Shuteye for the Timebroker

by Paul Di Filippo

  “Too much for you, eh?”

  Lingenfelter raised his head. Sylvester Jowell—recognizable from the photo that accompanied his art columns—stared at Lingenfelter without pity or even much interest. He was wearing a burgundy jersey with its sleeves pushed up and had thrust his hands deep in the pockets of his pleated gray trousers.

  “I’ve never seen such ugly work on canvas before.”

  “Didn’t you read my eloquent warnings in the Harbinger? I’ve written about this show like no other.”

  Lingenfelter’s nape hair bristled. “I know who you are,” he said. “In addition to the Harbinger’s art critic, I mean.”

  “Then you have the advantage of me.”

  “You’re the Squawk Jock.”

  Sylvester Jowell winced. “I loathe that sobriquet. I loathe the feature’s title, for that matter. I lobbied for ‘Cavils and Kvetches,’ you know.”

  “I had no idea. A friend said the Squawk Jock hated highfalutin stuff, but ‘Cavils and Kvetches’ sounds pretentious as hell.”

  Jowell crossed his arms. “Perhaps I do know who you are.”

  Lingenfelter repressed an urge to scream. “Who?”

  “The psychopath using my ‘Squawk of the Week’ as a template for outrageously nasty murders.”

  This accusation stunned Lingenfelter. He wanted to shout it down—to jump up, wrap his fingers around Jo well’s neck, and squeeze until, flushing scarlet and wheezing, Jowell recanted the insult. Of course, those very actions would fulfill Jowell’s every vile expectation of him. As Lingenfelter shook with rage and disgust, Jowell took two or three steps back, his body limned against the folds of the pearl-hued drapes cloaking the opposite wall. He glimmered before these drapes like an object in a cheap special-effects shot of a matter-transmission field.

  “Don’t abandon me here,” Lingenfelter said. “You know I’m not the killer.”

  “How do I know that?”

  “Because you’re either doing the killings yourself or you’re artfully directing them.”

  “Ah.” Jowell smiled. “Rest assured that I have no intention of abandoning you here, Mr. Lingenfelter.”

  His image—as shiny as a tinfoil cutout—steadied before the headache-inducing dazzle of the curtain.

  At that moment, three figures—like three-dimensional projections of the images in some of Francis Bacon’s paintings—walked through the chamber in single file. The first was an airline clerk wearing a bloody cap and a bloody bandage over the stub at the end of his right arm. The second was a portly man in a chalk-striped Italian business suit carrying his own swollen, shocked-looking head in his handless arms. These grotesque persons passed through the chamber without speaking. The third figure—a fit-looking priest in a black cassock and a jaunty black biretta—halted directly in front of Sylvester Jowell. He turned to look at Lingenfelter, who prepared to avert his gaze.

  “Excuse me,” the interloper said in an odd nasal voice. “Do you know in which room I can find Study after Velazquez, Number One?”

  Lingenfelter experienced profound relief that the shade of Chick Morrow, bearing the signs of his strangulation, had not posed this question. “No, sir, I’m afraid I don’t,” he said belatedly.

  The priest consulted a photocopied list. “Then how about a painting called Blood on the Floor?”

  “I’m wandering lost in this place, Father. But, to my eye, every painting here seems to celebrate lostness.”

  “Do you think so?” the priest said. Then he recited, “‘If all art is but an imitation of nature, then this Francis Bacon character must have really liked imitating its nastiest processes.’”

  “That sounds like a squawk,” Lingenfelter said.

  “Sadly, an unpublished one.” The priest either smiled or scowled.

  “Forgive my intrusion.” When he walked from the chamber into the next room, the air in his cassock’s wake actually crackled.

  Sylvester Jowell touched a finger to his face, which shone like a life mask lit from behind by a candle. Overlapping taped commentaries buzzed in the headsets of people in other rooms, a faint, out-of-sync chorus.

  “What did you want of me?” Jowell asked Lingenfelter.

  “A telephone number. An e-mail address. A name. The identity of the ‘Squawk of the Week’ killer.”

  “What if I admitted my sole culpability?”

  “I’d turn you in to the police as a prime suspect! I’d also fight to haul you into the station house to sign such a confession!”

  “‘Prime’?” Jowell repeated. “Provocative word.” He shimmered in his slacks and jersey. His skin glimmered. The folds of the gray curtain behind him foregrounded themselves so that they resembled the bars of a cage. Jowell grabbed them with his pale hands. Then he let go and peeled back the front of his knit shirt to reveal the fatty wings of his own rib cage. Without wholly dissolving, his face melted. His mouth opened, but no sound issued from it. The curtain at his back flickered like an electric field, its folds continuing to mimic the solidity of prison bars. Jowell’s body and face phased in and out of reality, wavering between freedom and encagement.

  Elsewhere, the sounds of shuffling feet and talking headsets told Lingenfelter that he had not suffered a psychotic break. Upon entering the show, he had seen a framed black-and-white photograph of Francis Bacon, middle-aged and shirtless. Triumphant in his own frank animality, Bacon held aloft in each hand a naked flank of meat. The distorted image of Jowell with his chest split open qualified as a living take on that still photographic image.

  Lingenfelter screamed and leaped to his feet.

  Jowell vanished like early-morning fog. The isolated little room congealed around Lingenfelter like aspic. The drapes on the wall had folds again rather than bars, but the chamber held him fast. It held him until a member of museum security and two Atlanta policemen hurried in, handcuffed him, and escorted him out of the exhibit under the astonished gazes of a dozen visitors. Lingenfelter wondered where all these people had come from.

  • Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage, but tell that to somebody who can’t interpenetrate them like Superman.

  • Tomorrow my wife will receive word that I am taking the spring short course in license-plate design.

  • If the measure of a good resort is the quality of the people you meet, this one deserves a minus five stars.

  Obsessively, Lingenfelter mentally framed squawks of a confessional sort. (It looked as if he had been framed himself.) Doing so helped pass the time. He had used his one telephone call to ring up Ernie’s sister’s house. Then he had asked Ernie to contact his lawyer, his wife, his agent, and Heather Farris at the Harbinger. Maybe she had some pull with local law enforcement. She could certainly testify to his good character, his reliability as a book reviewer, and his essential innocence, even if he did write down-and-dirty mystery thrillers.

  In the presence of his daunted attorney, Cleveland Bream, the police had grilled Lingenfelter about the squawk murders. Nan did not call. Later, the police summoned him from a fusty basement cell for a visit with Ernie Salter in their favorite interrogation room. All through this low-key talk, Lingenfelter knew that detectives were watching through a two-way mirror, eavesdropping on every word. Ernie promised to do all he could to help, and then he drove home. Heather Farris neither telephoned nor visited. Back downstairs, Lingenfelter wrote his squawks.

  Eventually, a guard approached him to say that he had another visitor. “Don’t get up,” the guard said. “This one’s coming to you—an honest-to-God Catholic priest. So don’t do anything antisocial or violent, OK?”

  “A priest?”

  The guard read from a manifest: “Diego Fahey, SJ.”

  “I’m not Catholic,” Lingenfelter protested. But the guard ignored him and left. Minutes later, the same spectral priest who had spoken to him in the High Museum loomed over him like a vulturine confessor.

  Lingenfelter’s hands went clammy, as if they were encased in latex gloves. His
stomach cramped repeatedly. Did anyone ever bother to search a priest? This one’s cassock sleeves could have concealed a National Guard arsenal—or at least a carving knife or two, an automatic pistol, and a fold-up machete.

  “Pleased to see you again,” Father Fahey said. “Sorry it’s under these dreary circumstances.”

  “What’s the ‘SJ’ stand for?”

  “Society of Jesus.” Father Fahey’s pupils glittered like bits of obsidian. “Why? What did you think they stood for?”

  “I couldn’t have said. Do you happen to know Sylvester Jowell?”

  “No, I don’t. Interesting name, though.”

  “Interesting initials, too.”

  “I suppose so. Did his initials lead you to assume a connection between him and us Jesuits?” Without asking, Father Fahey sat beside Lingenfelter on his narrow cot and gripped his knee. “Because we don’t know him. We’ve never known him. His opinions distress us. His motives defy our comprehension.” The grip on Lingenfelter’s knee grew more insistent, as painful as the flexion of a raptor’s talons. Father Fahey’s pupils—his dark-brown irises, for that matter—abruptly clouded, as if someone had pressed disks of smoked glass over them. “Shhh,” he said. “Don’t cry out. Love is the devil, but silence gets all manner of wickedness done.”

  From one cassock sleeve Father Fahey pulled a wooden ruler with a thin copper edge and some sort of writing implement. From the other he extracted a switchblade that Lingenfelter dimly associated with the Cross …

  * * *

  Heather Farris perched at Lingenfelter’s bedside in Henry Grady Memorial Hospital. For twenty minutes she had apologized for ratting him out to the police after identifying Sylvester Jowell to him as the Squawk Jock. She apologized for failing to heed Ernie Salter’s notification of his arrest. She apologized for the peculiar wounds that the priest had inflicted upon him in a fugue of profound enthrallment after cajoling his way into Lingenfelter’s cell. As Heather spoke, the mole on her jaw occupied almost all his attention.

  Apparently, Father Fahey had placed the wooden ruler across Lingenfelter’s windpipe until Lingenfelter blacked out. Then he had measured the cell’s dimensions in feet and inches. He wrote the length, height, and breadth of the cage on its rear wall in bright pearl-gray numerals. Then he placed Lingenfelter on the floor, cut away his shirt, and used the switchblade to gouge four star-shaped badges of flesh out of his torso. He was bent over Lingenfelter carving a fifth star into his chest, right above the heart, when the police broke in and seized him. If the cuts had gone much deeper, Lingenfelter would not have awakened.

  Heather said, “You don’t know how glad I was to see your eyes open, Harry.”

  Lingenfelter nodded. He wondered how Diego Fahey, SJ, had read his mind. He wondered if capturing and subduing the priest, whom Heather said had no memory of assaulting him, would put an end to the squawk murders. He feared the opposite. If the real agency behind the slayings could inspire new killers with epigrammatic thoughts out of the mental ether, the bizarre assaults would go on. Fahey struck Lingenfelter as a mere cat’s-paw whom Sylvester Jowell had felled by channeling and focusing the destructive essence of innumerable malign squawks, brilliant and banal.

  The ruler across Lingenfelter’s throat had rendered him temporarily mute. He knew this without even trying to talk. Heather detected his agitation and handed him a notepad and a pen. He worked to position them properly and then scratched out on the pad’s top sheet: What’s happened to Jowell?

  “He’s disappeared,” Heather said. “I think he knew that Diego Fahey, SJ, had outlived his usefulness. What serial killer in his cunning right mind attempts a murder in a locked jail cell?”

  No one knew where Jowell had gone, but Heather had an idea. The Francis Bacon exhibit at the High closed tomorrow and moved across country to a museum—Heather could not remember its name—in the San Francisco area. This fact struck her as suggestive. Lingenfelter pondered it for about thirty seconds and then scrawled a message on his notepad: Need to rest.

  * * *

  Although his doctors had advised him not to, on Sunday Lingenfelter attended Chick Morrow’s funeral. He sat with Lorna Riley in a pew reserved for close friends of the deceased, but he could not stop thinking of a melancholy Woody Allen observation: “We’re all in this alone.” So far as Lingenfelter knew, no one had ever ripped off this clever remark and submitted it to “The Squawk Box.”

  The young priest officiating at the service did his earnest best to contradict both this unspoken sentiment and the artist Francis Bacon’s love affair with portraits of caged and screaming popes. He exuded humility and calm. Some of his serenity passed into Lingenfelter. After all, Chick Morrow had considered Lingenfelter a friend, Lorna Riley had invited him to come, and not one mourner looked at him as if his presence in any way profaned these rites.

  An alien thought—a squawklike saying—struggled to rise into Lingenfelter’s consciousness. He could tell by its alien edge that it had originated elsewhere—in the troubled, alcoholic depths of Francis Bacon’s own personality, in fact. At length he had this terrible epigram firm and entire in his head: “I always think of friendship as where two people can really tear each other to pieces.” Lingenfelter’s mouth opened in awe and horror.

  Lorna Riley nudged him and whispered, “What’s wrong, Harry?”

  Lingenfelter tried to tell her, but all that he heard escaping his lips was a hideous, inarticulate squawk.

  Although my records of this period no longer exist, I am convinced that I wrote this story at approximately the same time that I composed Harp, Pipe, and Symphony, circa 1983. Its motifs and concerns are too similar not to have sprung from the same creative ferment that engendered that novel. A young man’s motifs and concerns, assuredly, but perhaps somewhat eternal for all that. I had forgotten the very existence of this story until, at the behest of publisher and editor Sean Wallace, I began rummaging through my files for any heretofore unpublished piece of fiction that could accompany the limited edition of Harp, Pipe, and Symphony.

  Rereading it for the first time in twenty years, I had as disorienting an experience as anything undergone by my protagonist, John Moreton—an experience as memorably piquant as any I have ever had, where my own writing was involved.

  I hope my readers enjoy some of the same sensations.

  Walking the Great Road

  For Broadway

  He set down the book.

  Rising from his chair, John Moreton thought, How strange. I’ve just read a story so full of life that it’s convinced me to forswear all reading.

  Music swelled from the speakers nestled amid his books, filling the crowded, shelf-lined study with a gorgeously colored cloud of sound: Scheherazade by Rimsky-Korsakov. Moreton’s head spun with the symphony and the impact of the unexpected epiphany. He felt slightly queasy, yet elated, as if he’d suddenly been conquered by a disease like life itself, which invigorates and compels the sufferer, even as it inevitably carries him closer and closer to death.

  He knew that from this instant, nothing would ever be the same again.

  His life could not consist almost solely of scribbling and devouring words anymore. The story—that damned, wonderful story!—had shown him the folly of such activity. (And how strange that a message delivered in a certain medium could work to overthrow the essential validity of that very medium. Only words had enough power to commit suicide. There would never be a statue that could argue for the destruction of all monuments, or a song that proposed all songs were empty, or a painting that negated the glory of color on canvas. Paradoxically, the stronger such works were, the more they contradicted their own arguments. No, only language was subtle enough, possessed of enough of the magic of life to deny itself.)

  Moreton spun on his heel in a daze. His surroundings struck him as alien, bizarre. He felt incredibly old, yet childlike, although he was neither elderly nor adolescent. What was he to do with his life now? The room oppressed him so that he could hardl
y breathe. He knew he had to flee. Yet where?

  Just get out, his mind urged. Decide outside. But quit this place.

  Moreton ran to the door, fumbled with the knob, got it open after what seemed an eternity, and fled his apartment, taking nothing but the clothes on his back and the change in his pockets.

  In his study, the pages of “Idle Days on the Yann” turned in a vagrant breeze, as if the wind sought to learn what had made the man run, and the music played on to itself.

  * * *

  Out on the sidewalk, he could breathe easier, exhaust fumes notwithstanding. The noise of the traffic was less disorienting than the symphony, chaos being less frightening than order at the moment. In his windowless, lamp-lit room full of books, he had been unaware of either the time of day or the weather. He was rather startled to find that it was close to noon on a sunny spring day. He looked up, marveling. The cloudless sky was a seamless royal blue fabric, stitched with birds. Across the busy street, tall apartment and office buildings reared up their bulky forms. The sidewalks were filled with lazing lunchtime strollers.

  Moreton turned, expecting to confront the revolving door to his building.

  The door was not there. The building itself—where he had lived his narrow, page-bound, constricted life—was gone. The adjoining buildings had vanished also.

  In their place was a wall. The wall was composed of giant granite blocks flecked with mica that glittered in the sun. The massive blocks ran in mortarless courses, their edges trimmed so precisely that Moreton doubted a piece of paper could have been inserted between them.