by Peter Straub
Michael supposed that for someone like Sam Stein what was happening to Stacy Talbot was also just normal medicine. For him, it was very much like what had happened to Robbie.
He stepped inside her room and squinted into the darkness. Her eyes were closed. He waited a moment before moving toward her. The blinds were down and the lights were off. Flowers from the shop on the hospital’s ground floor wilted in the dense dark air. Just visible beneath a welter of tubes, Stacy’s chest rose and fell. On the sheet next to her hand lay a copy of Huckleberry Finn. The placement of the bookmark showed that she had nearly finished reading it.
Michael stepped toward her bed, and her eyes opened. It took her a moment to recognize him, and then she grinned.
“I’m glad it’s you,” she said.
Stacy was not really his patient at all anymore—as the disease rampaged throughout her brain and body, she had been handed off to one specialist after another.
“I brought you a new book,” he said, and put it on her table. Then he sat down next to her and gently took her hand in his.
Stacy’s dehydrated skin emanated heat. Michael could see each brown spike of her eyebrows propped against a pad of red flesh. All of her hair had fallen out, and she wore a brilliantly colored knit cap that made her look vaguely Middle Eastern.
“Do you think Emmaline Grangerford had cancer?” she asked him. “I suppose not, actually. I keep hoping I’ll read a book some day that has someone like me in it, but I never do.”
“You’re not exactly an ordinary kid,” Michael said.
“Sometimes I think all of this stuff couldn’t really be happening to me—I think I must have just made it all up, and I’m really lying on my bed at home, doing a spectacular job of staying out of school.”
He opened her folder and skimmed through the dry account of her ongoing catastrophe.
“They found a new one.”
“So I see.”
“I guess I’ll get another dent in my head.” She tried to smile sideways at him, but failed. “I sort of like going to the CAT-scan, though. It’s tremendous travel. Past the nurses’ station! All the way down the hall! A ride on the elevator!”
“Must be highly stimulating.”
“I get faint all over and have to lie down for days and days.”
“And women clothed in white minister to your every need.”
“Unfortunately.”
Then her eyes widened, and for a moment she closed her hot fingers over his. When she relaxed, she said, “This is the moment when one of my aunts always tells me that she’ll pray for me.”
Michael smiled and held her hand tightly.
“At times like that I think that whoever is in charge of listening to prayers must be really sick of hearing my name.”
“I’ll see if I can get one of the nurses to take you out of your room once in a while. You seem to enjoy elevator travel.”
For a second Stacy looked almost hopeful.
“I wanted to tell you that I’m going to be doing some traveling myself,” Michael said. “Toward the end of January I’ll be going away for two or three weeks.” Stacy’s face settled back into the mask of illness. “I’m going to Singapore. Maybe Bangkok, too.”
“Alone?”
“With a couple of other people.”
“Very mysterious. I guess I ought to thank you for giving me plenty of warning.”
“I’ll send you a thousand postcards of men waving snakes in the air and elephants crossing against rickshaw traffic.”
“Swell. I visit the elevator, and you visit Singapore. Don’t bother.”
“I’ll bother if I want to.”
“Don’t do me any favors.” She turned her head away from him. “I mean it. Don’t bother.”
Michael had the feeling that this had happened before, in just this same way. He leaned forward and stroked her forehead. Her face contorted. “I’m sorry you’re angry with me, but I’ll see you again next week and we can talk about it some more.”
“How could you know what I feel? I’m so stupid. You don’t have any idea about what goes on inside me.”
“Believe it or not, I have some idea,” he said.
“Ever see a CAT-scan from the inside, Dr. Poole?”
Michael stood up. When he bent over to kiss her, she turned her head away.
She was crying when he left the room. Michael stopped at the nurses’ station before escaping the hospital.
3
That evening Poole called the other men about the charter flight. Conor said, “Wild, sign me up, man.” Harry Beevers said, “Outstanding. I was wondering when you were going to come through for us.” Tina Pumo said, “You know what my answer is, Mike. Somebody’s got to mind the store.”
“You just became my wife’s hero,” Michael said. “Well, anyhow … would you mind trying to find Tim Underhill’s address for us? His paperback publisher is Gladstone House—somebody there ought to know it.”
They agreed to have a drink together before the trip.
4
One night the following week, Michael Poole drove slowly home from New York through a snowstorm. Abandoned cars, many of them dented or wrecked, lay along the side of the parkway like corpses after a battle. A few hundred yards ahead the light bar on top of a police car flashed red-yellow-blue-yellow-red. Cars crawled in single file, dimly visible, past a high white ambulance and policemen waving lighted batons. For a second Poole imagined that he saw Tim Underhill, in the snow very like a giant white rabbit, standing beside his car in the storm, waving a lantern. To stop him? To light his way forward? Poole turned his head and saw that it was a tree heavy with snow. A yellow beam from the police car flashed through his windshield and traveled across the front seat.
1
All at once everything seemed to be going wrong, Tina Pumo thought, all at once everything was falling apart. He hated the Palladium and the Mike Todd Room. He also hated Area, the Roxy, CBGB’s, Magique, Danceteria, and the Ritz. Maggie wasn’t going to show up at the Mike Todd Room, and she wasn’t going to be at any of those other places either. He could stand at the bar for hours, drink until he fell down, and all that would happen was that hundreds of little night people would stomp him on the way to their next bottle of Rolling Rock.
The first time he talked his way past the doorman into the vast barnlike room that the Palladium used for publicity parties and private gatherings he had come from a marathon meeting with Saigon’s accountants. He was wearing his only grey flannel suit, purchased before the Vietnam War and small enough to pinch his waist. Pumo wandered through the crowd searching for Maggie. He noticed eventually that nearly everybody looked at him sharply, just once, then stepped away. In an otherwise crowded room, he was surrounded by a sort of DMZ, a cordon sanitaire of empty space. Once he heard laughter behind his back, turned around to see if he could share the joke, and saw everybody turn to stone, staring at him. Finally he went up to the bar and managed to catch the eye of a skinny young bartender with mascara on his face and a tangle of blond hair piled up on top of his head.
“I was wondering if you knew a girl named Maggie Lah,” Tina said. “I was supposed to meet her here tonight. She’s short, she’s Chinese, good-looking—”
“I know her,” the bartender said. “She might be in later.” He retreated to the other end of the bar.
Tina experienced a moment of pure rage at Maggie. May be Mike Todd, Maybe not. La La. He saw that this message was a trick followed by mocking laughter. He stormed away from the bar and found himself standing in front of a blonde girl who looked about sixteen, had stars painted on both cheeks, and wore a shiny, slinky black chemise. She was exactly his type. “I want to take you home with me,” he said. The girl opened her flowerlike mouth and solved one mystery by saying, “I don’t go home with narcs.”
That had been a week after Halloween. For at least two weeks afterward, he kept the city at bay while he tore his kitchen apart. Every time he and the exterminators took down anothe
r section of wall, a million bugs scrambled to get out of the light—if you killed them in one place, the next day they surfaced in another. For a long time they seemed to be concentrated behind the Garland range. In order to keep the fumigant from spoiling the food, he and the kitchen staff taped thick sheets of clear plastic between the range and food preparation surfaces and wherever they were trying to exterminate the insects. They pushed all three thousand pounds of the Garland eight feet out into the middle of the kitchen. Vinh, the head chef, complained that he and his daughter couldn’t sleep at night because they heard things moving inside the walls. They had recently moved into the restaurant’s “office,” a little room in the basement, because Vinh’s sister was having another baby and needed their room in her house in Queens. Normally the office was furnished with a desk, a couch, and boxes of files. Now the couch belonged to Goodwill, the desk was jammed into a corner of Pumo’s living room, and Vinh and Helen slept on a mattress on the floor.
This temporary, illegal situation looked as if it was becoming a permanent illegal situation. Helen not only couldn’t sleep, but she wet the bed—the mattress—whenever she did doze off. Vinh claimed that the bed-wetting got worse right after the child saw Harry Beevers sitting at the bar. That Harry Beevers was a devil who put curses on children was mystical Vietnamese hysteria, pure and simple, but they believed it, so for them it was true. Pumo sometimes felt like strangling Vinh, but if he did he’d not only go to jail, he’d never get another chef.
Headache upon headache. Maggie did not call or send word to him for ten days. He began having dreams about Victor Spitalny running out of the cave at Ia Thuc covered with wasps and spiders.
The Health Department issued him a Second Warning, and the inspector muttered about misuse of nonresidential space. The little office reeked of pee.
The day before Maggie put another ad in the Village Voice, Michael Poole called again, asking if he had time to see if anyone at a place called Gladstone House knew where Tim Underhill lived. “Oh, sure,” Tina grumped, “I spend all day in bed reading poetry.” But he looked up the number in the book. The woman who answered referred him to the editorial department. A woman named Corazon Fayre said she knew nothing about an author named Timothy Underwood, and referred him to a woman named Dinah Mellow, who referred him to Sarah Good, who referred him to Betsy Flagg, who claimed at least to have heard of Timothy Underwood, was it? No? Let me transfer you to publicity. In publicity, Jane Boot referred him to May Upshaw who referred him to Marjorie Fan, who disappeared into limbo for fifteen minutes and returned from it with the information that ten years ago Mr. Underhill had written requesting that his circumstances and whereabouts be kept secret on pain of serious authorial displeasure, and that all communications, fan mail included, be directed to him through his agent, Mr. Fenwick Throng.
“Fenwick Throng?” Pumo asked. “Is that a real name?”
The next day was Wednesday, and after getting Vinh off to the markets and Helen to school, Tina set out to buy a copy of the Village Voice at the newsstand on the corner of Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue. Many newsstands were closer, but Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue was only a few blocks from La Groceria, a café where Pumo could sit in pale sunlight streaming in through long windows, sip two cups of cappuccino while pretty waitresses with white morning faces yawned and stretched like ballerinas, and read every word of the VOICE BULLETIN BOARD.
He found a message from Maggie right above the drawing in the center of the page: Namcat. Try again same place, same time? Bruises and tattoos. You should fly East with the others, taking Type A with. Her brother must have heard about their trip from Harry and then told her.
He thought of what it would be like to go to Singapore with Poole, Linklater, Harry Beevers, and Maggie Lah. Instantly his stomach tightened up and the cappuccino tasted like brass. She would bring too much carry-on luggage, half of it paper bags. Out of principle, she’d insist on changing hotels at least twice. She’d flirt with Poole, pick fights with Beevers, and virtually adopt Conor. Pumo began to sweat. He signaled for the check, paid, and left.
Several times during the day he dialed Fenwick Throng’s telephone number, but the agent’s line was always busy.
At eleven o’clock he gave unnecessary instructions about closing the restaurant, then showered and changed clothes and hurried off to the Palladium’s back entrance. For fifteen minutes he stood and froze with half a dozen other people in an area like a dog pound enclosed by a wire fence, and then someone finally recognized him and let him in.
If it hadn’t been for that New York article, he thought, I wouldn’t even be able to get in here.
This time he was dressed in a Giorgio Armani jacket that looked vaguely like chain mail, voluminously pleated black trousers, a grey silk shirt, and a narrow black tie. They might mistake him for a pimp, he thought, but not for a narc.
Clutching a beer bottle, Pumo walked twice up and down the entire length of the bar before he admitted to himself that Maggie had stood him up twice in a row. He wound his way through the mob to the tables. Extravagantly dressed young people, none of them Maggie, leaned toward one another in pools of candlelight.
All of a sudden, everything’s falling apart, Pumo thought. Somewhere along the line, my life stopped making sense.
Young people swirled around him. Synthesizer rock blared from invisible speakers. For a moment Pumo wished he were back home, wearing blue jeans and listening to the Rolling Stones. Maggie was never going to show up, tonight or any other night. One of these days, some hulking new boyfriend would show up at his door to collect the plastic radio, the little yellow Pony Pro hairdryer, and the Bow Wow Wow records she had left behind.
Pumo fought his way up to the bar and ordered a double vodka martini on the rocks. Hold the olives, hold the vermouth, hold the rocks, he remembered Michael Poole saying in Manly’s little club, where there had been no olives, vermouth, or ice, only a jug of suspicious yellow-tinged “vodka” Manly claimed to have obtained from a colonel in the First Air Cav.
“That’s the happiest you’ve looked all night,” said a low voice beside him.
Poole turned and saw a tall, ambiguously sexed apparition in camouflage fatigues beaming at him. Bare shaven skin gleamed above its ears. Aggressive, shiny black hair swept across the top of the apparition’s head and hung down its back. Then Pumo noticed the apparition’s breasts bulging beneath the fatigue shirt. Her hips flared beneath a wide belt. He wondered what it would be like to go to bed with somebody with white sidewalls.
Fifteen minutes later the girl was squeezing herself up against him in the back seat of a taxi. “Bite my ear,” she said.
“Here?”
She tilted her head toward him. Pumo put one arm around her shoulder and took her earlobe between his teeth. Fine black stubble covered the side of her head.
“Harder.”
She squirmed when he bit down on the gristly lobe.
“You didn’t tell me your name,” he said.
She slid her hand over his crotch. Her breasts nuzzled his upper arm. He felt pleasantly engulfed. “My friends call me Dracula,” she said. “But not because I suck blood.”
She wouldn’t let him turn on the lights in his loft, and he groped his way to the bedroom in the dark. Giggling, she pushed him down on the bed. “Just lie there,” she said, and undid his belt, got rid of his boots, and pulled down his trousers. He got out of the chain-mail jacket and wrenched off his tie. “Pretty Tina,” Dracula said. She bent over and licked his erect cock. “I always feel like I’m in church when I do this.”
“Wow,” Tina said. “Where have you been all my life?”
“You don’t want to know where I’ve been.” She lightly scratched his scrotum with a long fingernail. “Don’t worry, I don’t have any nasty diseases. I practically live at the doctor’s office.”
“Why?”
“I guess I just enjoy being a girl.”
Exhausted, dulled by alcohol, Pumo let her proceed. When
she sat up, straddling him, she looked like an Apache warrior with plucked eyebrows. “Do you like Dracula?”
“I think I’ll marry Dracula,” he said.
She unbuttoned the camouflage shirt and tore it off, exposing firm conical breasts. “Bite me,” she said, pushing them into his face. “Hard. Until I tell you to stop.”
He gently bit one of her nipples, and she ground her knuckles into the side of his head. “Harder.” She dug her nails into his cock. Pumo bit down.
“Harder.”
He increased the pressure.
When he tasted blood, she screamed and moaned and gripped his head in her arms. “Good good.” Her hand left his head and found his cock again. “Still hard? Good Tina.”
Finally she let him raise his head. A thin line of blood oozed from the bottom of her breast down her ribcage. “Now little Drac goes back to church.”
Pumo laughed and fell back on the pillow. He wondered if Vinh or Helen had heard her scream and decided they probably hadn’t—they were two floors below.
After a long delirious time Pumo’s orgasm sent looping ribbons of semen over her cheeks, into her eyebrows, into the air. She moaned and hitched herself onto his body so that his arms were pinned beneath her legs and astonished him by rubbing his semen into her face with both hands.
“I haven’t come like that since I was about twenty,” he said. “But you’re sort of hurting my arms.”
“Poor baby.” She patted his cheek.
“I’d really appreciate it if you got off my arms,” he said.
She looked down at him triumphantly and hit him hard in the temple.
Pumo struggled to get up, but Dracula struck him again. He found himself unable to move for a second. She grinned down at him, her teeth and eyes flashing in the murk, and slammed her fist against the side of his head.
He yelled for help. She struck him again.