by Farris, John
"Don't. I asked you not to."
"Why can't I touch you any more, Gil? Why are you being so hostile, have I—?”
"Pri-vacy, Mother. Just allow me a little privacy, please! I am not your cuddly little babykins any more, I don't want to be—fondled, and if you find anything hostile in that I am sorry, very truly sorry."
Gillian plugged a cartridge into her eight-track deck and turned the volume loud, loud, loud. She stood with arms folded, her back to her mother, braced against the impact of the sound. Katharine sensed that she was crying. She gathered up the bed sheets and went out. There was nothing of Gillian in those sheets; they smelled of dried night sweats and dribbled urine and raunch, as if a family of weasels had denned in them. But the sheets had been on the bed for only two days. Katharine shuddered and threw the soiled bedding down where Rosalind would find it when she came back upstairs.
As she did so she saw Gillian's door close; she imagined, despite the Jaggerish rock-fury pounding at the stout walls, that she also heard the lock click into place.
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 5 10:56 A.M.
"Hello, Mrs. Bellaver, hold the line for Dr. Hansel, please."
"Hello, Katharine!"
"Well, Park, I guess you wouldn't be this cheerful if it was cancer."
"Kath, everything came back from the lab totally negative. I will double check it, as I usually do, but for the moment I can say that you have nothing to worry about."
"Except, possibly, getting pregnant. At a rather advanced age for childbearing."
"It's not unheard of for women to go on conceiving into their early fifties."
"But it is unusual to go through menopause and then, two years later, to start menstruating again. Heavier than when I was a kid, and I flowed like Niagara until after I had Gillian."
"Yes, I know. Cramps bothering you?"
"No, I just feel sort of draggy and really depressed at times. I went through change of life, I made up my mind, well, that part of life is over, but I'm no less a woman: better than ever, goddammit. And now here I am, puberty all over again."
"Kath, I can't tell you why it happened, at this point I only know there's no abnormality involved, thank the good Lord. You have a healthy uterus and two functioning ovaries after, uh . . .uh . . . this little hiatus. You did stop rather early, you know, forty-three and a half, these days the norm is closer to fifty years."
"Is that a clue? I've heard of false pregnancy, but false menopause?"
"Yes. The subjective symptoms of menopause can be totally misleading. I'll want to see you again next week. Meanwhile take your iron tablets and have that prescription for a new diaphragm filled, unless of course—
"OH, NO; no sir, no way!"
11:15 A.M.
"Hello, Larue? Katharine Bellaver."
"Mrs. Bellaver! Great to hear from you!"
"How did everything go in Boston?"
"Oh, those lousy rotten critics! Mrs. Bellaver, it's a beautiful show, but it hasn't happened yet, it just needs more time to happen. There was so much love in the company, and now there's so much bitterness. Neil Simon's coming to see it! I'll bet he'll have a lot of good ideas. If the producers would just get off my father's back and stop acting so morbid—"
"I know how brutal it can be out-of-town. Once when I was ready to throw in the crying towel George Abbott told me, 'You take your baby steps in Boston, you find your legs in Philly, and you come home wearing seven-league boots.' "
"I'm praying so hard . . . Gillian's all right, isn't she?"
"Much . . . better, and she misses you."
"Maybe I could come over?"
"Well, let's give her another day to rest. What I was thinking, Friday night for supper, around six? Then Seamus will drive the two of you to Lincoln Center for the Philharmonic—"
"Sounds fabulous . . . Mrs. Bellaver, Gil must be about to go, you know, really batshit by now, all that time in the hospital and then cooped up at home, do you think it would be okay if she spent the night at my place after the concert? I'd really love the company. There's nobody here now but Bjorn and Aase, and, you know, they say like two words a week in English."
"I'm sure it would be a welcome change of pace for her; yes, it's a lovely idea, thank you, Larue."
11:35 A.M.
For once the door wasn't locked, or even closed all the way. Inside the bedroom Gillian sat with her feet up on a window seat, playing the flute.
"Hey, Gil."
Gillian looked around at Katharine without taking the flute from her lips.
"I talked to Larue a little while ago."
"Oh, she's back?"
"I invited her for dinner Friday night."
"I'd love to see her," Gillian said after a pause, and picked up the flute again, turning her face to the sunny window.
"Also she thought you might like to spend the night with her after, say, the concert at Fisher Hall."
Gillian thought about this arrangement and nodded. She blew a few wrong notes, frowned, put the flute down and stood up.
"I think I'll take a nap."
"A nap? You slept till—"
"I explained to you that I get tired easily, Mother. Can I help that?"
"No. I wonder if you shouldn't see the doctor. I could make an appointment for later this—"
"No, Mother. I'm okay. I'm eating better, aren't I? I'm not feverish."
"I still don't think you're in shape to go back to school on Monday."
"Well, then, I'll stay home for a few more days, I have things to do anyway."
"Tootle your flute? Twiddle your toes?"
"Ugly, Mother. Very ugly."
"I do . . . get . . . exasperated."
"You came up here," Gillian said reasonably, and pointed to the door. "Could you close that on your way out?"
"It might get mysteriously locked again."
"It might. Better if it's locked when I'm sleeping."
"Why?"
Gillian clapped her hands together in a mock-prayerful attitude and cast her eyes heavenward, but she answered the question.
"Things could happen, otherwise."
"I'm not sure what to make of that."
"I just don't like the idea of—being looked in on while I'm lying here. You might get the wrong idea. You might try to wake me up. Maybe I wouldn't wake up right away, and you'd—panic. Try to move me, or something. To a hospital. That would be very bad for me, Mother."
Katharine listened to her heartbeats becoming loud and violent as slammed doors.
"That sounds ominous."
"Oh, don't make a big thing of it," Gillian said softly. She smiled, a rare smile these days, not wanting Katharine to be offended. "I'm getting to be very grown up. I can take care of myself if you give me half the chance."
"What are we talking about here?"
Gillian's eyes were half closed. "Things . . . well beyond your understanding."
"I will always make an effort . . . to try to understand . . . anything you may want to tell me."
For just a moment Gillian looked at Katharine almost longingly, as if she wanted to embrace her.
"That's fair enough, Mother. Now—if you don't mind?"
Katharine was on her way upstairs when the rock music began. She knew it was no use going back to hammer on the door and protest. The door would be locked, and Gillian oblivious. She felt a cramp coming on, hurried to her own bathroom and took the prescribed medicine. She batted back the tears stinging her eyes. Then, for the third time that day, she changed the large pad she was forced to wear to accommodate a heavy menstrual flow.
When she finally reached the atelier, Katharine called Miss Chowenhill and canceled everything on her calendar for the remainder for the week.
3:24 P.M.
Today the music was endless, deliberately and provokingly endless. Even behind a fat cushion of Valium Katharine felt ravaged.
"Avery, we need to get into Gillian's room."
He replaced the musty book he'd been consulting and look
ed down at her in some surprise from the third step of the library ladder.
"Katharine? I didn't hear you come in."
"She must have made her own tapes, two-hour tapes. Otherwise it couldn't just keep playing and playing without a pause."
"Don't you feel well? You look—"
"I'm doped, loaded to the gills, isn't that obvious? But it does no good. I can still feel, a little bit, and hear, and, oh my God, if I could just turn off my mind for a little while, what a blessing. How can you stand it? Don't you realize something's going on, she—"
"The music, yes. It is too loud. Mrs. Busk says they've complained from across the street."
"Damn, Avery, pay attention to what I'm trying to tell you! Gillian's in danger of—"
"Danger?"
"Of, I don't know what, but something is seriously wrong with her! Something is wrong in that room, she as much as told me so, we've got to get in."
"The door's locked?"
"Of course!"
"But Mrs. Busk has—"
"Mrs. Busk had a spare key; it's missing from her ring."
"You knocked?"
"Five times in the last hour. Pounded. She isn't—it's as if she—nobody sleeps that heavily." Katharine gently massaged the sore skin of her constricted temples.
"I'll call a locksmith," Avery said, searching for the phone book.
"No! I don't think there's time. Avery, you're clever with watch repairs and things like that, it's a fairly simple privacy lock with a keyhole on this side—"
He needed ten minutes to find his case of jeweler's tools, three minutes to jimmy a good lock.
Gillian's door swung open a few inches. The room was dark for mid-afternoon of a brilliant day. The rock music, close up, jarred Katharine to the roots of her teeth. She went in first and glanced at Gillian lying heavily across her bed, a sheet half covering her. She was unfamiliar with Gillian's stereo equipment and it took her a few seconds to turn off the tape. Even then the silent room seethed with hallucinatory sound.
Avery was standing near Gillian, looking down at her.
"Katharine, just a little light, please, from the windows?"
Katharine parted the drapes a hand's breadth and hurried to the bed.
What she saw of Gillian stunned her: whitish moons of sclerota visible beneath the taut eyelids, lips waxen, limbs stiffened, her skin very pale. And no breath, no breath at all . . .
"Gillian!"
Avery caught her hand an inch from Gillian's motionless breast. "No, don't touch her," he said, calmly enough, but the pressure of his fingers caused Katharine to rise on her toes in pain.
"She's—"
"Don't!" he said, more sharply, taking hold of Katharine's other hand as well. "Gillian isn't dead. Nor is she . . . there, right now."
"What the hell are you talking about, old man? Look, look at her!"
"The body is all right. Her respiration and pulse rate have slowed way down and the body temperature has dropped, probably to about twenty-four degrees centigrade. She's in a state of, I believe it's called tonic immobility." Avery looked over his shoulder at the stereo equipment, seeming unaware of Katharine's efforts to wrest herself free. "Oh, yes. Might have expected it. She required the enormous energy of the music. These ceremonies vary little in form, whether among the Ashanti, the Bavenda, the Hopi. The ritualist first utilizes the energy of sound; then he intones a name of power. Finally he performs a circumambulation, a ritual movement, until the exercise results in a deep trance. Much easier then for the novice to separate from the physical body. Of course those who are adepts, or specially skilled at astral projection, need no extraordinary preparations in order to separate."
He blinked and looked at Katharine again, surprised to see that he was holding her tightly enough to break both wrists, and that she was having hysterics, a drug-muffled, hum-drum and giggly version accompanied by bleatings and sudden violent snaps and twists of the body.
Fortunately Avery was a big man and well conditioned from his sojourns among primitive peoples. Still holding fast to his wife, he trotted her out of Gillian's room, up the stairs to his own bedroom and into the bath, where he thrust her under a frigid needle shower. He held her there until she regained her senses. For good measure he popped a capsule of smelling salts under her nose.
"That's enough!"
"The water is bloodied. Katharine, are you hurt?"
"I'm just h-having my p-period."
"After two years of menopause?"
"Let me go, I have to get back to Gillian!"
"But I can't let you disturb . . . the body. That's always taboo. Katharine, listen to me? Every living thing in this sphere has its shade, or doppelganger, or whatever you want to call it. I believe the popular term is "astral body." It's connected, probably by way of the pineal gland, to the material body, but it has the freedom to travel in other planes, other spheres. That's what Gillian is doing now. A great many people, when they think they've had an especially vivid dream, actually were experiencing—"
"Astral projection is occult bullshit dreamed up by so-called intellectuals who need something to sell the crazies, the gullible old ladies who can't get it on with their Ouija boards anymore."
"I don't think so, and I've been around a bit more than you have. The aborigines of central Australia, who have no written language and live in conditions of grueling hardship, have an astonishingly complete metapsychical system that rivals the insight of the most advanced mystic. Notions of time, ritual and protocosmic archetypes are molded into an elaborate mythos which they call alcheringa, which means pastpresentness, or 'dream-time.' Life doesn't begin and end with the material body. Life is thought, and therefore timeless. By thinking it we've created this world, a great grinding machine in which we are all caught up; but as Rimbaud said, 'real life is elsewhere.' "
"He must have b-been crocked on poppies at the time," Katharine sneered, and she hunched down inside the big towel Avery had wrapped her in. "I don't know or care about your theories. I want my Gilly—I want my daughter back."
"She'll be back."
Avery's insistence that Gillian was not with them in the house brought on a fresh spasm like dry heaves.
"Yesterday—Jake called. Some nonsense about Jody Pete seeing Gillian at the stables up there when I know good and well she was here. That scared me, though, and then Gillian—acting so weird all of a sudden. We never had a locked door between us, never."
"It's quite possible that he saw, not Gillian, but her—"
"Ghost?"
"No, ghosts are seen only after the body dies. It would have been a wraith—but as real, as substantial to Jody Pete's eyes as you and I are to each other."
"But she spoke to him!"
"That is unusual. But not unprecedented."
"I don't believe any of this! She's sick, some sort of relapse, we have to get her back to the hospital!"
"Katharine, I don't know what brought on Gillian's spell of wandering, where she goes, what she's looking for. I do know it would be disastrous if we move her body. It would be unimaginable hell for her to return and not be able to find it."
"My God. I truly believe—you've spent too much time with your headhunters and blood-drinking savages. You're obsessed with their addlepated superstitions!" She struggled up from her seat but Avery calmly stepped between her and the door. Katharine shook with outrage.
"My daughter is dying and you—"
"No, Katharine."
"Dying!"
"No."
She hit him viciously in the face. It hurt, but he didn't budge.
"Don't, Katharine."
Avery had made fists. Katharine was shocked. She realized then he would knock her down, restrain her forcibly if she tried to shove her way past him. Insanity. He was the least rebellious of men, always graceful when conceding. Katharine tried to think of the razor words that would humble him, remove his liver and dim his lights, reestablish her preeminence in the relationship. But the pecking order she'd alw
ays taken for granted had been impressively annulled not by Avery's willingness to do violence but by his conviction that he must do it for her, for Gillian: for the two women in the world he loved.
"Please, please, Avery, let me go." Her teeth chattered; she wept dispiritedly.
He began to peel away the sodden towel.
"Get you out of these wet things. Then I want you to lie down in my bed. Rest. I'll look after Gillian. Nothing will happen. It was a shock coming across her like that. But she needs to be alone, for a while. Try to understand, Katharine."
Katharine protested fitfully, but she was a rubbery lump in her husband's hands. Thirty seconds after he put her in his bed her eyes closed. Thirty seconds after that she was asleep on her side, arms wrapped around a pillow.
Avery went downstairs to Gillian's room. He remembered having partly closed the door on his way out with Katharine. Now it was completely closed.
And locked.
For the first time he felt deeply concerned: the skin of his forearms and the back of his neck reacted, it was like the hairs-on-end, sizzling warning that comes just before lightning strikes. He put his ear to the door to try to hear Gillian. The room inside was breathlessly still. He doubted that Gillian had returned, reentered the body, gotten up to lock her door.
Someone, then, or something, was ensuring her privacy. For good or for evil, he couldn't say which.
9:52 P.M.
Avery was nodding before the fire in his library, books at his feet, more in his lap, when a slight shift of attitude allowed one of the volumes he was holding to fall to the floor. He woke up with a leaden lifting of his head, yawned until his jaws popped, stared at the flames.
He felt watched. He looked back over one shoulder.
Gillian was standing in the doorway, shirttail hanging frayed, legs bare. She was drinking from a quart container of milk.
"Hello, Gillian."
"Daddy." She ambled toward him and flopped on the carpet with her back to the fire, crossed her legs, finished drinking. "Um. Nothing tastes good to me anymore but cold milk. My second quart today."