The Necromancer's House (11 page)

“This is my bathroom. These silver fists you see holding the roll of toilet paper make the roll inexhaustible. Very popular with the ladies, as is the lid, which lowers itself when the room is vacated. Subtle magic, that. Less subtle is the claw-foot bathtub. If you dive into it headfirst, hard enough to break your neck,”

(Nadia winces at this)

“it will send you to a bathroom in whatever place you say and think about. If you say nothing, it will send you to the last place it gated to.”

Anneke thinks about this. It makes sense . . . bathrooms are private. One wouldn't want to appear in the middle of a public fountain or even a kitchen. If Superman had been real, he would have changed in a toilet, not a phone booth. Maybe he uses a toilet now since phone booths are nearly extinct. Andrew might know—he seems dork enough to have a secret comic book habit.

“Do you get wet?”

“Only if the bathtub's full. The water in the pipes conducts, it doesn't immerse.”

“How do you get back?”

“Any fixture in the bathroom you got sent to will send you right back to this tub. Another tub is best; toilet works, too, though the idea is off-putting. The sink will stretch wide enough to accommodate you if you believe it will, though I once cracked a rib on the spigot when I wondered if I was going to clear the spigot. Belief is more than half of all magic.”

“What is the last place it gated to?” Anneke asks.

“I don't remember,” he says. “Would you like to see for yourself?”

She gives him a you-must-have-forgotten-whom-you're-daring look and dives. Nadia, startled (and a little impressed), swears in Russian, stepping back so as not to be clipped by Anneke's foot.

Anneke finds herself in a bathroom, painted green from the waist down, white on the top half. She's on the can, the lid of which is thankfully down. A startled young man with a sandy white-boy Afro was washing his hands at the sink. His mind can't deal with the idea that she suddenly appeared, so it performs a kind of emergency rewrite.

“People knock, you know. I'll be done in a minute.”

She's in shock, too, though, so all she does is blink at him.

He wonders if she has a head injury.

“Are you all right?”

She nods.

The paper towels are out, so the young man wipes on his pants.

It doesn't even occur to him that he has to draw the tiny bolt to open the door because nobody came in that way after him.

“Want it closed?” he asks.

Sweet kid.

She nods.

She stands up on shaky legs and locks the door again so she can gather herself. Sits back down. A water heater dominates the cramped bathroom, a yellow sticker warning her that gasoline should not be stored nearby as the pilot light will ignite the fumes. The walls are hung with memorabilia from a cable mafia show.

She thinks about just jumping into the toilet and returning to the house, but doubt strikes her. The fixture looks harder somehow, more
real
than the one she launched herself into in Andrew's house. She imagines braining herself in the old commode. Afro-boy would tell the paramedics she looked confused, walked in on him, didn't seem right to begin with.

And there she is, rolling around at an LGBT mixer in a wheelchair.

“How did you get paralyzed?”

“UTI.”

“Urinary—”

(She cuts off her imaginary interlocutor, who looks strangely like Shelly Bertolucci.)

“Unfortunate Toilet Incident.”

She doesn't know how long she stands looking at the toilet (which could use a brushing), but a timid knock shakes her from her reverie.

“Just a minute.”

“No problem,” a girl says.

Wherever she is, they're nice here.

 • • • 

She leaves the bathroom on weak knees, walks into a bright room—a coffee shop—filled with kids studying, old hippies talking politics, a mean-faced woman in line crossing and recrossing her arms, impatient to order her complicated drink. A reflective red truck goes by on the street outside and the whole room flashes red. Anneke opens the door, the little bell on top of which jingles, and the affable man making the cappuccino machine hiss says, “Come back and see us.”

“Thanks,” she says, walking onto the sidewalk.

Where am I?

How do I get back?

Am I really going to jump in a toilet?

Yes, I am.

Then you had better just go in there and do it because the longer you think about it, the worse this will be.

She glances back in the picture window of the coffee shop, sees an abandoned newspaper on a table. Makes the door ding-a-ling again. Looks at the paper.
USA Today.
Not helpful. Where did it come from? She sees the rack now, near the counter, approaches it as cross-arm-woman eyes her, suspicious she'll try to cut.

The New York Times.

USA Today.

Ah!

The Dayton Daily News.

This townlet looks too small and clean for Dayton, though.

She spots a small rack on the other side of the coffee line, cranes her head to look; the woman winds up to say
Excuse me
, but the pleasant fellow at the counter shuts her down with, “What can I start for you?”

Anneke excuses herself behind the woman, plucks a paper, looks at it.

The Yellow Springs News.

Yellow Springs, Ohio.

Jesus Christ, this is real!

I should get out of here.

They're waiting.

Are they?

Is this happening in real time?

She contemplates another trip to the bathroom, but a heavily bearded poet-type shuts himself in.

Fuck.

I'm not ready to jump in the toilet yet, anyway.

She gets in the coffee line.

Looks behind her, out the front window.

A saloon across the street, all wooden and old-timey.

Oh, that's all I fucking need.

No, that's EXACTLY what you fucking need.

Nerve.

She feels herself start to sweat.

Stays in line, gets a hot chocolate with the cash in her front pocket.

Sips the hot chocolate primly, looking now at the bathroom, now at the saloon. Drums her fingers on the table.

Okay, this isn't your fault. You're in a situation. You have to do this.

Wow, you're cunning.

You're through a magic portal. Whatever happens here won't count.

[Yawn] Wow, you're baffling.

You already know you're going to do it. That, or head to the bus station and get yourself a ticket to Rochester. All you're doing now is wasting time. Yours, Andrew's, and fish-cunt's.

Okay, that was powerful.

Higher power time.

I haven't really got one.

I'm a phony in AA.

I'm only six months in since my last slip.

What's six months?

During the next half an hour, Anneke uses the remaining ten in her pants to order one more hot chocolate and a decaf hazelnut latte. She moves her lips while talking to herself. After her third trip into the bathroom to stare down the throat of the potty, she says “Fuck it,” marches out the door,

Ding-a-ling!

and into the tavern across the street, where she orders three shots of Jack Daniel's, only to be told they don't serve hard liquor. She asks who does. Walks the block and a half to the Dayton Street Gulch, looking pissed about it.

Now she orders her three shots.

“Fifteen dollars,” says the bartender from a very red mouth sunk in a white-blond beard.

She reaches for her pocket.

Out of bills.

She sees herself tucking her wallet under the front seat of her Subaru.

I don't have my wallet!

The bartender turns to the fridge, fetches out a beer for the fedora-wearing black man who had been wiping up the pool table with a college kid in an ironically name-tagged mechanic's shirt. Anneke slams the first shot. She goes to the bathroom of the saloon (just to pee). Returns to the bar. Slams the second shot. Watches the soundless television, where some daytime TV judge reprimands a woman with an improbable weave. A series of commercials follows:

Detergent, with smiley MILF and smilier babies.

A self-help tape for getting rich through faith, presented by an oddly familiar-looking smiley hypocrite.

Diapers.

More babies.

Fuck daytime television anyway.

She downs the third shot.

“What's your favorite brand of diaper?” she asks the bearded young bartender.

“No preference.”

“Very diplomatic of you,” she says.

He grins.

She used to be able to outdrink men, but now she's a lightweight. The whiskey slips its hairy fingers around her heart.

It's good.

Here comes the buzz.

It's
really
good.

Maybe he'll pour me two more.

I'll ask if they take Visa first so he thinks I'm okay.

I want them.

But then I'll be shitfaced.

Magic is dangerous enough sober, eh,
brujo
?

Now or never.

Anneke slips out the door, is nearly struck by a van, runs across the gas station parking lot, nearly hits a stroller, sprints past the tavern and into the coffee shop,

Ding-a-ling-a-ling!!

finds the bathroom door latched!

She glances at the window.

Glimpses the bartender's head between trucks and over cars. She could have played that cooler, acted like she was just going to her car, but adrenaline got her. He looks purposeful. He'll vault when there's a break in the traffic.

Anneke says “Fuck!” and kicks the bathroom door open, the tiny bolt tinkling on the floor.

“Fuck!” echoes a peaceful skinhead type with quarter-sized wooden disks in his ears. She yanks him out from in front of the toilet just before he starts urinating, then pushes him into the coffee shop, his pierced cock a-jiggle.

“Wh'th'fuck, man!” he says.

The counterman sees the push, starts to say “Hey!”

Before he can, both counterman and baldy see Anneke jump into the toilet and disappear.

More properly, she jumps
at
the toilet, but no part of her touches it.

Her cracked oxblood Docs vanish last, flailing.

Both men instantly forget her.

When the exasperated bartender flings open the door of the coffee shop—
ding-a-ling-a-ling!!!
—the counterman asks if there's a problem.

The bartender scratches his beard.

“I'm sorry,” he says, realizing he was rough with the door but absolutely blanking on why.

He covers.

“Do you have any fives?”

The cabin is full of Russians. They have come from Florida, New Jersey, Little Odessa. A few Americans, stunned-looking relatives of Dragomirov's late wife, all tall, sandy-blond, and blue-eyed, sit in their own corner of the back porch, almost on top of each other because there is no room. The intensity of the Russians scares them, these Lutherans whose stewardess-model married a man of dubious past employment and dangerous associations. This Dragomirov tribe is wild-eyed, dark-haired, quick to laugh, quick to anger.

They read poetry to each other.

Who reads poetry at a party?

This isn't precisely a party.

Neither is it
not
a party.

This is something like a wake, but darker.

Singing, stories, jokes, hints at vengeance to come, these followed by knowing looks between men that suggest more will be said when the women and children have been packed away.

Mikhail Yevgenievich Dragomirov, “Misha,” has been gone one month.

The family came today to take possession of the cabin, which has been paid up through the end of August.

One would think the patriarch of the American wing of the family, Georgi Fyodorovich Dragomirov, cousin of the vanished man, would be the one to dominate the room, but he is old now, he dyes his eyebrows, and his heartburn bothers him when he forgets to take his medicine. He has forgotten to take his medicine.

Next in line might have been the half sister, Valentina Fyodorovna, at whose request the icon of the virgin appeared on the corner shelf, replacing Misha's whiskey. She expatriated most recently, but she is too sad to speak at any length, and blows her nose often, always into two tissues, always behind her liver-spotted hand, the nails of which shine with the best burgundy nail polish.

The one who captivates them is not even fifty, and none of them have seen her for years. Little Marina, who had such a hard life. Marina of Nizhny Novgorod, the girl from the woods, saved from prostitution by her Baba, then sent to university. For poetry. How she stunned them when they fetched her at Hancock airport in Syracuse.

She is the brightest of them, seems to shame them with how America has diluted the Dragomirov stock.

She is petite, toned, pretty; they have seen the video she sent them as an introduction, to show them she had her uncle's sense of humor, a video of her working out with kettlebells in the forest to the tune of the Volga Boat Song.

Now she stands before them in her stylish peacoat as evening comes on, her pale, healthy skin, accented by the beauty mark on her cheek, making her look like some lost Romanov.

“My uncle would not want tears,” Marina Yaganishna says.

“Bullshit! He cried at movies. He cried at poetry,” says a nephew-poet.

“He cried at
your
poetry.”

They laugh.

They love her.

They have eaten the funerary blintzes she cooked in the cabin,

“Marishka has taken the stove's virginity—Misha used only the grill and the microwave!”

smeared with the quince jam she learned to make in the forest,

“Her Baba must have taught her this before she died!”

and they have plied her with Stolichnaya only to find themselves drunk before a bright-eyed, clearheaded girl

“Girl my ass! She is a tank soldier like her great-uncle Yevgeny!”

who teases with the best of them.

“Alexandr Nikolayevich, will you dishonor your great-uncle's memory with such a weak fart? Eat more sour cream on your chicken, and fart like a Cossack.”

This boy is twelve, and laughs and blushes like beet juice to have his strange Russian aunt spear him so deftly. Earlier, she had stolen the smartphone from his hand and said, “No man under forty should play with a phone more than his
zalupa
.”

His father had made them laugh more with, “But I tell him all the time, drop the
zalupa
!”

One of the American Lutherans, relieved to have something to talk about, explained to Marina what a chalupa was, the dated commercial with the talking chihuahua.

Now, when the last light is gone from the sky, the Lutherans say their good-byes through big-teeth smiles. Marina comically shields her eyes, saying “Your smiles are so perfect in America, you blind me!”

Women and children leave the cabin until it is only Marina and the men who knew Misha. She will be staying—they have all agreed that she can have the cabin as long as she wants it.

But now it is time for men to speak.

They look at her meaningfully, perhaps a bit apologetically, and she understands that they will now fill their glasses more rapidly and exchange oaths of vengeance should the disappearance turn out to be murder—the police said there were signs of a struggle, that DNA evidence of several women has been found, two of them known prostitutes, one of them an unknown. The cousins and nephews of the missing man know his habits; there will be talk of pimps, jealous lovers. The hot-blooded men will vow to handle it personally; the wiser ones will mention, not by name of course, old associates of Misha's who could be brought in, men who know their way around a Makarov, men who know how to leave a mystery.

She lets herself outside.

She laughs a little when they cannot see her face.

They will be right in their assertions that Dragomirov was the wrong man to fuck with.

They will be wrong as to why.

Marina Yaganishna goes down the stairs, leaving behind the wash of light that bathes the patio. She takes her boots off and walks barefoot out to the edge of the water, barely swaying despite the amount of vodka she has poured into herself. She carries a nearly full bottle with her. Now she removes the rest of her clothes, wades out into the lake with the bottle.

She stands for some time, looking down, as though listening to the waves.

Old Georgi, indicating the nude woman, rubs the burning stomach he knows will kill him soon, says quietly, “Good thing the Americans left.”

They laugh.

“She's got the devil in her,” one of them says affectionately.

Now they watch their estranged kinswoman upend the bottle, pouring it into the surf.

“Ha! She's giving Misha a drink!”

“Someone should tell her he likes whiskey better.”

A silence, as the men continue to watch, despite themselves.

Marina Yaganishna looks thirty-five, not almost fifty.

“I think menopause will be late for her,” Georgi says.

They laugh themselves sick, then go back to talk of vengeance.

 • • • 

Out in the lake, the woman pours vodka into the mouth of a kneeling, dead old man with dim lamps for eyes.

“You're sure?” she says.

He nods.

“It will be done, then.”

“And I will be free?”

“I think so,” she says. “Revenge is liberating.”

He opens his bloated mouth for more vodka.

She got it from the freezer, where one of the Lutherans had stashed it in mock ignorance when clearing the table.

She pours again.

“Sorry it's cold.”

Misha doesn't care.

Everything is cold now.

He swallows gratefully.

Sinks.