Morpheus

by Charnofsky, Stan;

  One morning she called and told me she had decided on a strategy, and suggested we get together so she could lay out my role in it. I was willing to meet, but was wary about what I was sure would be a nefarious task assigned to me.

  My route would have been to ask police to look for evidence at the scene of the fire, comb the area in their professional style as I had done naively, for any sign of the perp’s presence there. Surely, Ken, in his amateur way, would have bumbled about and left some kind of clue, a dropped matchbook with a telltale advertisement (I’d seen a scenario like that in a movie), a piece of jewelry that snagged on something and fell off, footprints on the fringe of the fire. For him to be arrested and charged and put away for his crime would be the appropriate punishment as far as I was concerned.

  “Okay,” I told her. “I’ll come to your apartment. Be there in twenty minutes.”

  When I arrived she opened the door as if in a rush, and repaired immediately back to her computer, where she set about furiously punching keys and groaning with each image.

  Finally—I remained quiet, observing—she seemed sated with her search, pushed away from her desk, turned to me, and said, “The guy has an Achilles heel!”

  I knew the myth about Achilles, who, as an infant, was dipped into the river Styx by his mother holding him by his heel; he became invulnerable over his entire body except for that heel which did not touch the water. The indomitable warrior was felled in the Trojan Wars by a poisoned arrow sent by Paris, when it hit his one vulnerable spot. I also knew that the real Dimaggio, Joe, the Yankee Clipper, was once sidelined by a torn Achilles tendon, and as great a ballplayer as he was, that became his Achilles heel according to all the media.

  “Okay, tell me.”

  “Remember he once let out that he dreamt about snakes and spiders? Said he was scared of them, but didn’t remember any serious event, like being bitten or anything. Well, knowing that about him got me to doing a little research. Snakes would be out of the question. Too hard to handle, and anyway I wouldn’t know how to get them, deliver them, or explain their presence. Spiders are a different story. Totally untraceable, it could happen by chance, happens all the time.”

  “Wait a minute. Are you planning what I think? Are you wanting to poison him with some kind of deadly spider?”

  “Not deadly. I don’t want him dead. I want him suffering.”

  “So, how do you propose to make him suffer from a spider bite but not die? I mean what kind of spider would you have to find?”

  “No problem. That’s the computer work I’ve been doing. A common poisonous spider in the southwest part of the US is the Black Widow. The males and juveniles are benign, but the female’s bite can cause grief to humans. Only one percent of people die from its bite, but almost all develop serious and painful symptoms.”

  “You would like to arrange for Ken to be bitten by a Black Widow?”

  “See, they’re really shy creatures, spend most of their time in their webs, and come out at night. They won’t deliberately set out to bite a person, but if their nest is invaded or if they’re flushed out of a shoe or a sock in a closet, they’ll attack.”

  “But that’s pure chance. And anyway, how will you catch Black Widows, and how will you get them into his shoe or sock?

  “That’s where you come in.”

  “What?”

  “Behind where I live,” Abby said, a look of macabre glee lighting up her delicate features, “in the garage, I have seen Black Widows three or four times. They are large and, of course, black, with a red hourglass on their tummies. I swatted one once, with a broom—it was hanging from a wooden beam right in the doorway—and when it crashed to the cement, I stepped on it. There have been others since, so I didn’t wipe out the line. Anyway, I’ve been reading about their habits, and I can coach you on how to lure them out so you can trap them in a plastic container. I’d really like to get three or four, so the chances of a bite are higher.”

  “This is nuts,” I said. “What if they decide to bite me?”

  “You’ll wear gloves, and you’ll swoop in with your plastic box and pluck them off their webs.”

  “Madness,” I said. “Why can’t you do that?”

  “I’m like Ken, spiders give me the creeps.”

  “So, how do you intend to deliver these toxic creatures—presuming they can be trapped?”

  “During Writers’ Guild night, when Ken is at the lecture, you’ll be there, cell phone at the ready. I already checked out his address; I’ll take the containers, hustle over to his apartment, maybe knock out a back window, go to his closet, and deposit our little friends in his wooly slippers––if he has any––and in his sox drawer. He’ll know somebody had gotten in, but he won’t know what was left for his amusement.”

  “What if someone sees you?”

  “I’ll be careful. Ken probably won’t even report the break-in because he’d be afraid of an investigation.”

  “Abby, this whole plot is a piece of shit! Too many ‘ifs,’ and too much risk.”

  “That’s the beauty of it. As I said, unlikely as a scheme, perfectly natural, could happen to anyone.”

  None of it made any sense to me. Rage over what had happened to her childhood home made her, as far as I was concerned, confused and irrational, her manner coldly conniving. The whole wild, implausible plan speared me with contempt.

  “You’re afraid to catch the damned things, but not to deliver them.”

  “In the plastic they’re not so threatening. They can’t fly, and I only have to dump them out.”

  I shook my head, but before I could say anything more, she jabbed me with her forefinger and challenged: “Do you love me or not?”

  “Sure, but….”

  “No buts. This sick dodo is going to pay for his ugly behavior. Either you help, or we’re history!”

  What a choice! Sure, I loved her, and sure, her revenge script was cuckoo. Both. I could only hope fate would step in with some alternative thrust, to derail her absolutely silly scheme.

  I nodded without saying a word.

  Fate, in the form of an impediment or two, did intrude itself into the scene.

  First, I was instructed to go to her garage with appropriate tools: heavy gloves, plastic containers with hinged lids, a flashlight for nighttime hunting—that part, finding the nasty little creatures, I could make work—and once captured, stash them somewhere in my own garage until it was time to dump them in Ken’s pristine environs.

  But it rained the night of our Writers’ Guild lecture, steady and heavy, so that delivering them became too chancy.

  Then, by the time the next lecture approached, I had to report to Abby that the spiders––I had captured three of them––had died. Damn, I didn’t know what to feed them, or how long they could survive in a plastic vessel, and she hadn’t bothered to reveal what her research had said—well, I doubt it said anything about care of Black Widows in captivity, since who in hell would harvest them as pets?

  That meant starting over, a not-so-simple activity, since finding more spiders would be a challenge, and storing them still an improbability. I tried again to talk Abby out of it.

  “It’s dumb, Abby. It can’t work. Come up with something else.”

  I could envision her one day pining away in prison for attempted murder, saddled with the sobriquet of the “Black Widow” killer.

  As writers, both of us had to learn to be creative, to observe people and their behavior. Surely, she could invent some other “get Ken” scenario.

  I thought of writers whose tales were off the wall, like Kurt Vonnegut with his Deadeye Dick and Cat’s Cradle. People in his stories suffered the most unlikely treatment: some died, some survived; one woman, formerly young and beautiful, became a disfigured middle-aged drug addict and killed herself by drinking Drano. Another character’s head was blown off—and never found—by a shotgun blast from a police chief on a hunting outing. In Cat’s Cradle, a midget is the protagonist, and the fate of th
e planet is thrown into jeopardy.

  Bizarre things like that.

  I imagined I could help her by dreaming up retribution a lot more level and practical. The way I worded that, ‘dreaming up,’ is meant to be ironic, since after Abby told me her plan, I began to fill my dreams with her issues, peculiar visions, like the two of us in bed and a fire engulfing us, creating a halo of searing flame above, and an instant sealing off of any escape route. We were trapped. I woke up gasping for air. The very next night, I dreamt an odd recreation of Abby’s rape event—odd, since I was only told about it—where her cousin, his face shrouded in mist, was watching her and me, pointing with an elongated finger at us, and laughing as if he had a secret, which, of course, he had.

  These dreams led me to the insight that if Abby could confront her first violator, track down that brutal and elusive cousin, bring him before a family tribunal of some kind, she might put to rest her excessive attempts to settle scores with irrational violence. Quite a challenge, I realized, and maybe a stretch. No way to know if the family would cooperate, if Abby would abide seeing the man, or if that early defilement, laid bare, would alleviate what I considered a vicious overreaction to the later one.

  My first task, I decided—amateur detective that I was—would be to find out how to reach said cousin. I knew where Abby’s parents had been set up to live, with the uncle, so I drove over there hoping to talk to her mother.

  We had met before, and she seemed to like me. I figured that the cousin had been on the father’s side, so the mother would be more likely to divulge information about him.

  She looked much older, haggard—I’m sure a monstrous tragedy can do that—and sat with me in the modest living room of her temporary home, a dismal grotto with ragged furniture, scarred tables strewn with popular magazines and old newspapers, everything musty and decaying. From the kitchen doorway, two children, a boy and a girl, dark-eyed, dark-haired, perhaps seven and five, peered out at us.

  I had rehearsed how I would frame my search, and set out to put Mrs. Justicia at ease. “Abby is really suffering from what happened. I know that for you and your husband it must be a bombshell. You have my deepest sympathy, and if I can help in any way, let me know. I care about Abby a lot and want to see things work out.”

  She thanked me, but I could see she was guarded, unsure about the purpose of my visit.

  “You know, Abby told me stories about her childhood, and one thing in particular stood out above all else. It’s a delicate subject, I’m sure, but it would help me if I understood the truth.” I paused, made a quick decision to jump in, and said, “The cousin that Abby said was nasty to her, what’s his name?”

  She looked startled at first—a long-dead issue, thankfully, as far as she was concerned—then composed herself and said, “Are you talking about Alejandro, my husband’s nephew?”

  “Yes, that’s it, Alejandro. I think it would be good to find out his side of the story so I could help Abby clear up that old unfinished business with him. She’d be a lot less angry. She could feel more settled.”

  I’m not sure she believed me, but I also caught no particular love for this cousin character, as she said, “Alejandro is the most famous loser in my husband’s family. He’s unreclaimable. I mean, others in the family have tried to straighten him out and it never worked.” She smiled. Her point was not the same as my phony proposal. “Not sure why you would want to talk to him. You won’t get much. He’s not a retard, but he is a recluse.”

  I persisted in my game: “Well, it’s for Abby. I thought if I could track this cousin down, maybe he would shed some light on the old hurtful story that Abby holds onto.”

  “Look, Clarence,” she said, standing up as if to broadcast our session was about to end, “you can go talk to Alejandro if you can find him. I really don’t give a damn. Neither does my husband. The pendejo—that means ‘fool’ in Spanish—lives in a walk-up in Westwood, on Weyburn, near Starbucks, one of the few cheapies in that part of town. I think he survives off a government pension because his leg was wounded in one of our misguided wars. I wish you luck, and I hope Abby finds out what’s been eating her for so long.”

  Pretty crafty gal this mother of Abby’s. I wasn’t about to discredit Abby’s demeaning descriptions of both her parents; they lived lives of their own making, perhaps a compromise, perhaps quietly desperate, but I came away with a smidgen of respect for the female half of the pair.

  TWENTY-ONE

  So, one morning, I went out for early coffee in Westwood, where UCLA is located, and where needy and homeless people are plentiful. I noticed something: Santa Barbara, Berkeley, Westwood, centers of education, seemed to attract the downtrodden, they, perhaps too optimistically, presuming better treatment from society’s so-called intelligentsia.

  In front of the coffeehouse I sat in my car for a time, observing the foot-traffic prior to 8:00 AM, before affluent shoppers were up and ravenous, and ahead of the dark suits soon to fill up the massive office buildings.

  There was a small out-of-place walk-up hotel crammed in-between elegant new edifices, which sequentially spilled out an elderly man with a walker, a wrinkled woman with crimson lipstick carelessly applied, a young woman who had restless, startled eyes wearing a backpack, a black man dressed in a dark, heavy full-length coat, a chubby, angry-looking woman who didn’t know which way she wanted to go, a man and a woman holding hands, she tall and rotund, he short and frail, with bare, hairy arms….

  I made up a storyline for each of these real-life characters. Good practice, and it forced me to think up endings, some happy, others morbid.

  Then I stiffened. I saw a bearded shaggy fellow, old before his time, shuffling along past the entrance to the coffeehouse, his clothes patchwork, a black woolen cap snuggled on his head with long strands of dark hairs, grey on their tips, splaying out on all sides, at least two moth-eaten sweaters on his stooped frame, shoes with holes in the toes, hands blackened from sun damage, fingers twisted and surely arthritic—in all, a pathetic figure, a grand contradiction to our affluent American culture. He looked Latino, dark-skinned, with watery, almond-shaped eyes, the Native Indian influence.

  There could have been four or ten Latino men living in the walk-up but somehow, this one looked the part of my quarry. By way of confirmation I observed him limping, each foot landing obliquely angled left and right rather than straight ahead, his left leg less vital, and I settled on the wound from the war as the cause. As well, I saw him wrinkle up his nose every few seconds.

  I stared for a moment as he approached a woman waiting by a bus-stop bench, his hand out, his manner beggarly. She turned away, and he shrugged, almost imperceptibly, shuffled off, at first back from where he had come, then reversing and heading on past the bench. Aimless, he seemed, like the woman I saw earlier, not knowing which way to go, but also, as if it didn’t matter much, a vagabond in search of … what? He turned the corner and I lost sight of him, but that was okay. I knew his territory.

  Now that I’d found Alejandro, the pendejo, the family pariah, the long-ago defiler of my lovely Abby’s virginity—now that I knew where to corral him, like the spiders in Abby’s garage—the grand question flared: what about the delivery? How could I position him in the proper time and place, to a rendezvous with, as yet, an unknowing and possibly uncooperative Abby?

  I needed to mull it over, locked my car, stepped into Starbucks, and filled my belly with a cheese Danish and caramel Frappacino, in my misguided way, assuming that food for the tummy would offer food for thought.

  It didn’t work that way, at least not in Starbucks, certainly not in this Starbucks. The ever-present background music would not permit contemplation, though in some coffeehouses such activity might have been possible. Closer to where I lived, in the established neighborhoods, populated by the landed affluent who relished the music of the sixties and earlier, one would hear Sinatra, a song from Guys and Dolls, a ballad from Doris Day, old Gershwin tunes: “Embraceable You,” “Someone to Wat
ch Over Me,” “The Man I Love,” a violin rendition of “Summertime,” and even a shortened version of “Rhapsody in Blue.” More than once I had sat in that establishment and was able to add touches to a fiction piece I was creating.

  But, there in Westwood, in a Starbucks that catered to students, the sounds assaulted the ears, some recognizable, like the Bruce Springsteen piece then playing, a Sting rendition, a rap offering from Ice T, or a modern ‘ballad’ where the words were undecipherable to anyone over twenty.

  So I sat immersed in coffee and pastry and upbeat sound, frowning in frustration, unable to concentrate on my emerging outside issue.

  Unannounced, the music suddenly shifted––I often wondered who programmed public background entertainment; I’d heard it was some outfit called Muzac or something like that—and on came an orchestral medley of songs from “Sound of Music,” unusual to say the least for this Starbucks. I think the movie had recently been on television.

  Voila! My nerves settled, my thoughts focused, I began to plan, began to rummage through a series of possibilities. Something jelled. Segments of a likely scene began to take shape. I stood, looked up at the positioned speaker at the junction of two walls, thanked Rodgers and Hammerstein, and hiked back to my car with a spring in my step.

  “Listen, Abby. I want to ask you an important question.”

  We were seated in her apartment in the early afternoon on a Saturday, not much conversation, sort of lazing about, I quite aware she was not happy with me in my reluctance to start over with the spiders. She turned from a magazine she was leafing through, raised her eyes slowly, and said, “So ask.”

  “I’m curious about something: if suddenly your long-absent but never forgotten cousin—the one who forced himself on you—was right here in this room, in front of you, what would you do or say?”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “What would you say?”

  “Fuck him! I don’t have anything to say to him. He’s a loser.”

  “Sure, but what he did, his actions, stay with you, they muck up your life to this day.”