelers stumbling their way home on New Year's Eve? Madeline and Sophie wondered the same thing themselves: was this how ghosts were supposed to feel?

They made for the vast, inland desert of the frozen lake and like graceful skaters glided effortlessly across cracks and fissures until they found the mighty
Rogue
trapped in ice, all engines stopped, a wisp of pale smoke rising from its black funnel, its wheelhouse glowing in the dark and throwing sharp splinters of light across the ice. One thousand feet long and carrying sixty thousand metric tons of taconite iron ore, the
Rogue
had passed through dozens of canals that year and had seen the rough, quartering seas of two oceans and all five Great Lakes. The twins slid between the thin cracks of those weird, wind-sculpted formations of silt-laden water, what the sailors called “rotten ice,” and entered the ship through the propeller shaft. From there they shimmied into the briny ballast tank, where they marveled at the bizarre creatures floating dormant in the hull, zebra mussels, round goby, sea lamprey, a hundred invasive species from across the globe that had hitched a ride and awaited the return of warm weather so they could shiver themselves awake and wreak havoc on foreign ecosystems.

Passing through an open hatch, the girls slipped unnoticed into the freighter's wheelhouse, a structure as wide and tall as a six-story apartment complex, and wandered in a maze of empty companionways until they found near the stern a mean little cabin where a frightened sailor stared into the dark. Earlier that day the captain had informed the crew that the icebreaker
Prometheus
should reach the ship and free them by dawn, and even though all engines had stopped, the walls of the cabin vibrated from the shifting ice. In the early-morning gloom a foghorn moaned, drowning out the low, steady hum of the bilge pumps and generator.

Without making a sound, the girls approached their father's bunk. There was a prophetic hush, and for a moment they listened to his panicked breathing and watched his eyes grow wide with alarm.

“Is someone there?” he said, stretching out a shaking hand. “Is that you, Emily?”

Another powerful gust pelted the
Rogue,
and Charlie Ryan, unable to sleep, continued to tranquilize himself by drinking another cup of the Red Death. He had made a big batch before leaving home and smuggled it aboard, stashing his jug of contraband beneath the bunk. In two quick swallows he finished it, letting the last of the liquor drip onto the tip of his tongue, and then he pressed the empty cup like a cold pack against his burning forehead. Before embarking on his latest voyage, he'd searched his bedroom closet for the
.38
but couldn't find it. Not that it mattered. There were certain mechanisms in the human heart that prohibited most people from checking out early, and even if he'd found the gun, he wasn't sure he'd be able to use it, but now, as the waning winter moon filled his cabin with inexplicable shapes and colors, he contemplated a slow and painful death from the awful island recipe.

Two faint shadows hovered at the foot of his bed, and Charlie, who harbored many superstitions, took them at their word when they said they badly needed his help. The girls beckoned their father to follow them, and he watched in wonder as they passed right through the cabin wall. He pulled on his boots and lurched toward the door, not bothering to grab his coat and hat. At this hour no one was stirring, and he hurried down the stairs to the main deck. Wearing only jeans and a flannel shirt, he was poorly equipped to face the wrathful winter night, but the girls assured him that his journey would not be a long one. The coast was only ten miles away, and if he moved at a steady pace, taking long strides, he was certain to reach the nearest town in two hours, three at most. He could endure the frigid temperatures for that long. The girls had confidence in him.

Charlie braced himself as he pushed open the hatchway. The wind whipped around the wheelhouse, screaming furiously, creating powerful updrafts that whistled along the deck. At first the shock of icy air invigorated him and helped focus his mind on higher matters, but soon the cold assaulted his lungs and froze the tears at the corners of his eyes. As the stinging snow found its way inside his shirt and down his back, Charlie lowered his head and crossed his arms. This wasn't cold so much as it was the complete absence of heat, what deep space must feel like, and after a few minutes his muscles tensed and his hands turned into useless claws. He considered going back to his cabin to get his gloves but decided to press on. Careful to avoid the patches of black ice, he made his way down the middle of the enormous deck, three times the length of a football field. Water from heavy seas had frozen inside the narrow gaps between the holds and around the bases of the giant crane towers that rose like round steel stanchions sixty feet above him.

Ten years a boatswain on the Great Lakes, he stood cargo watch most days and directed the crane operator who lowered freight into the holds. Sometimes during his shifts, he imagined the
Rogue
to be a voracious sea creature that prowled the deep and devoured enormous wooden crates destined for faraway lands. It must have been obvious to all hands that Charlie was not well, that he should never have come back to work, that he needed to take more time off, seek counseling, sedate his reeling brain with a strong prescription. Privately the crew, but especially the captain, believed he was a hopeless alcoholic and an unfit father, a man unsound of mind and body who was in danger of losing his children to the courts. Charlie knew what they thought. He couldn't stand most of them, especially the captain, the vessel's sober and unsmiling commissar, an insidious company man, a team player, a professional ass kisser who had a faintly executive air about him and who always stank of freshly brewed coffee and warm blueberry muffins.

Determined to prove he was an exceptionally dedicated father, Charlie hurried after the girls as they glided along the deck but was frightened away by a red-throated loon wrenching its way out of the sky. He worried he'd drawn near a nest of dead and frozen hatchlings, the distressed mother diving toward the rail near the ship's bow and trying to warn him away with a short, croaking bark. But it was the wrong time of year for loons. He stood absolutely still, hoping the captain, always at the helm, hadn't seen him.

“Be not afraid,” said the girls as they drifted hand in hand into the night.

It never occurred to Charlie to question why the gangway had been lowered. He simply followed the twins down to the surface of the frozen lake, but when he rounded the stern he lost sight of them.

The lake and winter sky were nearly indistinguishable, the horizon nothing but a blur of deepest purple, its ethereal beauty nearly paralyzing. He coughed, exhaling a thin vapor into the inky darkness, and offered a quick salute to four or five rats, honorary passengers, gathered at the stern and crouched on their hind legs as if inspecting the ship's rudder. Worried now that his little girls were gone forever, Charlie started to jog across the ice but slipped and fell, badly banging his knees. He cursed, brushed snow from his pants, and through that immense solitude he limped determinedly southward.