by Nancy Mauro
“Is something else wrong?” Lloyd’s sunken eyes are on her. “Come on, cupcake, free yourself. Your dissertation is plagiarized? Is that why you so seldom work on it?”
“How cavalier, you giving me advice.” She lifts a finger at the man. “Who’s the impotent one here?”
“You’d better be talking metaphorically.”
“Mirrors? Come on, coward. Is that the best you can do, look under skirts for the rest of your life?”
“Okay, Lily, I understand. Just sock it to me, I can take it, baby.”
She stands up, pivots her head on her neck, listens to the pop of hollows and ball bearings. She’s exhausted by men, the constant natter of them. “Shit or get off the pot, Lloyd.”
“You’ve got a point.” He taps his lip, contemplates. “Now that you’re the scourge of the town, it sure takes the heat off me.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Lloyd shrugs. “The Jews could have really used you during the pogroms.” He stands and straightens his shoe mirrors. “If you will excuse me, sweetheart, I’ve got some skirts to chase.”
Duncan is in the habit of checking his messages with his office telephone set on speaker. He has discovered there’s a small but rewarding sense of accomplishment—a nod to the light industry of multitasking—when he’s able to retrieve messages while moving around his office, hands free to sort through papers, tie laces, or adjust the window blinds.
After punching in the four-digit code (predictably, the month and year of his wedding) his voice mail clicks awake and releases its stored data. He is bent over a file cabinet near the door when the message is relayed, when the sound lifts from the suddenly crystal Samsung speaker, and fills his small office with the chirping madness of crickets.
Heads pop out of cubicles and doorways all along the corridor. Duncan stands for a moment, telescoping the file folders in his hands, amazed by the high-fidelity reproduction of insects. It is the sound of a great plague coming, the sound of his waking terrors, free from obfuscation, from treble and bass.
He makes his way down the corridor of the creative department. Kooch isn’t in his cubicle. Duncan takes a seat at his desk, which is partially hidden behind a support beam. He doesn’t bother scouting around the drawers or trash. He’s not expecting jars of miked grasshoppers. The real evidence is intangible: Kooch is nothing but a hack writer with a flair for intellectual property theft and who holds a grudge against a man who will not let him rise.
Duncan leans back in the chair, props his feet on the desk, and waits.
CHAPTER 26
Nervous Tissue
It’s a good thing he stopped shaving, as his beard helps to cover the keyboard imprint on his face; that universal ordering of tabs and bars, the grout between keys, numbers in the upper reaches with their ghostly and misunderstood alt functions. When Duncan lifts his head, the computer screen also emerges from stasis, just seconds behind him, displaying the time. Seven-ten. But which seven? Which day? He rolls his neck through 360 painful degrees of rotation. His neck and jaw have spent an entire night in an unfortunate angle on the keyboard. Kooch hadn’t returned to his desk last night. Or if he did, Duncan had already fallen asleep while on watch. The office is empty, the east windows bright enough to indicate morning. He looks down at Kooch’s wastebasket. It’s been emptied; the cleaning staff has been in. How could he have slept through the vacuum cleaner? Duncan limps down the hall toward his office, intent on routing out the small stash of prescription codeine he keeps somewhere in his cabinet. The phone on his desk is flashing. When he punches in his code, he hears Lily. Her call came last night. At first he can hardly make out the message, she’s snorting back words in a loose-limbed struggle against tears.
… there were two wheelbarrows where I said I’d seen them. And then that Wakefield man tells me, he says that the dog dug up a human bone. Like a tibia? And that it was running through town with the bone in its mouth until Skinner brought it to the cops—he brought the bone to the cops, not the dog—because people had seen it, you know? So he had gone to the police. And Duncan, that’s Tinker’s tibia and now people are talking about the wild boar and the human bone like it’s all connected. So we need to get her out of the ground, because now they’re trailing the dog to see where it’s going …
He saves the message. Something he rarely does unless it includes a meeting time or a phone number he’s apt to forget. But here, no date, no meeting, no request, just the small and frayed voice of his wife.
“And now, for something completely different.” Lloyd directs her off the sidewalk and into the crack between two office buildings. She is not pleased by the prospect of leaving the yard unguarded, but there’s no way to forestall this evening with Lloyd without a hefty explanation. And as careful as she might try to craft a passable lie, Lily knows, he’d still smell right through it.
Lloyd motions her to keep quiet until they reach the broad alley that stretches west through the remains of some scattered commercial buildings. “One thing, Lily,” he says once they emerge into the alley, “you’re going to have to promise to abide by a rule here.”
“A rule?”
“I mean, whatever happens, remember—we watch but we do not touch.”
“I’m not the frott here.”
“No, I’m saying we are like the walking dead, okay?” Although Lloyd is no more attractive at night than he is in daylight, there’s a crepuscular ease to his features, a pundit’s sense of assurance that blooms in this darkness.
“I’m granting you permission to see the natural world, but not to interact with it. No changing of circumstances.”
“Your greatest prologue yet.” Lily jumps a few steps ahead of him along the alley, trying to forecast their target among the back doors and stone-chipped windows. “Where we going anyway?”
Before she can get a yard away, he’s at her side. He pins her arm with surprising strength.
“Swear it.” He’s never touched her with any force before.
She knows enough to look Lloyd straight in the eyes, into those two, deep-set prunes. Only by opening her entire face to his can she convince him, and herself, that she’s not frightened. Lily wants him to know that unlike his dim-witted teenage gigs she will not allow him the pleasure of a struggle.
“Okay. All right.”
He lets go of her arm.
“So what’s so different about tonight’s field trip?” She forces herself to continue walking. Her voice sounds steady and unaffected, as polished as it was last night in the hardware store. Probably a cow bone. I’ve seen Skinner’s poodle—that dog is no retriever.
“Excellent question!” Lloyd regains his smiling affability and continues along beside her. “Tonight’s excursion is part entertainment, part test. While it’s true that Adult Babyhood is fascinating, I’m worried that I’ve been giving you a unilateral view of the perv world, Lily.”
“There’s more?”
“Sure. I want you to know that it’s a rich, multifaceted place where nearly everyone can find his niche—if nearly everyone was true to their guts.”
“And morally skeptic.”
“Amen.” Lloyd stops, turns her in the direction of a white stucco building behind a grid of plank fencing. He walks slowly toward the edge of the property. “Like I said before, as a peep you see a lot of things before you get a nude. Well, I came across this little beauty a couple months ago. Took a while to figure out the timing, of course. But the thing that might strike you about this situation is that it’s devoid of sexual perversity.”
“Some of that rich tapestry of experience you just mentioned?”
“Yes. People are bewildering.” He pushes her along a narrow path behind the fence. “Motivations are fluid and therefore often inscrutable.”
Lily thinks of Luis Oster. She can’t imagine any sort of fluid motivation that would have caused her great-grandfather to tear a helpless governess to bits. Madness, perhaps. Some sort of neurological problem.
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br /> She glances at Lloyd, who’s squeezing behind her through the two-foot margin between building and fence, and wonders, not for the first time, if she might be touched by that same madness herself.
They move through an alternating host of parking lot smells: gasoline, banana skins, deep-fried wontons. She inches along, pressing close to the building in order to avoid the splintered planks of the fence behind her. Under her fingers the stucco wall feels like a landscape of flattop mesas in miniature, the moss sprouting in the chines of uneven plaster as prolific as chaparral bushes and scrub. About three feet ahead, a ground-level window is lit. Lloyd signals her and they nose up to the ledge, each claiming a bottom corner position.
Inside is a rustic, wood-paneled dental operatory with a floor-mounted spittoon and vinyl-trimmed chair. A Rockwellian throwback, Lily thinks, compared to slick city dental offices where modular seating and flat-screen TVs provide distraction from oral angst. Here, overhead lights throw murky yellow where surfaces should appear sterile.
The dentist—for who else would he be this time of night—is alone and stands drying his hands at the sink. He’s a craggy-nosed man, salted gray and pleasantly avuncular, with a crisp surgical smock over a corduroy shirt and chinos. Lily is relieved to engage in nonlibidinous voyeurism tonight. Despite the Depression-era gloom and outdated dental equipment, there’s something about the older man—perhaps the set of his chin—that she finds kindly and heartwarming.
The dentist putters with some instruments and Lily takes in the rest of the cramped surgical studio. On the wall facing the dental chair is an illustrated medical diagram of a bisected head. The color-coded squirm of soft tissue, hard bone, and cartilage puts her in mind of the finicky job of picking meat from a boiled crab. The echoing chambers of the nasal and oral cavities dominate, then the southbound connection of the nasopharynx, the oropharynx, the laryngopharynx. The maxilla bone on top and mandible below. The tongue—always, forever, mostly in the way. All these tunnels and passages. Some slick-walled and wet, others with a clever lining of cilia fluttering at each breath, busy sieving out foreign particles.
She exhales sharply, trying to clear her own nasal passages of the alley funk surrounding them. It’s astounding, really. The human head is a labyrinthine construction that has virtually assembled itself, or at least has evolved itself, into a compact and self-cleaning unit. Such little upkeep required on the outside—a wash from time to time, run a little balm over the lips in cold weather—compared to the unparalleled self-regulating functions within.
Lloyd had to stand on his toes for a clear view. He comes down, performs a single squat, then flexes both hamstrings before returning to his watch. When Lily looks back in the window, the dentist has taken a seat in the chair and stretches his arms overhead. Might there be a visit from the succubus yet? There are canisters on a dolly behind the spittoon, laughing gas, two slender metal rockets, green and silver with blurred pressure gauges.
As Lily watches, the kindly dentist pulls a jelly face mask out from behind his headrest, untwists the pinched hose that connects it to the nitrous oxide, and straps it over his mouth and nose. He fiddles with the valves, combining and releasing his own personal nitrogen and oxygen cocktail.
Lloyd is watching her. But she keeps her eye on the dentist. He settles into his chair, unfolding a newspaper as though settling in for the Times and a nap.
“Don’t forget,” Lloyd whispers. “You swore.”
Why had he used the word test tonight?
In the operatory the dentist begins to mutter, the paper spread on his lap rising and falling. His eyes are shut and he stretches out his hands and feet. Lily finds herself holding her breath for several long moments until the first giggles emerge, sputtering from the corners of his mouth. She turns her best pinched face on Lloyd. What she means to convey is, So, fine, a nitrous oxide addict. There are worse things. She wants to challenge his notions about her boundaries. It bothers Lily that he paced her through such elegant foreplay, swore her to oaths before turning her on to a dentist who uses hippie crack. Lloyd’s studying her carefully, but doesn’t seem to pick up on her jaded skepticism. She feels a tweak at the back of her neck. Her animal undercoat rising in response to something. But in response to what?
Lloyd’s watchfulness is making her uneasy. At the same time, the force of the dentist’s mirth grows as the minutes pass. The downthrust of each laughing spell is followed by a few moments of silence where he lies perfectly motionless. The newspaper slides to the floor. What happens with too much gas? Lily scrolls through her knowledge bank in vain. The answer to this question, she suspects, was not covered in any of her chemistry lessons at St. Agatha’s.
Another rush of electricity at the back of her neck. Could it be the business of Lloyd’s hand on her arm that’s thrown her? There was real force in those five fingers.
She’s troubled by the way the man in the chair has begun to wriggle out at either end. As though shaking off an infestation of the extremities. Also, his laughter is subsiding. She wishes Lloyd would quit staring. This is definitely not as fun as the breast-fed man. Inside the operatory, one of the dentist’s loafers falls off. The pane of glass between them is thin and the sound of the shoe striking the floor startles Lily. She tries to laugh it off but the effort only serves to heighten her awareness of the dentist’s laughter. No, his lack of laughter. The man is silent now, has grown flaccid. And, by the stillness of his chest—
“I think he’s passed out.”
Hips slide from vinyl seat. Arms splay to the sides as if the body’s being prepped for a gutting.
Lloyd finally turns from her to look through the window. “Yeah, I’d say he has.”
The gas mask is strapped at the back of his head. Because the jelly chamber is fogged, Lily guesses the seal between mask and mouth and nose is still intact. She moves back from the window.
“Why would he strap the mask on?”
“Silly him.”
“He should’ve held it,” she says. “It would have just fallen off.”
Lloyd comes down off his toes. “It always has in the past. Do you think he’s trying to off himself?” But his concern is baroque, gilded.
She tries reading the pervert’s face in the meek operatory light. She knows this voice, of course, this method of rhetorical questioning. But does she believe it?
“Is this part of the thing?” she asks.
“It’s a sleeping dog, little sister,” he says with nothing in his eyes. “I’ll bet they don’t do this shit where you come from.”
She turns, knocks on the glass. “I’m going to go look for a phone.”
Lloyd puts his fingers on the window.
“I won’t give my name,” she adds.
Lloyd keeps his fingers on the pane, as though the glass is a conductor of ugly energy between the two men.
“You’ll do no such thing.”
The remaining codeine pills have slipped from their envelope and have come loose in his pocket with a handful of like-shaped breath mints. Duncan draws out five white tablets. His neck and shoulders are hounding him for relief and in the dim car interior he downs the handful.
He reaches Osterhagen with minty fresh breath and takes the country bypass west of the town, past the infamous site where they exterminated and abandoned the Sovereign of the Deep Wood. He drives slowly along the dirt road, not knowing what to expect here on a Wednesday night in the country. How far sounds might carry.
Duncan reaches the house and drives a couple hundred yards past the place, pulling into the first clearing he sees off the road. He gets out and throws on an old sweater to guard against burrs and branches and deer ticks. There’s a clear moon overhead and with its assistance, he tackles the ditch and thickets with surprising ease. The split rail fence sags under his weight but holds, and it’s a short climb beyond this into the narrow field of stubble. Here, Duncan can see across the flats to the start of the barley crops. He starts hiking back toward Lily.
The house stands over the grain, folded up for the night without a single candle burning to greet the surprise guest wading through the barley. When he pulls out alongside the house, the same moon that got him through the scrub now reveals that Lily’s bike is gone, both ends of the chain lock hanging from the porch rail like empty shackles. At least, he thinks, it’s a voluntary absence. He digs through his pockets for the house keys. Brings up instead a beer cap, a paper coaster, and a plastic cocktail sword. Fuck. Duncan watches his cool curl into wisps and float away. He’s aware of what he’s done wrong tonight: fleeing the office, leaving several campaign components primed to unspool in an air already rank with mutiny. But he wants to see Lily. Or, more accurately, he wants to see her when she least expects it.
Duncan turns to look down the driveway. He could return to the car and search for the keys. But neither the long walk down the road or through the field will be possible now that he’s actually beginning to feel the drain of the meds. He knocks on the door instead. He knocks, knowing there won’t be a response. He knocks because a man can only plan so far in advance and, quite frankly, he hasn’t thought of what might happen beyond this front-step encounter.
What’s he expecting to find anyway? Evidence of witchcraft? Tambourines and candle wax? The golden ram idol of forest nymphs? Or maybe he wants to find her in the garden, breaking her promise once again. Expose her in a small lie that’ll allow him to extrapolate to a larger lie. Another man? Someone brazen and unafraid of nature. Someone whose attributes can be brought down to a concise set of bullet points, an index-card explanation as to why she should be set free.
Duncan walks around to the backyard, where the grass sighs, passing away strand by strand. He keeps within the shadow of this blight of a house, all the while wishing the Crusaders had never come into the piece of ill-managed property. At least in the city he could follow his wife if he had to, find out where she went at night.