Peaceable Kingdom (mobi)

by Jack Ketchum

  I fully expected him to beg off school in the morning, pleading headache or upset stomach.

  He didn’t.

  And he didn’t want his breakfast, either.

  And the next night, same thing.

  Now this was particularly strange because Susan had cooked spaghetti and meat sauce that night and there was nothing in her considerable repertoire that the kids liked better. Even though—or maybe because of the fact—that it was one of the simplest dishes she ever threw together. But Danny just sat there and said he wasn’t hungry, contented to watch while everybody else heaped it on. I’d come home late after a particularly grueling day—I work for a brokerage firm in the City—and personally I was famished. And not a little unnerved by my son’s repeated refusals to eat.

  “Listen,” I said. “You’ve got to have something. We’re talking three days now.”

  “Did you eat lunch?” Susan asked.

  Danny doesn’t lie. “I didn’t feel like it,” he said.

  Even Clarissa and Jenny were looking at him like he had two heads by now.

  “But you love spaghetti,” Susan said.

  “Try some garlic bread,” said Clarissa.

  “No thanks.”

  “Do you feel okay, guy?” I asked him.

  “I feel fine. I’m just not hungry’s all.”

  So he sat there.

  Wednesday night Susan went all out, making him his personal favorite—roast leg of lemon-spiced lamb with mint sauce, baked potato and red wine gravy, and green snappeas on the side.

  He sat there. Though he seemed to enjoy watching us eat.

  Thursday night we tried take-out—chinese food from his favorite Szechuan restaurant. Ginger beef, shrimp fried rice, fried won ton and sweet-and-sour ribs.

  He said it smelled good. And sat there.

  By Friday night whatever remnants of depression-era mentality lingered in my own personal psyche kicked in with a vengeance and I found myself standing there yelling at him, telling him he wasn’t getting up from his chair, young man, until he finished at least one slice of his favorite pepperoni, meatball and sausage pizza from his favorite Italian restaurant.

  The fact is I was worried. I’d have handed him a twenty, gladly, just to see some of that stringy mozzarella hanging off his chin. But I didn’t tell him that. Instead I stood there pointing a finger at him and yelling until he started to cry—and then, second-generation depression-brat that I am, I ordered him to bed. Which is exactly what my parents would have done.

  Scratch a son, you always get his Dad.

  But by Sunday you could see his ribs through his tee-shirt. We kept him out of school Monday and I stayed home from work so we could both be there for our appointment with Doctor Weller. Weller was one of the last of those wonderful old-fashioned GP’s, the kind you just about never see anymore. Over seventy years old, he would still stop by your house after office hours if the need arose. In Rye that was as unheard-of as an honest mechanic. Weller believed in homecare, not hospitals. He’d fallen asleep on my sofa one night after checking in on Jenny’s bronchitis and slept for two hours straight over an untouched cup of coffee while we tiptoed around him and listened to him snore.

  We sat in his office Monday morning answering questions while he checked Danny’s eyes, ears, nose and throat, tapped his knees, his back and chest, checked his breathing, took a vial of blood and sent him into the bathroom for a urine sample.

  “He looks perfectly fine to me. He’s lost five pounds since the last time he was in for a checkup but beyond that I can’t see anything wrong with him. Of course we’ll have to wait for the blood work. You say he’s eaten nothing?”

  “Absolutely nothing,” Susan said.

  He sighed. “Wait outside,” he said. “Let me talk with him.”

  In the waiting room Susan picked up a magazine, looked at the cover and returned it to the pile. “Why?” she whispered.

  An old man with a walker glanced over at us and then looked away. A mother across from us watched her daughter coloring in a Garfield book.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I wish I did.”

  I was aware sitting there of an odd detachment, as though this were happening to the rest of them—to them, not me—not us.

  I have always felt a fundamental core of loneliness in me. Perhaps it comes from being an only child. Perhaps it’s my grandfather’s sullen thick German blood. I have been alone with my wife and alone with my children, untouchable, unreachable, and I suspect that most of the time they haven’t known. It runs deep, this aloneness. I have accommodated it. It informs all my relationships and all my expectations. It makes me almost impossible to surprise by life’s grimmer turns of fate.

  I was very aware of it now.

  Dr. Weller was smiling when he led Danny through the waiting room and asked him to have a seat for a moment while he motioned us inside. But the smile was for Danny. There was nothing real inside it.

  We sat down.

  “The most extraordinary thing.” The doctor shook his head. “I told him he had to eat. He asked me why. I said, Danny, people die every day of starvation. All over the world. If you don’t eat, you’ll die—it’s that simple. Your son looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘so?’ ”

  “Jesus,” Susan said.

  “He wasn’t being flip, believe me—he was asking me a serious question. I said, well, you want to live, don’t you? He said, ‘should I?’ Believe me, you could have knocked me right off this chair. ‘Should I!’ I said of course you should! Everybody wants to live.

  “‘Why?’ he said.

  “My God. I told him that life was beautiful, that life was sacred, that life was fun! Wasn’t Christmas just around the corner? What about holidays and birthdays and summer vacations? I told him that it was everybody’s duty to try to live life to the absolute fullest, to do everything you could in order to be as strong and healthy and happy as humanly possible. And he listened to me. He listened to me and I knew he understood me. He didn’t seem the slightest bit worried about any of what I was saying or the slightest bit concerned or unhappy. And when I was done, all he said was, yes—yes, but I’m not hungry.”

  The doctor looked amazed, confounded.

  “I really don’t know what to tell you.” He picked up a pad. “I’m writing down the name and phone number of a psychotherapist. Not a psychiatrist, mind—this fellow isn’t going to push any pills at Danny. A therapist. The only thing I can come up with pending some—to my way of thinking, practically unimaginable—problem with his bloodwork is that Danny has some very serious emotional problems that need exploring and need exploring immediately. This man Field is the best I know. And he’s very good with children. Tell him I said to fit you in right away, today if at all possible. We go back a long time, he and I—he’ll do as I ask. And I think he’ll be able to help Danny.”

  “Help him do what, doctor?” Susan said. I could sense her losing it. “Help him do what?” she said. “Find a reason for living?”

  Her voice broke on the last word and suddenly she was sobbing into her hands and I reached over and tried to contact that part of me which might be able to contact her and found it not entirely mute inside me, and held her.

  In the night I heard them talking. Danny and the two girls.

  It was late and we were getting ready for bed and Susan was in the bathroom brushing her teeth. I stepped out into the hall to go downstairs for one last cigarette from my pack in the kitchen and that was when I heard them whispering. The twins had their room and Danny had his. The whispering was coming from their room.

  It was against the rules but the rules were rapidly going to hell these days anyway. Homework was being ignored. Breakfast was coffee and packaged donuts. For Danny, of course, not even that much. Bedtime arrived when we felt exhausted.

  Dr. Field had told us that that was all right for a while. That we should avoid all areas of tension or confrontation within the family for at least the next week or so.

&nb
sp; I was not to yell at Danny for not eating.

  Field had spoken first to him for half an hour in his office and then, for another twenty minutes, to Susan and I. I found him personable and soft-spoken. As yet he had no idea what Danny’s problem could be. The gist of what he was able to tell us was that he would need to see Danny every day until he started eating again and probably once or twice a week thereafter.

  If he did start eating.

  Anyhow, I’d decided to ignore the whispering. I figured if I’d stuck to my guns about quitting the Goddamn cigarettes I’d never have heard it in the first place. But then something Jenny said sailed through the half-open door loud and clear and stopped me.

  “I still don’t get it,” she said. “What’s it got to do with that box?”

  I didn’t catch his answer. I walked to the door. A floorboard squeaked. The whispering stopped.

  I opened it. They were huddled together on the bed. “What’s what got to do with what box?” I said.

  They looked at me. My children I thought, had grown up amazingly free of guilty conscience. Rules or no rules. In that they were not like me. There were times I wondered if they were actually my children at all.

  “Nothing,” Danny said.

  “Nothing,” said Clarissa and Jenny.

  “Come on,” I said. “Give. What were you guys just talking about?”

  “Just stuff,” said Danny.

  “Secret stuff?” I was kidding, making it sound like it was no big deal.

  He shrugged. “Just, you know, stuff.”

  “Stuff that maybe has to do with why you’re not eating? That kind of stuff?”

  “Daaaad.”

  I knew my son. He was easily as stubborn as I was. It didn’t take a genius to know when you were not going to get anything further out of him and this was one of those times. “Okay,” I said, “back to bed.”

  He walked past me. I glanced into the bedroom and saw the two girls sitting motionless, staring at me.

  “What,” I said.

  “Nothing,” said Clarissa.

  “G’night, Daddy,” said Jenny.

  I said goodnight and went downstairs for my cigarettes. I smoked three of them. I wondered what this whole box business was.

  The following morning my girls were not eating.

  Things occurred rapidly then. By evening it became apparent that they were taking the same route Danny had taken. They were happy. They were content. And they could not be budged. To me, we’re not hungry had suddenly become the scariest three words in the English language.

  A variation became just as scary when, two nights later, sitting over a steaming baked lasagna she’d worked on all day long, Susan asked me how in the world I expected her to eat while all her children were starving.

  And then ate nothing further.

  I started getting takeout for one.

  McDonald’s. Slices of pizza. Buffalo wings from the deli.

  By Christmas Day, Danny could not get out of bed unassisted.

  The twins were looking gaunt—so was my wife.

  There was no Christmas dinner. There wasn’t any point to it.

  I ate cold fried rice and threw a couple of ribs into the microwave and that was that.

  Meantime Field was frankly baffled by the entire thing and told me he was thinking of writing a paper—did I mind? I didn’t mind. I didn’t care one way or another. Dr. Weller, who normally considered hospitals strictly a last resort, wanted to get Danny on an IV as soon as possible. He was ordering more blood tests. We asked if it could wait till after Christmas. He said it could but not a moment longer. We agreed.

  Despite the cold fried rice and the insane circumstances Christmas was actually by far the very best day we’d had in a very long time. Seeing us all together, sitting by the fire, opening packages under the tree—it brought back memories. The cozy warmth of earlier days. It was almost, though certainly not quite, normal. For this day alone I could almost begin to forget my worries about them, forget that Danny would be going into the hospital the next morning—with the twins, no doubt, following pretty close behind. For her part Susan seemed to have no worries. It was as though in joining them in their fast she had also somehow partaken of their lack of concern for it. As though the fast were itself a drug.

  I remember laughter from that day, plenty of laughter. Nobody’s new clothes fit but my own but we tried them on anyway—there were jokes about the Amazing Colossal Woman and the Incredible Shrinking Man. And the toys and games all fit, and the brand-new hand-carved American-primitive angel I’d bought for the tree.

  Believe it or not, we were happy.

  But that night I lay in bed and thought about Danny in the hospital the next day and then for some reason about the whispered conversation I’d overheard that seemed so long ago and then about the man with the box and the day it had all begun. I felt like a fool, like somebody who was awakened from a long confused and confusing dream.

  I suddenly had to know what Danny knew.

  I got up and went to his room and shook him gently from his sleep.

  I asked him if he remembered that day on the train and the man with the box and then looking into the box and he said that yes he did and then I asked him what was in it.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “Really nothing? You mean it was actually empty?” He nodded.

  “But didn’t he . . . I remember him telling us it was a present.”

  He nodded again. I still didn’t get it. It made no sense to me.

  “So you mean it was some kind of joke or something? He was playing some kind of joke on somebody?”

  “I don’t know. It was just . . . the box was empty.”

  He looked at me as though it was impossible for him to understand why I didn’t understand. Empty was empty. That was that.

  I let him sleep. For his last night, in his own room.

  I told you that things happened rapidly after that and they did, although it hardly seemed so at the time. Three weeks later my son smiled at me sweetly and slipped into a coma and died in just under thirty-two hours. It was unusual, I was told, for the IV not to have sustained a boy his age but sometimes it happened. By then the twins had beds two doors down the hall. Clarissa went on February 3rd and Jenny on February 5th.

  My wife, Susan, lingered until the 27th.

  And through all of this, through all these weeks now, going back and forth to the hospital each day, working when I was and am able and graciously being granted time off whenever I can’t, riding into the City from Rye and from the City back to Rye again alone on the train, I look for him. I look through every car. I walk back and forth in case he should get on one stop sooner or one stop later. I don’t want to miss him. I’m losing weight.

  Oh, I’m eating. Not as well as I should be I suppose but I’m eating.

  But I need to find him. To know what my son knew and then passed on to the others. I’m sure that the girls knew, that he passed it on to them that night in the bedroom—some terrible knowledge, some awful peace. And I think somehow, perhaps by being so very much closer to all of my children than I was ever capable of being, that Susan knew too. I’m convinced it’s so.

  I’m convinced that it was my essential loneliness that set me apart and saved me, and now of course which haunts me, makes me wander through dark corridors of commuter trains waiting for a glimpse of him—him and his damnable present, his gift, his box.

  I want to know. It’s the only way I can get close to them.

  I want to see. I have to see.

  I’m hungry.

  For Neal McPheeters

  Mail Order

  It arrived in a plain brown bubble-wrap package. No return address. Nice and private.

  Whoever invented bubble-wrap, Howard thought, must be worth a fortune.

  He made a mental note to check it. Just for amusement’s sake. It was far too late for any investing.

  The cover art was strictly cheap, a black and white drawing of some gi
rl screaming bloody murder while shadowy male figures loomed around her—one of them raising a badly executed piece of cutlery in what was vaguely supposed to be her direction.

  The video’s title was the only word on the box, in big block letters across the front.

  Offed.

  There was nothing on the back at all.

  No credits. No copyright.

  Nothing.

  That was when his hands began to shake—turning over the box, seeing nothing.

  Because this just might be . . .

  . . . the honest-to-God real thing.

  After all these years.

  He slipped the cassette out of the box and into the VCR and hit the power button. Then Play. Sat back in his big brown leather custom-made Lazy-Boy in his oak and mahogany study and watched empty black leader tape roll hissing by.

  There was an awful lot of leader. Howard didn’t mind.

  Anticipation was half the fun of it.

  He’d waited six and a half weeks since sending his check to the Los Angeles address listed in Video Nasties.

  And maybe half his life for this tape.

  If it was what it purported to be.

  He’d been buying, collecting since college—and that was ten years ago now—starting with the classics like Blood Feast, Last House on the Left, Mark of the Devil, and good old Chainsaw, then graduating to lesser-known back-shelf items like Make Them Die Slowly and Faces of Death, both of which included real life footage of maiming, torture, and killing by the way, though mostly what were killed were only animals. And finally, to the truly obscure stuff you could only find in fanzines like The Film Threat Video Guide and Video Nasties—he subscribed to both. Movies with titles like Gorgasm, Twisted Tissue and—his favorite—Shut Up and Suffer.

  By now he had a closetful. Literally. Right over here behind him.

  It was one of the benefits of investing for a living. You had the cash and the modem hooked up to Wall Street. You just stayed here in your suite and used the phone. You had privacy and no secretarial snooping. You remained in the shadows. And in the shadows was right where he liked it. Investing through an investor who invested through investors sometimes. As though he didn’t exist at all in a way—unless he wanted to.