And she moved to the kitchenette to get the chicken soup.
Downstairs, around three hours earlier, just around three-thirty, just after Oliver had left to find Tiffany, Zachary had opened the red bag. The minute he saw Oliver heading off toward West Fourth Street, he had hurried into the bathroom for it. That’s where the bag was, stowed under the sink in there. He had pulled it out and he had told himself: he had to move fast.
He had kept telling himself that. He had knelt on the floor in front of the bag and thought: I have to move fast. Over and over. But it wasn’t so easy. He really was sick. The aftermath of the drug. Dizziness. Flashes of light. Occasional goblins crouching at the corners of his eyes. And that diarrhea. That’s what had stopped him from dealing with the bag when he first got here. He had just finished hanging his raincoat in the closet when he was hit with yet another attack of the shits. He’d been pinned to the toilet for nearly an hour. Then, after he’d finally stashed Tiffany’s dresses in the bag and gotten out his real clothes, Oliver had come home. Nearly caught him too before he could get the bag closed again. Nearly ruined everything. All relieved and glad to see him. Pumping his hand, slapping him on the back. Zach thought he’d never be able to get him out of the apartment again.
And, now that Ollie was gone, he was sure to be back in a big hurry. Tiffany’s bookstore was only ten minutes away. Which gave Zach less than half an hour to do what he had to do.
I have to move fast, he kept thinking. He knelt in front of the red bag. His fingers moved to the bag’s zipper. But still, they just hovered there. His mind … It felt like a great balloon, massive and wobbly. Weighted down with details, sluggish with them. Fast, he kept thinking. Fast! But he was distracted by the feel of the cold tiles through the holes in his jeans. Mesmerized by the spots of brown rust on the silver pipe beneath the sink. The sting of his asshole, the liquid chill in his intestines. All of it was magnified. All of it crowded into the mind-balloon and kept it anchored soddenly to the earth.
Finally, he unzipped the bag. But it was only more of the same. More clutter. Tiffany’s skirt, the one he’d worn here. Her sweater. Her scarf. Things, things, things. He pulled all these aside. There was the skull mask underneath. The syringe. The vial of blood. The butcher knife. The stag-handled Colt automatic. He gazed at them—these things in their solidity. He couldn’t quite take them in, they seemed so meaningless and real.
He swayed on his knees. He thought: Oh Jesus. He closed his eyes and sent up yet another quick prayer for forgiveness. Could it really have been so wrong? he thought. Breaking his promise to God, taking the drug? Did he really deserve all this sickness: the oversleeping, the diarrhea, this heaviness of mind? He had only been trying to recapture the old vision, after all. To become part of the great tapestry again. And the living truth was that if he had another needleful of Aquarius right this second, he would pump it into his arm without thinking twice. Christ forgive him, but he would. Just to clear all this crap out of his system. Just to be free again, the way he was last night.
Looking down at the objects in the bag reminded him. Last night. How beautiful it had been. These very same objects—how beautiful they had been. The knife, the blood, the silver-handled gun. Now, strewn at random in the bottom of the red bag, they were just things, just its. Like the rust on the pipe. Like the little blue patch of mildew in the corner near the tub. Like his own slim fingers … So much of their magic, their truth, had seeped away.
But last night. Last night, when he had been on Aquarius … oh, he thought, the vision! Things were not only things then. Each was interwoven with them all, with everything. Like the teacup in the tapestry, each object was the center of a web of being that had stretched out from itself into the universal. And he had been part of it. Everything he touched, everything he saw, drew him from the prison of his own flesh, connected him to a vast Oneness. How could that be wrong? To be so full of joy, so full of knowing. To be, for moments on end, within the very mind of the eternal God.
That’s how it had felt, anyway. Especially when he decapitated the woman.
It had been beautiful. It had been so beautiful then. Not like now, when he could only remember it. Now, when the inner experience was gone. When he could only call up images, details, the exterior actions. All morning, all afternoon, he had kept these images at bay. He had tried to preserve the beauty of the true event intact. But now, the sight of the knife and the gun and the blood in the red bag forced it all into his mind again. He had to close his eyes again, shake his head to clear it. He had to remind himself—force himself to remember—that it had been beautiful.
She had been beautiful. Tied to the bed. His own old bed. Struggling as he approached her. Her white limbs straining, her eyes wide: the sensuality of her terror. Right there. In the mews. In the ever-strange house that was never quite home to him, that still smelled of old lady and desertion. Right there in his old room, on his old bed: the woman. Only he could see more than that. He could see the Truth within the Woman, the Woman in her Victimhood. Pleading with him for mercy: Have mercy. Please, God. Weeping—just as he had wept so often on that bed. It was like looking at himself, in fact: that was part of the Meaning of it. It was like looking at his Other Self in the past that was always present. Oh, but he had driven the great knife into her throat so slowly, with a sort of childlike fascination. And what an electric connection it was! Like a lightning bolt that touched off her orgasmic thrashing, that loosed the burbling blood, erased the words from her cries and made them nothing but choking and the whistling of air through her severed esophagus. He had felt her pulse beating against the blade, beating through the knife handle and into him, her Life into his, One Life, the Man in his Power connected to the Woman, her Martyrdom his, and he had felt like his own father with his own son’s cheek crushed down against the rough desktop and the boy’s naked ass lifted like a flirty girl’s and the father’s ruler whacking and whacking him while his mother’s face went hectic with excitement … It was all One Thing. This and that, past and present, each and all. He could see the connections. And he had leaned down to press his lips against the dying woman’s ear—and she was just shivering now, her eyes going glassy—he had leaned down, knowing she would understand him, this Great Secret, and he had whispered to her breathlessly: “He broke the typewriter.”
She had only stared at him. Her and her empty eyes.
Tears rolled down Zachie’s cheeks now. Fell on his hands as they hovered above the red bag. Sure, he thought. Sure. Her eyes. That image of her eyes. He was being punished for breaking his promise to God, even though he had only been trying to become one with the eternal. Jesus was making him forget how beautiful it had been. Was forcing him to remember only the emptiness of those eyes. How lonely they had made him feel. How furious. And the way he’d attacked her then, savagely slashing at her. The way he’d cursed her crazily, slobbering, crying out. Clutching her hair in his blood-soaked hand. Raging at her severed head … Oh, sure, from the outside, it was all ugliness.
Well, I’m sorry, okay? he thought. He let out one long, last shuddering sob. Bowed his head. I said I was sorry, didn’t I? It was just one broken promise, after all. There was no need to torture him about it forever.
It was another few moments before he got control of himself. Breathing in little blasts, his cheeks puffed. He wiped his face dry with his palms. Tightened his lips with determination. God closes a door, but opens a window. Right? It was time, he thought, to get to work.
He forced himself to move with businesslike precision. He removed the pistol first. Stuffed it into his belt. Tugged the quilted shirt down over it. Then, he took out the vial of blood. He had drawn this from the woman’s headless corpse with his syringe. He brought the syringe out and snapped the vial back into it. His hand threw frantic shadows in the light from the bare bulb above him.
He got up. Went into the living room, holding the blood-filled syringe. The lights were still off in here, but he could see his way well enough. He
wove quickly and surely through the stalagmitic stacks of books. He went to the dresser. It stood by the window in a wedge of fading daylight. There were two small piles of books on top of it, a framed drawing of Whitman in between. Whitman watched as Zach opened his brother’s top drawer.
This was the underwear drawer. Zach gazed down into it, holding the syringe up in his right hand. Oliver’s Hanes briefs lay neatly folded in there, next to his balled socks. The red and white waistbands. The crotch panels. Crowding Zach’s brain. Too neat, he thought. It was all too neat—one of Ollie’s “babes” must have done it for him. The idea made Zach shiver, his stomach coiling. Goose pimples rose on his arm. He stood there, gazing, swaying, for another long moment. Then he shut the drawer hard with his left hand. Blinked. He mustn’t let himself get lost in the details. He forced himself to pull open the drawer below.
The sweater drawer. That was the one he wanted. He pulled out one of the burly woolen sweaters Nana was always knitting for Oliver. He knelt on the floor with the sweater lying between two mounds of slanting books. Carefully, he held the syringe over the sleeve. He pressed the plunger down, feeding the dead woman’s blood onto the wool. Weird, he thought dreamily. This was all too weird. He gazed at the growing bloodstain on the sweater sleeve …
And then he came to himself. Careful. Not too much, he thought. He stopped the stream of blood from the syringe. Just enough. Just like that. It looked perfect. As if Oliver had stained himself without noticing. He stood and stuffed the sweater roughly into the back of the drawer. He left the drawer ajar slightly, so that a careful investigator would notice it on his own.
He tried to create the same natural effect with the butcher knife. It was the knife that he had used to kill the girl. He had it in the red bag also. It was all covered in Glad wrap. He had swabbed the blade clean last night, but not too thoroughly. Just enough to remove his own fingerprints and yet leave a trail of blood and fabric for the cops to find and analyze. He brought the knife into the kitchenette now. Unwrapped it carefully, keeping his fingers on the plastic. Then he placed it in the drainer, down among the clean dishes there. That would look as if Ollie had brought the knife home and washed it, but hadn’t cleaned it quite well enough.
Like the parables of Christ, he thought, as he set the knife just right. Always a little left to the imagination. Let the cops make their own discoveries, their own deductions. Make them feel like participants, as if they were re-creating the chain of events in their minds. That would bring the whole story to life for them. It would help them convince themselves that he was innocent. Just suddenly, without knowing why, they would think: Oliver! With that pleasant shock of understanding, they would think: It was Oliver all along.
A loud fart escaped him. His stomach was finally starting to settle down a little. He blinked to keep his mind right. Then he crumpled the plastic wrap in his hand and stepped back from the kitchenette. He regarded the drainer scene. Was it all right? He couldn’t think. He couldn’t be sure. He found he was studying an opalescent water droplet on the rim of the sink. He had to concentrate. He turned away. He surveyed the entire apartment. Gray with dusk. Jagged in outline with its stacks and swarms of books. He licked his lips and smiled weakly. It was so much like Oliver, this place. He laughed a little. Oliver, he thought. The only one who could ever help him. When their mother died. When their father deserted them. When he had broken down in college. When he had collapsed at the Christian retreat in P.A. And that night—that night in the mews, when he was drugged to the gills with Aquarius … Oliver, he thought. So much history between them. He felt his love for his big brother surging up inside.
So weird, he thought. He returned to the bathroom, to the red bag. It was all just so weird. Him and Oliver. Coming to this point, reaching this stage of life together. It was hard to believe they had grown so old. There was always someplace inside Zach, someplace in his mind, where Ollie and he were still just kids. Still little children in the Long Island house with Mom and Dad around them. He knelt on the tiles, repacking the bag. Putting in the syringe and the plastic wrap. Burying the skull mask under Tiffany’s clothing. It was so weird that Oliver was thirty-one. That his hairline was starting to recede. That he himself had to shave felt strange sometimes. And then, sometimes the two of them would have these arguments, these grown-up conversations. About politics or art or religion. And Zach would say something like, “The soul could be a product, a sort of radiance, of the body, and still survive it the way a gas survives the two chemicals mixed to create it.” And Ollie would throw up his hands and cry, “It could all be illusion, man! Even self-consciousness could just be the place where the electric function of the brain can’t perceive itself anymore!” And right in the middle of the discussion, Zach would suddenly realize that all they were really saying to each other was: “You are so!” “I am not!” “You are so, ya big doody!” It was exactly the same as ever between them. That was the truth of it. Nothing really had ever changed.
Zach zipped up the red bag slowly. His neck felt limp, his head heavy. He let out a long breath. Boy, he really was tired now. His arms felt like lead. His eyes were practically falling shut. All right, he thought. The business was done. With an effort, he shoved the bag back under the kitchen sink. He worked himself to his feet. He clumped back into the living room again.
He gave a weary groan and dropped down on the mattress. He gazed up at the ceiling, which was now in gray shadow. Oliver would be home soon, he thought. Any second now. And then, all he had to do was wait it out. Wait for the right time. Good, good, good. He closed his eyes. He crossed his hands on his thin chest. He lay on his back, his feet slanting off the bed so his sneakers wouldn’t dirty the bedcovers. Nothing really had ever changed, he thought. And with his eyes still closed, he thought about Tiffany. He imagined her there. Naked. Sitting above him. Straddling him with her muscular legs. Nailing his outstretched arms to the bed with her knees. Cooing down at him. He fucked me, Zach. That night you were in the hospital. With her sweet face, dripping the words down onto his flesh like hot wax. He fucked me so hard. I screamed when I came. Zach’s jeans slowly grew tight as he lay there. He was so big I could hardly take him. Zach’s breathing grew heavier. Oliver and Tiff. He imagined them now. He imagined her bent over the desk with her bare ass lifted. Oliver behind her, thrusting with his hips. Zach’s tears started again. They slipped, cool, down over his temples. They dampened the pillow underneath his head. His jeans were very tight, his erection very hard.
Later, Tiffany had tried to tell him she had made the whole thing up. Isn’t that what I’m supposed to do? She had tried to pretend it was just part of what they did together, part of what they called his Martyrdom. I mean, you told me to say things like that. Isn’t that what you wanted? But Zach knew it was the truth from the moment he heard it. They had been together that night he was in the hospital. He imagined Oliver’s hips circling obscenely as his cock slid in and out of her. He imagined watching them from a secret place. Hidden in the dark in a secret place, watching them. Deep in the dark. Far away …
His tears had ceased. His erection was fading. He was hidden. Farther and farther away in the dark. The street sough at the window was growing distant. He was deep in the closet dark. In his secret compartment there. With the fish-eye lens in the peephole. With the camera hooked up to the lens.
Are you serious? Tiffany was all wide-eyed over it. Isn’t that blackmail? Zach, that can’t be right. It isn’t right.
You know, you look at these actions, Tiffany, and you just see actions, he explained to her. But the symbolism of an act is just as important to the mind of God as the act itself. Otherwise, why would Christ have killed the fig tree, or attacked the moneylenders. So, when you say blackmail, I mean, you’re not operating on the level where you understand the parable. The parable of my life, of our lives. I mean, when we talk about how Nana controls us with her money—and how she’s just going to put Oliver in charge of her money when she dies—I mean, that’s not j
ust … I mean, that’s a parable of our slavery to Mammon in the world. You see? And to be free from that requires an act of martyrdom that will redeem sin.
Oh, Zachie. Oh Zach, please don’t start talking about martyrdom again. I mean, it just doesn’t make sense to me why—
Hey. Whose astro-level is higher? Yours or mine?
Well … I mean … blackmail. How can we blackmail someone? Who are we going to blackmail?
Our little friend Fernando Woodlawn.
The lawyer? But he’s been so nice to us. Ever since you took that picture of him for the magazine, he’s been so sweet. He took us out to dinner and everything …
He’s perfect. He wants to be governor, he has lots of money. And he wants you.
Zachie! I’m not just going to … go to bed with him.
Why not? You did it with Oliver.
She went quiet at that. She frowned, her eyes glistening with tears. Then slowly, in the soft, rhythmic, persuasive voice he often had to use with her, he had begun to explain. The symbolism. The idea. The concept of Martyrdom: the death on which life depends. It would be her Martyrdom this time, he said. It would redeem her from the sins she had been committing against his, Zach’s, flesh, which was, through his spiritual knowledge, the body that contained all things. Symbolically speaking. And she had said that she felt bad about the pain she had caused him, hadn’t she? Well, when this was over, he told her, the purpose of it would be clear to her. Then she would not feel bad about it anymore.
Still, even when she had agreed to it—as he knew she would, as she always agreed to everything—the tears were streaming down her face. How do you even know he’ll do it? she asked him softly.
Woodlawn? Oh, he’ll do it. He wants you. He told me so. And anyway, Zach had added with a shrug, he’s a New York City politician: he’ll fuck anybody.
The Animal Hour Page 24