Hunger's Brides

by W. Paul Anderson

  The truth, the truth.

  “Show me your arm! We’ll have your cuts tested—is that it, your sick game? Grandstanding with your lighter, telling me your story only now that your wounds are healed. Confessing only when the evidence fades—dramatic taped confession! But then when you’re charged, you just say it was all a little fable, a bit of entertainment?”

  We are all made part of the entertainment.

  “Say something!”

  “Petra, I’ve never disputed the blood was mine.”

  “All this sham self-pity and guilt’s just part of the game, isn’t it? For the man who holds all the evidence! Gloating.”

  “No.”

  “No what?”

  No more.

  “Interview over, Professor? All right then. You gave me lots here. More than you know,” she says, reaching into her briefcase, casually extracting a little dictaphone, still turning.

  Angrily he asks if machine number three is a suppository.

  “So …” she says, ignoring the question, “I’m going to give you a little something in return.”

  “Tell me what she said to you.”

  “That’s a part of the story that goes unfiled. I want you to know your little fable will always be incomplete—”

  “What about your public?”

  “Understand, Professor, that someone out there will always know—”

  “And your duty to expose the truth?”

  “What you never will.”

  “You’ve made this personal, Petra Stern, haven’t you.”

  “Personal, you bastard? I heard her voice. She spoke to me. I could have gotten her help! She wouldn’t tell me your name. Only that her prof would have the story, she’d left him all the evidence. You’d be able to explain. Everything. If I could get you to. She wouldn’t give your name. She was standing in a phone booth. I could hear the cars. She had to go home now….

  “I could have helped her,” she says, eyes boring into his.“The police needed something to go on. A name, an address. In the newsroom we sat up through the night, listening to the scanners for word to come in. Three A.M…. You know what that was like? To catch up just as the ambulance pulls away? Do you know how that felt?” She stopped the dictaphone. “To have wondered all along if it was you, and denied it to myself—for the two hours that might have made a difference? You’re so fascinated by my name. Stern, Petra. Familiar, no …?”

  “I do know you, then.” The penitent’s mortification deepens.

  “Twice a week for a semester, Professor. Check your lists for the class of ’83. Your first year teaching, wasn’t it?”

  “But how, I don’t—”

  “Recognize me? But then, how the fuck could you? So many faces. So many students to do. So little time.

  “You gave me an A if that helps—does that help? And I was at a cocktail party at your house five years ago. No? Don’t remember that either. But you had so much on your mind back then. When she called, your face flashed through my mind. That’s crazy—I told myself. Ten years ago all the profs were fucking their acolytes, it wasn’t just you. Ridiculous to think. That you should cross my mind…. I could have phoned your house. I’ve met your wife. We might have found that girl. Found her before you. They say now she may have a damaged brain. How does that make you feel, Professor? This one really did go ga-ga over you.”

  She tucks the dictaphone into her briefcase, leans back, crosses her legs.“Maybe I’ll take that drink, now. We can chat about old times.”

  “The bar is closed for the day.”

  “Women are attracted to you, why deny it?”

  “Call it a paradox.”

  “No. We like pricks. Bigger they are, harder we fall.”

  He turns his head toward the wall of glass. The smoky light has fulfilled its promise. Violet clouds drift from the west, keeled in brass. Beneath, a dark blue shoal of hills. Lights flare on along the river. There, a phosphorescence. Another there.

  “I think it’s time you left.”

  “Maybe she’ll wake up soon. When you go to visit, she’ll see you but won’t remember who … or why. Follow you around like a dog, drooling and sighing. She’ll take you for a friend—idiots always think you’re their friend.” A voice quavering with rage.

  She fumbles at the table in the half-dark of the room, then flicks on the lighter. The flame dances shadows across the planes of her face. “Or maybe not a dog. Vegetables have eyes too, don’t they, Professor. Like potatoes.” Her smile is a grotesque gash in the flickering light.

  “Get out. Don’t make me tell you again.” He hears the words begin in threat and end in listlessness.

  “Don’t worry, I’m leaving.” She leans forward, nodding towards the dim stacks beside the fireplace, “But I just have to ask you once, face to face. How can you? Tell her story? You have no right.” Still she makes no move to leave. “But you know that.”

  “It’s why she picked me.”

  “How convenient for you.” She uses the lighter now to locate her pad and pens, the dictaphone. She glances down, her face in shadow, as she puts them back in the briefcase. “You’ll change the names to protect the innocent I suppose.”

  “The innocent have nothing to fear.”

  “Should be very popular down in Kingston, your book. I hear the prison there has a close-knit writing community. Though small.” She waves the flame at the shadows surrounding him. “How many?”

  “Many?”

  “Copies. Of your book. How many will you pay them to print?”

  He sits a while. After a moment, the flame goes out. She waits. He turns again to the soaring wall of windows.

  He stirs finally. She thinks he will answer.

  They sit another moment, together in the near dark. A moment more and she stands to leave, fumbling a little. She opens the door and pauses, silhouetted against the evening sky.

  “These girls—women, young women—wanted so badly to give something of themselves. Back to you, Dr. Gregory. Our bodies were all we had. Or so we thought. Many of us were from towns out in the country. Small, prairie towns. Simple places. Plainspoken places. Not understanding any of it, you shared a gift most of us never even knew existed. It was never the beard, the blue eyes, the pipe. The prestige. You shared a new world with us. A passion—for ideas, for words—an enchanted space. A poetry. It was unlike everything we’d left behind.

  “You were our guide. You had that once.” So very long ago. “We gave that,” she adds quietly, closing the door, “to you.”

  He had wanted to tell her the number.

  The number of books was two.

  But that seems just hours ago, not weeks. Now it is late. It is almost night. In the west just the palest glimmer remains above the chipped saw of peaks.

  He sits out still on the curving porch as night draws on, the evening chill beckons from the grass, sound takes up the night’s blind watch … A crow’s hacking caw, a calf bawls in a pasture down the valley. A small plane makes for home. Its passage overhead bends from growl away to drone.

  In the far distance a highway just within hearing. Endless exhalation, a river of sound … cascade that undercuts the banks of night in a raw, scouring fall.

  He is beside you as you follow her to the end. He is with you, not before, not behind. Beside, abreast, to where she waits he walks with you, across on the other side.

  TRUE-CRIME STORIES 3

  The following bases its inferences upon facts in the public record.

  ON APRIL 13, 1995, Petra Stern captured Professor Donald Gregory’s rambling half-confession on tape. Her next few days were full as she sought corroborating facts and quotes from the other principals. Her intention was to present all of her material to the police, but only after it had been filed with her producer.

  Whatever elation she may initially have felt must have quickly faded. She would come to wonder if she had not been set up, fed just enough disinformation to be made a fool of. On April 14, she called the Limosneros fa
mily and persuaded them to listen to the tape. For a victim’s family, they had been unusually close-mouthed. She hoped the recording would jar loose an accusation or some item of damaging information or, better yet, earn her a look at their daughter’s papers, which had been tantalizingly withheld from her by Donald Gregory on the previous day.

  When she arrived at the Limosneros residence in Mount Royal, she was met at the door by the family’s attorney and turned away.

  On April 15, Madeleine Gregory agreed to a meeting, off the record. Mrs. Gregory had no interest in the role of bitter and betrayed wife. Useful background did however emerge, none of it strictly incriminating. As she was taking her leave of Mrs. Gregory, promising to stay in touch, Petra Stern was stunned to learn that Donald had flown earlier that day to England, for a research trip of indeterminate length. It was now apparent that by the time her exposé aired, Donald Gregory might well be beyond the reach of Calgary police. An interesting twist to her story but with unpleasant implications for her relations with Detectives Curtis and Green.

  She was now a little desperate. She wasted much of Sunday, using the tape as a pretext for attempting to re-interview the professor’s colleagues and former students. Petra Stern decided that a hostile reaction from the perpetrator in London would make an effective follow up once the story ran. She was briefly pleased with herself for so quickly locating Donald Gregory at a three-star hotel near the British Museum. She placed her call to London on the morning of Monday, April 17. It was her intention to take her material to Detective Curtis immediately after the call, and to incorporate his reaction into the final edit.

  The police reaction was this: While the airing of a half-drunk ramble might make for sensational news, it contained in fact no evidence unknown to investigators, and no evidence contradicting the subject’s own statement to police.

  Two blood types were indeed found, but Professor Gregory had been kneeling in glass. The first officers arriving on the scene reported a suspected ritual assault. However, every piece of evidence gathered thereafter tended to disprove this. Fingernail scrapings and a rape kit were, in fact, routinely used to gather evidence in cases with ritualistic overtones. Although the victim was found naked, there was no conclusive evidence of sexual activity. Meanwhile Professor Gregory had not made even cursory attempts to wipe away his bloody fingerprints from all over the bath area. His tissue was found only under the nails of her left hand. If not the only explanation, convulsions were one that could not be disproved.

  What reviving the story would accomplish, they assured her, was to embarrass Detectives Curtis and Green before a new police chief hungry for publicity.

  The day after her report aired, Petra Stern was informed by a stone-faced Detective Curtis that Donald Gregory had checked out of his hotel two hours after her call and had taken the next flight to Mexico City.

  What the detectives could not know was that April 17, 1995, was the three-hundredth anniversary of the death of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. A day earlier, Donald Gregory had been reminded of this fact at the British Museum where a display had been set up to commemorate the event, thereby drawing the attention of museum patrons to the passing of a great figure perhaps unknown to them. It now appears that Dr. Gregory, with no set itinerary for the foreseeable future, had the idea of prolonging the day of April 17th with a ten-hour transatlantic flight across eight time zones to Mexico City, where a month-long cycle of international conferences was underway.

  What Detective Curtis did know, however, and took pains to stress to Petra Stern, was that Mexico City was one of the best places in the world in which to disappear.

  A print version of Petra Stern’s radio story was picked up by the Canadian Press wire service for national and international distribution under the headline, “Quiet Flees the Don—Again.”

  The only other item of note is that when these facts later became known to Professor Donald Gregory on his return from Mexico, Petra Stern’s personal and professional discomfort gave him no pleasure.

  This in itself should have served notice that things were no longer quite as they had been.

  JUANA INÉS DE LA CRUZ

  In truth, my sweetest love,

  truly I do not overstate it:

  that without you, even my words

  sound foreign to me, estranged;

  because, to be in want of

  you exceeds all the torments

  that cruelty might invent

  when abetted by genius.

  Who know the tyranny

  of this beautiful device

  use neither blades,

  nor hooks, nor irons:

  idle were the knife,

  superfluous the cords,

  gentle the lash,

  tepid the fires.

  Since these, to one put to torture,

  at the sight of you bring glory,

  when you leave,

  purgatory …

  SERPENT LITTER

  Beulah flies from Puebla to the ancient sacred seaport of Coatzalcoalcos….

  [16 Jan 1995]

  I THOUGHT MAKE IT HERE, the last verse on loss. Draft the lost canticle of the three-chambered heart. For weeks in the cities, in the mountains—say the word, say them both out loud. Laughable….

  I hoped.

  Coatzalcoalcos, ‘abode of the serpent litter!’ From here the FeatherSerpent sailed on alone to the land of knowledge and death, where even failure ends. Out onto the Gulf he stepped, and the sea matted with serpents risen numberless to bear him up, to carry him.

  And he said he would come back—promised his dwarf retinue, told us Wait and gave us each a treasure map.

  Horizon blot of supertankers twisting on chains. Styrofoam cups Jumbo cokefloats, bubble wrap, bottles of engine oil tapered like dunce caps. Even I could walk out there now—up and out on this litter of plastic. Stinking port of holy oil—mockery of the past. Of me. Oh look how far I’ve come from Calgary—straight to another oil boom.

  Al estado de la Veracruz … to the true state of the cross.

  And even so I still believed—I had everything I needed to finish this work—how could I fail? How hard can dying be? Every necessity in this hotel cell above the bus depot—cot, orangecrate nightstand, rough wooden cross, pitcher of Deuterium. Shutters for the window, darkness, a little desk—to light my path a Gideon’s Bible, the traveller’s friend in Spanish, English and Nahuatl. Nights of diesel in the sheets, in the dampness in the pillows in the dark. Rank solvent tang in the water and air. Does the whole city smell like this or just in here? in my claustridium dificile—abode of the cloistered insomniac starving for dreams. R.E.M. clockcrawl—I close my eyes on the blackness of shuttered day and see points of light beckoning…. If I could dream, just this one mercy—

  But no! no quarter asked none ever given, sit tight little soldier hold your position, here in this Black Room above the steambath busdepot of holy Coatzalcoalcos, sit before these shuttered windows hapless barricade against the noise and smoke of endless motorcades. Refuse to rise! Hold fast against this CIA music treatment—mariachi brass from the lobby, speakers bolted to the ceiling right under my desk—give up give up little Noriega come out of there! Submit, surrender.

  But no, I cling and cling to my numinous embassy.

  So I work faster think harder look at the calendar can’t you see the time? so little left the cursor blinking blinking its frantic mockery and I curse BACK. Laugh? I try I try—oh how I should love this irony that annihilates me:

  Silence was once an agony; now I am drowning in noise.

  How I hated it. But only at first. Because I didn’t understand yet. I came for stillness and surcease. Now I tilt my face back in the cursor-lit darkness and suck at this noise so thick I can taste it SONIC OILBOOM engine backfires cherry bombs, traffic whistles shrilling—flatulent blat of airbrakes jaunty hornblasts of pilot tugs pulling their silver ships into port under me. The pitcher on the nighttable quivers its welcome its gratitude / its bent-kneed men
iscus under the cross by the cot—for each safe slide into dock.

  And I am grateful. I came for peace but have stayed for the din that drowns out the engine in my head. I have learned to submit. To everything here. To bank these my internal harmonics / combusted symphonies of white noise blasted to ash.

  And I do submit—so cheerfully—to every sound but one. One sound drives me in the end from my Black Room. For an hour. For a little air. For a stroll down by the sea….

  I walk out through the depot lobby, past the fat taxista, bloat-lip toad: Oye muchacha, I can take you to Lake Catemaco for thirty American dollars, okay twenty—ten—okay I pay you how much you want? Every day you say no. You are not here for the Tuxtlas, then why have you come to this hole?

  Don’t you think I wonder, stuffed Taximan, don’t you think I ask?

  I walk sticky-sided, sweat-slabbed, down to the running shore. Eyes stunned in sun … face slicked with salt grime, lids cloaked in the pumice of moth wings, each blink a salt fan, folding. And each sticky step stokes this simmer of exhilaration that I can’t prevent. Near the water, high winds toss and glitter in the fronds of dwarf palms—jesters dancing in silver-fringed jerkins.

  At the sea a hot stink of brine, wet socks and rot. The wind blows faint relief in mirthless gales. Teases long windward plumes of tawny spindrift out over the waves till an agitate surf pounds out its brown foam like a fulling mallet. I tuck my boots under the same sandy bush, so good to be home. Stand in socks and glory at this my uncharted prospect! All along the grey-lipped shore a thin moustache of froth stashed by this Tropic of Cancerous tide.

  Down barefoot now—over the burning grey sand—my fakirflail a hopped simulacrum—shallow flap / kneedip / heel and toeroll over hot grey coals. Each day the same grey fun. Bloodwarm surf embalming my soles.

  Knee-deep in surf I walk up the beach to the broken jetty, a swayback skeleton gutted on surf. Lashed pilings of grey bone raked from an ash pit. Standing in its shadows the old Cuban man of the sea watches my sub-aquatic goosestep—lurching into potholes scooped in swirling sand. Lo the sea’s ephemeral roadwork in progress eternal. How he shakes his white cotton head now to see the SeaCow pitch forward, clutch at her gluesoft hoof.