Mortal Fear

by Greg Iles

  ERIN> Lie about the little things, but tell the truth about the big things?

  MAXWELL> Just so. I must start in a time before you were born. For my destiny began then.

  ERIN> I’m ready.

  MAXWELL> In the latter years of the last century, my paternal grandfather was born into a prominent family in Germany. Call him Rudolf. Rudolf was given a first-class education, and became a distinguished surgeon in Berlin. When he was twenty-five, his parents died in a fire. His elder brother Karl, also a surgeon, was his only surviving relation. Rudolf was a bull of a man, Prussian to his boots, but he married a small, frail woman. She was porcelain pale, with fine features and sea blue eyes.

  When the kaiser began rattling his saber, my grandfather decided to emigrate to America. Karl begged him to remain during what he called “the Fatherland’s hour of need,” but Rudolf took his inheritance and settled his wife in

  Here the speakers fall silent, but after a brief delay Brahma picks up again.

  a large American city and quickly established himself as surgeon to an upper-class clientele. Their first child was a son. We’ll call him Richard.

  Richard was something of a Byronic figure, even as an infant. He’d inherited his mother’s slight bones, pale skin, and blue eyes, but his father’s dark hair, intellect, and relentless will. A year later a daughter was born. Catherine. At that time it was discovered that Richard suffered from hemophilia. His condition was controllable, so long as he was protected from traumatic injury, but his “handicap” completed his Byronic persona.

  Early on, Richard showed signs of genius. He was given a peerless education by private tutors, while Catherine received instruction in music and ballet from the age of four. The family led an idyllic existence until 1929. When the stock market crashed, Rudolf lost his fortune overnight. He could still practice medicine, but suddenly it was a means of survival rather than a lucrative hobby. When several friends committed suicide, he fell into severe depression. His behavior became erratic, he practically imprisoned himself and his family in

  The speakers are silent again. Unsure of what to do, I finally type:ERIN> What’s the matter? Are you all right?

  MAXWELL> Yes. It’s proving harder than I thought to tell the story without giving away too much.

  ERIN> What are you afraid of?

  MAXWELL> When I’m finished, you will understand. I’m under a great deal of pressure just now. I am working on a great enterprise. Certain people would like to stop me. They don’t understand my work.

  ERIN> But you believe I will?

  MAXWELL> You might. I’m not sure.

  ERIN> I’ve got to tell you, I’m under a lot of strain myself. Almost breakdown level, to be honest. Don’t tell me anything you don’t want to, but getting it out might do you some good. I know what it means to keep a secret bottled up for too long.

  MAXWELL> If I go on, you must remember something. Knowledge is a burden. It has a price. Remember the Garden of Eden.

  ERIN> Don’t worry. I’d make a very good Eve. I’d blame Adam or Satan for picking the apple while I made apple wine for God. This is the kind of conversation I subscribed to EROS for in the first place.

  MAXWELL> You actually made me laugh. I shall continue then.

  After losing his fortune, Rudolf practically imprisoned his family in their brownstone in the city. He practiced only enough medicine to keep food on the table. The staple of home life was continuing Richard’s studies, particularly in anatomy and physiology. My grandmother taught Catherine piano on their Bösendorfer. After five long years of depression, both small and capital D, Rudolf locked himself in his study and put a bullet through his brain.

  Richard discovered the body. Though but twelve, he became the psychological head of the family. He wrote to Germany for help, and Uncle Karl obliged with money, stating that Richard should use it to return the family to Berlin. But Richard knew that if he did, his uncle would quickly take his father’s place. He convinced his mother they should try to hold on in America. Doling out Karl’s money like a man rationing water to lifeboat passengers, Richard continued his studies alone, using his father’s magnificent library. He became driven, his solitary goal to regain the status and fortune his father had lost.

  Imagine the scene. A shadowy mansion, empty but for three people. A beautiful boy seated at an oil lamp reading Gray’s Anatomy and Aeschylus until his eyes blurred. A senile mother rapping her daughter’s fingers with a ruler when she made mistakes at her Beethoven, speaking only German, the boy keeping up his sister’s English while the mother slept. Their survival was a miracle. The only food was that which Richard could buy cheaply or steal on the streets, while a city and nation starved outside. Rudolf had taught his son how to manage his hemophilia, how to go to hospitals and clandestinely purchase whole blood, how to give himself transfusions. And the boy did it! He survived! It was within this dark and insular realm that Richard came into his sexual awakening.

  Virtually cut off from outside contact, he turned to his younger sister for comfort. Bereaved by the death of her father and by the emotional withdrawal of her mother, Catherine accepted Richard’s advances, even welcomed them. All the studies tell us incest skyrockets in situations of overcrowding, isolation, or poverty, but I make no excuses. This relationship was a great gift for Richard. His immense powers of concentration were never diverted by petty romances, nor did he risk genetic union with an inferior partner. My grandmother must have known and understood, because the children lived as lovers under that enormous roof, sleeping in the same bed, exploring the limits of physical and spiritual experience.

  Have I shocked you, Erin?

  ERIN> I’d be lying if I said no. But I’m fascinated too. I’ve never heard anything like this before.

  MAXWELL> It’s like reading about young gods, isn’t it?

  ERIN> In a way. But I know what’s coming. Richard left Catherine, didn’t he?

  MAXWELL> Did he? When still quite young, Richard passed the examinations required to enter university. Desperately short of money, he wrote again to Uncle Karl. He blamed Jewish thieves and anti-German persecution for the family’s failure to appear in Berlin. War was looming again, and Karl immediately forwarded funds sufficient for a sea passage. Of course Richard used the money to enter university. He became an academic star, his tuition paid by scholarship. And since his hemophilia exempted him from the draft, he was able to accept a scholarship to medical school three years later.

  During this time, Catherine had begun meeting men outside the family, but no relationships developed. My grandmother discouraged her, saying that this or that suitor could never “measure up to the family standard,” which of course meant Richard. For his part, Richard had several outside relationships, with both women and men. But none supplanted Catherine in his heart.

  ERIN> I feel sorry for Catherine. She never had a chance to find out what she really wanted.

  MAXWELL> She was marked by destiny, Erin. Does that idea make you uncomfortable?

  ERIN> Why don’t you tell me her destiny first?

  MAXWELL> While in medical school, Richard decided for Machiavellian reasons that the time had come to marry, and to marry well. His opportunity arrived in the form of the disgraced daughter of a wealthy professor. I always called her the Gorgon. Pregnant before her first marriage, this woman lost the baby immediately after it, then went through a nasty and public divorce. No longer suitable for men of her own class, she was convinced by her father to give a brilliant medical student a chance. Richard wasted no time. Realizing that his plan would be a shock to his sister, he broke the news gently, stressing his mercenary motives, but to no avail. Catherine was devastated. Over the next two weeks she pleaded madly with him and twice seduced him, telling him that no other woman could ever love or understand him as she did. When he refused to yield, she blurted out that no other woman could ever give him the child she could. Richard ignored her and pushed ahead with his plans.

  The day before the weddi
ng, Catherine left the city with all the money Richard had in the world. Worried near to collapse, he told everyone she had gone west to seek relief for fragile lungs. If he had known the truth, he would undoubtedly have followed her. Like a homing bird, Catherine had gone in search of their one blood relative, Uncle Karl. This was during the war, remember. She traveled first to neutral Spain and befriended members of the German émigré community there. With their reluctant assistance, she managed finally to reach Berlin. There, during an air raid, cowering with strangers in the basement of a hospital, she delivered the child she had conceived in America, the child of her brother. It was a son.

  That child was me.

  In the silence that follows these words, my composure begins to fray. During the last few minutes Brahma has told me more about himself than he told Lenz in a dozen conversations. The fantastic character of his story fills me with wonder, and also dread, but I cannot stop to analyze any of it. Time is draining away like water through my hands.

  ERIN> I don’t know what to say.

  MAXWELL> Now you understand my special knowledge of incest. I have gone as far as I will for now. I believe I have earned the right to your story. Or at least part of it.

  ERIN> I’m embarrassed. I don’t have a dramatic family saga like yours.

  MAXWELL> All family histories are dramatic. Freud showed us that. In some families the struggle merely occurs beneath the surface, like battles under primeval seas.

  Brahma has an answer for everything.

  He wants a story. And for days I’ve planned to tell him one. Only now that the moment is at hand, I am paralyzed. How much truth do I tell? How much fiction? Earlier this week, it seemed to me that deception was mostly a matter of facts, with continuity the key to success. Now I see how foolish I was. Successful lies are not based on fact, but instinct. Emotion. If I tell a story that I believe, Brahma must believe too.

  Closing my eyes, I fill my mind with images of Erin: a child laughing in the bathtub with Drewe in grainy home movies; a girl smoking cigarettes behind bushes in a Girl Scout uniform; a teenager riding pillion behind a Harley-crazed pothead, her long hair flying in the wind; a high school junior standing naked on a pier; a young woman, glossy-faced in the magazines, moving urgently beneath me in Chicago; a bride draped in white and kissing Patrick at her wedding, eyes open and looking down the row of groomsmen, to where I stand. This is like performing a classic song. You don’t just sing and play the notes; you open yourself to the subliminal power of the whole, the fluid biopsy of personality that was somehow captured in the words and music of the original recording. And if you’re lucky, for one small slice of time, you become Otis or Muddy or Jimi or Janis or Lennon.

  I have done that.

  And if I can do that, I can do this.

  When I speak, I hear my voice as Erin’s hypnotic contralto. The sound soothes my nerves. Using stories told me long ago by Bob Anderson, I begin weaving a history of Drewe and Erin’s ancestors, then slowly draw it into a New South tale worthy of Margaret Mitchell. My reason tells me I shouldn’t use too much truth, but instinct tells me that straying too far from it will destroy my credibility. The lives I use for thread are like my own, are in fact part of my own, and the tapestry that results will not be pulled apart, not even by Brahma. Yet as my story moves into the recent past, he begins asking questions.

  MAXWELL> You do not get along with your sister now?

  ERIN> We get along. How can you not get along with the most perfect person in the world?

  MAXWELL> Obviously you don’t believe that about her.

  ERIN> Sometimes I do. She’s a doctor now, but everybody knew she’d be an astronaut or something like that even when she was a kid. You’d probably love her.

  MAXWELL> I doubt it. I know many female superachievers, and the image rarely reflects the reality beneath.

  ERIN> In this case it does. My sister’s life could be a movie, only it would be too boring. It’s more like a TV commercial.

  MAXWELL> Is she attractive?

  ERIN> Yes.

  MAXWELL> But you are more so.

  ERIN> Physically.

  MAXWELL> She was jealous of your beauty?

  ERIN> If she was, she never showed it. If she’d tried, she could have gotten as much male attention as I did. But while I was cutting class, she was dissecting fetal pigs.

  MAXWELL> Did you go to university?

  ERIN> No, New York.

  MAXWELL> Ah. What did you do there?

  I pause. It’s time to bend the truth a little.

  ERIN> I was a singer.

  MAXWELL> What kind of singer? Opera? Broadway?

  ERIN> A folksinger. Sort of Joni Mitchell, but with more edge. I changed my name so my family couldn’t find me. My father had told me I’d end up turning tricks to eat, but I was signed pretty quickly. I was wined and dined and photographed and flown to Montserrat to cut a CD. Then my A&R guy got fired for signing too many acts that flopped. I think he only signed me because he wanted to sleep with me. Nobody else at the label cared whether I lived or died. My CD was never even mastered. I got depressed, did more coke than Sherlock Holmes and Freud put together, and crashed in less than a year.

  MAXWELL> Crashed?

  ERIN> Lost my bearings. Did too many drugs, slept with too many men, even started losing my looks. They’re back now, thank God. I’m vain enough to appreciate that.

  MAXWELL> Vanity may be what saved you. But don’t you think it’s time we went back a bit further? Perhaps discussed your father a bit more?

  ERIN> Why?

  MAXWELL> I think you know. It’s the oldest story in the world, Erin. Let yourself be rid of the weight.

  ERIN> You think my father tried to screw me or something?

  MAXWELL> Not necessarily. Most adult-child sex involves oral or manual stimulation, not penetration.

  ERIN> My God. You’ve got it ALL wrong.

  MAXWELL> That sounds like denial to me.

  ERIN> And you sound like every stupid shrink I ever went to. My problem has nothing to do with my father. It’s my sister.

  MAXWELL> Your sister? Are you telling me you had a lesbian affair with your sister? That you’re haunted by some silly adolescent cunnilingus or suchlike?

  ERIN> Or _suchlike_? How old are you really?

  MAXWELL> Forty-seven.

  ERIN> God. I’m not sure whether we can talk or not. Different cultural vocabularies.

  MAXWELL> I transcend generations, Erin.

  ERIN> Right. Do you keep yourself in shape?

  MAXWELL> Cellini’s Perseus is my ideal.

  ERIN> I’ve never seen it, but I get the idea. How close do you come to your ideal?

  MAXWELL> Perhaps one day you will judge. Let’s return to your sister. What is this thing you try so to avoid telling me?

  ERIN> It’s her husband.

  MAXWELL> You are bedding her husband?

  ERIN> _Bedding?_ No. Worse than that. I have a child by him. A son.

  In the ensuing silence, I sense Brahma’s heightened interest like a leopard raising its head.

  MAXWELL> Your sister is still married to him?

  ERIN> Yes. She does _not_ know he’s the father of my child.

  MAXWELL> Ah. Does he know?

  ERIN> Yes. I told him three months ago.

  MAXWELL> How old is your son?

  ERIN> Three.

  MAXWELL> How did this happen, Erin?

  With a fluidity that surprises me, I give Brahma a condensed history of the relationships between myself, Drewe, and Erin—but from Erin’s perspective. The names I change, yet the eternal triangle retains its mythic power. Brahma seems particularly interested in the diametric personalities of Erin and Drewe. When I arrive at the incident in Chicago, he asks:MAXWELL> What was the sex like between you?

  How do I describe sex with myself from Erin’s point of view? This may be the obstacle that finally trips me.

  ERIN> It was the consummation of years of suppressed desire. In a certain way,
it was unique. I’d been disillusioned by men very early. Men see women as saints or whores, and at that time I saw men in similar terms. Bastards or wimps. The bastards I was always attracted to tried to destroy me, and the nice guys _I_ destroyed. That’s what’s happening to my husband now.

  MAXWELL> Which type was your sister’s husband?

  ERIN> Neither. That was the unique thing. With him I responded like I had with my bastard lovers, but he wasn’t one. He was gentle. He was a musician, a songwriter.

  MAXWELL> But this is the root of your desire for a man with the soul of a woman. Artists are the bridge between the male and female poles. They are spiritually hermaphroditic.

  ERIN> Maybe that’s it. Because he took me to a different place than I’d ever been. Sometimes when we made love, I achieved something more than an orgasm. It was a total obliteration of consciousness. The waves would start, and then suddenly I’d reach this hyperaware plateau, a clear white space like a liquid dream. And then I’d black out. Absolutely. When I woke up, I felt something I never had before. Peace. I felt I’d known what it was to be dead, or at least beyond life. And I _liked_ it, you know? I wanted that peace. Later I found out the French call that “the little death.”

  MAXWELL> Sex and death are opposite sides of the same coin, Erin. We in the West repress this, but the East has always known it. Death without sex means extinction, sex without death the same. Orgasm is a bridge between the two states, a temporary annihilation of the self, a momentary return to the womb waters, to the mindless timeless flux of nature. It was into this infinite province that he took you.

  ERIN> You sound like you know a lot about it.

  MAXWELL> Death and life? Yes. I know them well. But you should not long for that annihilation. We all get there too soon. Tell me, why did you not marry this unique lover?

  As I describe Erin’s marriage of convenience to Patrick, and his promise never to ask about Holly’s father, I am forced to look into an abyss I have not allowed myself to think about for the past three months. The dark hole where Dr. Patrick Graham has become unhinged, obsessed by a shadow face that lurks in his dreams like a grinning demon that will never grant him peace.