The Burn Palace

by Stephen Dobyns

  But here he was at the police station, and he bounced up over the curb to the front steps. Should he lock his bike? Maybe he had better. After all, it was full of crooks. Thinking that made him remember why he had come, and he got angry. The damn crooks! And he ran up the steps.

  The lobby was empty except for a policeman behind the desk reading a newspaper. “I want to report a crime,” said Hercel.

  The policeman lowered his paper but didn’t speak. He looked tired, as if he’d been up all night.

  “Someone broke into our basement and stole my pet. They broke the lock.”

  “Oh, yeah?” The policeman began to look amused.

  “Yeah. They stole my snake, a corn snake, a really nice one.”

  • • •

  Vicki Lefebvre awoke that morning on the couch. Her covers—two shawls and her winter coat—had slipped to the floor and she was cold even though the sun was just coming through the windows. It took her a moment to get her bearings. It was seven.

  Quickly, she scrambled to her feet. Had Nina come home? She ran upstairs to Nina’s room fearing the worst. But her daughter was asleep, her brown hair tousled on her pillow, her thick bangs nearly reaching her eyebrows like her favorite singer, Adele, whose posters hung on the bedroom walls.

  “What time did you get home?” shouted Vicki.

  Nina opened her eyes and looked at her mother. Vicki should have known right then that something was wrong, because Nina showed no expression. Usually her emotions were all over the map.

  “Where were you? Don’t you know I was worried sick? You were gone two nights. You lied to me. I’m going to call your dad immediately, see if I don’t! Maybe he can deal with you.” All this was delivered in a shout as her daughter got out of bed and made her way to the bathroom. She’d slept in her clothes, jeans and a sweater. There was mud on her cuffs, and her feet were dirty.

  “Look at the mess you’ve made with your muddy clothes! Where have you been? I demand an answer, young lady. Have you been seeing some boy? If you get knocked up, I’m not raising your brat. I insist you tell me where you’ve been. Look at the time! Now you’ll be late for school!”

  Nina entered the bathroom, shut and locked the door. A moment later, Vicki heard the shower. She felt on the verge of tears. “I refuse to put up with this!” Then she felt foolish shouting at a locked door and returned to her daughter’s bedroom. She didn’t want to yell at Nina. She wanted to tell her how glad she was to find her safe and sound. Even to tell her she loved her. The girl’s shoes were also muddy. Clothes were scattered across the floor, papers covered the small desk, along with socks, jars of makeup, dirty glasses, and cereal bowls. Vicki gathered up the dirty dishes.

  When Nina came out of the bathroom, she didn’t return to her room but headed down the stairs, not running, just proceeding at a steady pace.

  Vicki ran after her while balancing the dishes, so as not to drop them. “Aren’t you even going to change your clothes? They’re an absolute mess. What’s wrong with you, anyway? I demand you come home right after school. If you ever do this again, I’m calling the police. You’re grounded, young lady. Until further notice!”

  At the door, Nina picked up her backpack with her schoolbooks. She looked up at her mother who had paused halfway down the stairs. Vicki was too mad to think of anything except her anger and Nina’s list of transgressions. Later she recalled the girl’s expression and how sad she looked. And she also thought about how her daughter always shouted back, how she always gave as good as she got. But not this time. This time she slung her bag over her shoulder and left, even shutting the door behind her.

  • • •

  Ernest Hartmann’s back hurt, and he blamed it on the queen-size bed in the Brewster Inn, a lousy bed with a dip in the middle from years of rough sex play, and his back had slipped into it like a burger into a bun and got bent out of shape. Now he walked in a crouch. Whenever he straightened up, a million volts of electricity shot through his sacroiliac or someplace like that. Absolutely the last thing he wanted was a back operation, a surgeon taking a knife to him. But he had messed up his back before and each time made it worse and someday his sacroiliac, or whatever it was, would be no more than silly putty.

  At seven a.m., having been awake for several hours, he had gingerly crept from bed and dragged himself to the shower. This by itself nearly killed him. But the hot water had done some good, and despite the pain he managed to get dressed. The alternative was lying like a log until the maids found him. He put on his jeans, a blue aloha shirt with a chain of white hibiscus across the chest, and a dark blue blazer. Then he headed for the door.

  Hartmann folded himself into his blue Ford Focus coupe—he called it a Mazda in drag—and sat, breathing heavily. If he had been able to afford something bigger like a Ford Escape, he could climb in and out without yanking his back, but he hadn’t had the extra money, though he was paying for it now in back pain, that’s for sure. Pulling out of the motel lot, he drove to the CVS for ibuprofen, aspirin, and naproxen—he would pop all three until he started feeling better. Then he drove to the Brewster Brew to dose himself with caffeine and maybe a pumpernickel-raisin bagel with cream cheese.

  The coffee shop was in the middle of the block, and in its previous life it had been Henry’s Shoes, but as Brewster Brew it was making more money than Mr. Henry ever made in his last few years, and the owner, Jean Sawyer, also got a break on the rent.

  When Hartmann entered, Jean was talking to Florie Ligetti at the counter, talking so intensely that neither woman saw him. Florie, Hartmann thought, was a little too thin and had one of those flat asses he didn’t like, flat as a board. Jean was more to his taste, plump and womanly. Both women were about his age. Not that Hartmann was interested; he was only window-shopping. Anyway, having sex with his back out would put him in his coffin, muy pronto. On two shelves behind the counter were old-time coffeemakers, and above them was a watercolor of a gentleman in a white wig who looked vaguely like George Washington, though more depressed. Beneath were the words: Wrestling Brewster, Our Founder.

  Hartmann tapped a quarter on the glass and the women looked at him blankly, as if wondering what he was doing there. “Could I get a black coffee and a bagel, pumpernickel-raisin, if you have it?”

  As the woman behind the counter took a cup from the shelf, she began to smile as if just waking up. “Haven’t you heard about the snakes?”

  The very question made Hartmann’s back hurt. He decided not to answer it. “And cream cheese, low-fat cream cheese.”

  “The hospital’s full of them. A baby was stolen. Abducted. Peggy Summers’s baby, poor thing. I hope they don’t ransom it, because Peggy doesn’t have a dime. The town’s absolutely packed with cops; they’re all over at the hospital. My mom went over this morning for a flu shot and they wouldn’t let her in. You said you wanted cream?”

  “Black.” Hartmann was positive he didn’t want to get caught up in a wacko conversation, but then he asked, “Where’d the snakes come from?”

  “Nobody knows. It’s a mystery. The whole thing’s a mystery. TV’s been here, all sorts of people. It’s going to put this town on the map. No way it’s not going to be on CNN with that Wolf Biter, or whatever his name is.”

  “Blitzer,” said Hartmann. “That a real picture up there, that Brewster picture?”

  “The watercolor thing? No way. I had a contest to see who could paint the best old-fashioned picture of the guy they named the town for. The winner got five pounds of coffee of his choice. A kid from the high school won. It looks like George Washington, don’t you think?”

  “Was that his name? Wrestling?”

  “That’s right, Wrestling Brewster. He spent his life wrestling with the Devil.”

  “Doesn’t look like he won,” said Hartmann.

  “He was eaten by a pack of wolves. They had wolves in those days.”

  During their conversation, the woman poured Hartmann his coffee and put the bagel in the toaster oven. “
I’ll bring your bagel over in a jiff. There’s a newspaper, but it doesn’t have anything about the snakes. I mean, it just happened.”

  Hartmann gingerly walked to the table; the wrong step sent a jagged lightning bolt through his lower back. He wondered how he had thrown it out. Maybe it was bad dreams about the twins, about street gangs in LA where they lived; heavy traffic. As he sipped his coffee, he looked out at the street. In the course of a minute, three police cruisers drove by in one direction and two drove by in the other. He guessed this snake business was something after all. He wasn’t sure how he felt about it. If the person he was supposed to meet was trying to keep his business secret, then a town full of cops might put a scare into him.

  The woman brought his bagel. “You look like you’re walking on eggshells. It must be the weather. My mom says her bones tell her when a storm’s coming.”

  Hartmann turned awkwardly. “It was the bed at the motel. I slept on it wrong, that’s all.”

  “I never visit motels myself. They wash the sheets but not the bedspreads. Bodily fluids soak into them. Anyway, you should go upstairs. They got lots of ways to fix it.”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “You-You, they’ll take care of it.”

  Hartmann thought the pain kept him from hearing correctly. “I’m not following you.”

  “You’re not from around here? The You Within You. They got classes all day long. It’s an alternative place. They got a bunch of different massage people. Like a supermarket, I mean, you just pick the one that suits you best. You-You, get it?”

  “Got it. Maybe I’ll give them a try.” It wouldn’t do any harm, he thought.

  “I’ve got friends that swear by it. Me, I got a back like a horse.”

  Moments later the woman was again talking to her friend. Hartmann had had massages in the past, though not for a while. He didn’t dislike them, but neither was he a fan. They were intimate yet formal at the same time. Not like a dentist, who was purely formal. He knew he should think of it like seeing a dentist, but a massage had a faintly erotic element that was undentistlike. On the other hand, his back was killing him and he had a few hours to spare. Anything was better than being in pain all day.

  Hartmann knew nothing about the different types of massage, so when he climbed the stairs to the You-You desk and the young man asked what sort of massage he wanted, Hartmann said, “I don’t know, something like a health club massage. I pulled my back.”

  “I don’t believe we have that sort of massage. Is it Swedish?”

  As an insurance investigator, Hartmann had met lots of unpleasant people and he had learned to deal with them without animus, or at least without revealing his feelings. This young fellow had nothing wrong with him except he belonged to a world that Hartmann knew nothing about and he saw Hartmann as belonging to a world he had escaped. He was thin, thirty, fit, with a monkish appearance. From another room came the grunts and thumps of an exercise class.

  Hartmann rubbed the back of his head and grinned. “I’ll take whatever makes me feel better. Something conservative. Never mind the hot stones.” Hartmann had noticed a flyer advertising stone massage, as well as shiatsu, reflexology massage, hilot massage, and ayurvedic massage. Other flyers announced classes in yoga and a number of offerings that made no sense to him, such as myofascial release, and some that made sense but which he didn’t understand, like aromatherapy. Hartmann wasn’t judgmental, but neither was he an easy believer. Toward everything he took a wait-and-see approach.

  “Then we’ll make it Swedish. I’ll see who’s available.” The young man got busy on his iPhone.

  Ten minutes later Hartmann was naked except for his shorts and a towel around his waist. His clothes were folded on a chair, as he waited in a small room painted in various pastels with posters of peaceful landscapes mostly indicative of spring and early mornings, nothing in black and white, nothing moody like Ansel Adams.

  A young man entered who looked rather like the man at the front desk except he was blond. “Hi. I’m Gabe. May I call you Ernie?”

  “No,” said Hartmann. “I’d prefer Ernest, if anything.”

  “And are you earnest?” Gabe laughed. Hanging around his neck and across his red T-shirt was a gold chain with a circular red medallion of a serpent with its tail in its mouth. “I take it you’re a virgin?”

  Hartmann had been looking at the snake. “I beg your pardon?”

  “This is your first time at You-You?”

  “Right.”

  “Should I concentrate on the back, or do you want the full treatment?”

  By now Hartmann was on his belly on the table, with his head in the horseshoe-shaped support, staring down at the tile floor. “It’s the back that’s bothering me.”

  “You seem pretty tense.”

  “Maybe it’s because I’m a virgin.”

  They both laughed.

  “Just the back,” said Hartmann. “Maybe the shoulders if there’s time.”

  Gabe put his hands on Hartmann’s lower back; he winced.

  “Touchy, touchy. Just relax. You’ve got nice hair. Do girls ever tell you that?”

  “Not for a while.”

  “You do anything to it?”

  Hartmann winced again. The back felt worse, not better. “I wash it and brush it. The rest is genetic.”

  “What are you, in your forties? You don’t even have any gray.”

  Why’s he asking about my hair? thought Hartmann. He decided to change the subject. “What’s that red snake you’ve got around your neck?”

  “Ouroboros, the snake with its tail in its mouth. It’s the symbol of cyclicality and the Eternal Return,” said Gabe, settling into his subject. “Everything repeats itself. What we’re doing now we’ve done countless times before and we’ll do countless times in the future. If matter is finite and time is infinite, then events have to repeat themselves. It’s only logical. No telling how many times I’ve given you a massage. More than once, that’s for sure.”

  “Just as long as your prices don’t go up.” Hartmann thought he should have guessed the snake meant something like that. He couldn’t imagine having such ideas.

  “Ouroboros is one of our oldest symbols. Many people think that when the first travelers left Africa seventy thousand years ago, they brought this symbol with them. You see, this isn’t a European snake. It’s huge; it’s African.”

  Hartmann made a noncommittal grunt.

  Gabe had stopped working on Hartmann’s back; now he started again and again Hartmann winced. “Just relax,” Gabe repeated. “You know what it means to ‘go with the flow’? You gotta focus on it, think of it as the center of a bull’s-eye.”

  After a moment, Hartmann asked, “So what does this snake do for you?” The man’s hands were warm as he kneaded the small of Hartmann’s back with long, firm strokes.

  “It reminds me of beginnings and endings, where I’ve come from and where I’m going. It reminds me that everything I think’s real is in fact an illusion, an illusion that occurs again and again through time—just like that movie The Matrix but different. Have you ever wondered where we’d be if it weren’t for the snake in the Garden of Eden?”

  “I’ve never given much thought to it.”

  “We’d still be in the garden, but we wouldn’t know anything. We’d be ignorant. No, we’d be stupid. Have you thought how it’d be without knowledge?”

  “No newspapers.”

  Gabe pushed down sharply and Hartmann grunted. “You’re a funny guy, aren’t you.” It wasn’t a question.

  Hartmann apologized. “I don’t mean to be disrespectful. We’ve all got to believe in something, right?”

  “It’s not that I just believe in snakes. I respect them.”

  “But you believe in Ouroboros.” Hartmann wondered if Gabe knew about the business at the hospital.

  “I don’t believe in some big snake with its tail in its mouth. It’s a symbol. I believe in what it symbolizes. Are you Catholic?”

&nb
sp; “I was raised Catholic.” Hartmann hadn’t been in a church for twenty years except for weddings and funerals.

  “Me, too, but then I moved on.”

  Hartmann realized his back had begun to feel better.

  “Right now,” said Gabe, “I’m a pantheist. Everything’s part of the supreme being—you, this table, your shoes, me, everything. It’s all energy and it repeats and repeats. It seems like many things all mixed up, but it’s just one thing.”

  “Like Ouroboros.”

  “Exactly.”

  “As long as it makes you happy,” said Hartmann diplomatically. What he didn’t understand was why people made things so complicated. Even if you tried to keep things simple, they got complicated all by themselves. So why start with them already complicated? Then you had a mess.

  In ten more minutes, Hartmann’s fifty minutes were up. Gabe slapped him lightly on his rump. “There, that should do you for a while.”

  Hartmann got off the table. He definitely felt better. He’d paid at the front desk, but he wondered if he should give Gabe a tip. He reached for his clothes to get his wallet. Something fell from his pocket, clinked on the floor, and rolled. It was the brass coin the man had given him in Boston with a five-pointed star on one side and a goat standing on its hind legs on the other.

  Gabe reached under a chair, picked it up, and looked at it. “Wow, where’d you get this? It’s neat. Is it your good-luck coin?”

  “Someone gave it to me yesterday.” Hartmann reached out for it.

  Gabe looked at the coin for a moment and gave it back. “And it’s got those funny letters. Like ancient. This is really weird. D’you know what it means?”

  Hartmann put the coin back in his pocket and continued getting dressed. “I’ve no idea. Some mystical stuff, most likely.”

  “That goat standing on its hind legs, that’s the horned god. It’s what later became the Devil. It’s an image of Satan.”

  Hartmann finished tying his shoes. He was tired of these subjects and wanted to get busy. “It probably comes from Africa, too. Right?”