by Paul Monette
But she had won this one concession from the darkness: now they knew she would not kill for the sake of kingdoms. Heaven and hell did not engage her, either one. She would not go at all unless they let her believe in nothing whatsoever.
“Why not just stay home?” she murmured in his ear. “We could spend the day in bed.”
The pain tore up and down her like a madman in a cage.
“Don’t tempt me,” Tim said happily, as he set her lightly back on earth.
Please help me, she thought. Don’t go.
But when she moved to speak it, silence shivered through her. He was gone before she could make a sign—some gesture of withdrawal, so he would always know she’d stayed to say good-bye. If only she had some moment of the past to give him back. Yet the years, it seemed, had fallen off a tree. The snow had bedded them deep, like sheets on summer furniture. She stood at the back door watching Tim go off. The air was smoked with his breathing, all the way to the barn. He backed his black car out and drove away. He receded like the far horizon, sweeping her out to sea.
She must not linger. She must not care. She had to be on a plane at four o’clock. Except for this—her one tenacious deadline—the amnesia lay like cotton on her brain. As she reached a canvas suitcase down off the closet shelf, she understood she was not allowed to search out any memories. The details were all off limits, as well as the taking of souvenirs.
When she passed her desk in the dining room she felt as if a wall of fire had sprung up out of the carpet, holding her at bay. In the hall behind the stairs, where the books rose floor to ceiling, she found she couldn’t recollect a single title. She picked up papers here and there—letters and lists and homework, strewn across the parlor. A blur had flared like a virus in her head till her finer vision was slightly off. The words wouldn’t hold together. The simplest phrases didn’t work anymore.
She realized she was meant to pack for rainy weather. The outer gear—knee-high boots and a yellow slicker—took up all the room. There was hardly space left over for a heavy sweater and sheepskin vest. No fancy clothes required. No personal effects. Yet even here she would not give up the past without a fight. She found that when she happened on the odds and ends of this life—came on them incidentally, without the will to know—there occurred a moment’s break in the fog. As she went to get her checkbook out of a drawer beside the bed she uncovered a wrinkled calling card. She caught a quick glimpse as she turned away: Timothy Ammons, Rector, St. Andrew’s, Killingworth Common. Episcopal, it looked like.
A few minutes later she stood in the bathroom, stocking a quilted bag with necessaries. Toothbrush, aspirin, soap, and a fistful of pills for any number of overnight conditions. She might have been planning a weekend jaunt. Turning to go, she noticed a pile of magazines on the ledge behind the toilet, Vogue on top. The mailing label on the cover was printed with her name: Dr. Iris Ammons.
Doctor of what, she wondered. As she went to the bed to zip her suitcase, she cast about in her mind to figure what she had the power to heal. Her hands were numb; her aim was squeamish. She shied from sickness generally, as being too like death for comfort. Who’d ever pay good money to a doctor who was scared?
The dog stuck close to her heels when she left the house. He seemed to think she’d let him come along. She found his air of expectation vaguely threatening. The wagging tail, the panting tongue—what was he anyway, some kind of spaniel? He scratched at the door of the station wagon as she slipped inside and started it. He appeared to have some notion she would need him.
A wolf perhaps, or a red-eyed owl, but not this eunuch sentimental mutt. He clearly didn’t have it in him to go for the vitals. As she wheeled around the drive and picked up speed, he trotted close to the car. He gave a playful yap, still sure she was only kidding. Just at the last, she gunned the engine and swerved—so he had to scramble squealing out of the path of the racing wheel.
She drove to town over roads she could have sworn she’d seen in photographs. She didn’t know how she knew the way, but this was sure: she would never be able to retrace it. She skirted a grove of birches, crested a hill, and saw the village square spread out below. That’s not it at all, she thought. Not what? She couldn’t say. As she drove downhill, she passed beneath an arch of leafless elms, most of which were cut to the bone to halt the spread of blight. They stood like broken sentries, handing in their arms.
She turned in at a red-brick bank designed to look like a sweetshop. The young teller didn’t bat an eye when she wrote out a check for fifteen hundred, cash. All he said was: “Getting an early start on Christmas, are you, Dr. Ammons?”
To which she replied she would have it in hundreds. She would not stop to small talk. The kid got very apologetic, counting out her bills. As if he’d gone too far, somehow, and feared she’d turn him in.
Across the square, outside the drugstore, Iris slipped into a phone booth to call in her reservation. “Where to?” the airline clerk asked patiently. “San Francisco,” said Iris like a dutiful child. Till she spoke the name, she had no clue where she was meant to go. She mulled it over as the airline man rang off to consult his computer. She’d been there once before, of course, when she was … twenty, twenty-five. One of her summers in college, perhaps. A flattish sort of travelogue ran dully in her mind. Did she have some friend there? Some connection?
She looked across the street to the village grocery. A portly man in a spotless apron pyramided his bins of fruit. Two old women picked through a burlap sack of onions. A small child, too young to go to school, toddled in the doorway. It wasn’t clear who he belonged to, but he seemed to sense that nobody here was watching. He reached inside the grocer’s open toolbox. He brought out a pair of steel-gray shears that would have cut a chicken up like paper. Iris stared with growing fury, but made no move to stop him. He pulled the scissors open. The blades were as long as his arms.
“The four o’clock is filled,” announced the tight-lipped clerk. “I have a space on the five-fifteen.”
“The five-fifteen is perfect,” Iris said. She felt a thrill of power to think there were systems out of their control. The forces still had limits. Remember that, she thought.
The little boy stood at the grocer’s knee, holding up the slack-jawed shears. He only wished to be helpful. He did a sort of jig, to get the other’s attention. The blade points grazed the belly of his parka.
“Just one way,” she told the clerk.
As she hung up the phone, the grocer turned and nearly stumbled. The child fell back, the shears beneath him. Iris cocked an ear for the cry and watched for the gout of blood. But it seemed the deadly drift of things had not caught on in the country towns, or not around these parts, at least. The blades fell flat, so he fell without harm. The grocer stooped and heaved the child up, laughing. No one took note of the shears at all. Now the two went barreling through the door to fetch the boy a chocolate bar. The elderly ladies clucked at the price of tangerines. In the grocery window, the hands on the clock met tight at noon, and all the shadows vanished.
Why was it, then, that Iris shook with horror, if all the danger was safely passed? Couldn’t she see how solidly the bricks were mortared here? The circle of shops that bordered the square took care of the people’s every need. The village streets connected each to each, so no one even had to turn around. In the center of the square, a polished granite obelisk rose out of a boxwood hedge. It bore the names of the town’s war dead—four wars, one to a side—and showed they were ever mindful of the sacrifice that kept them safe. The wells were deep with water sweet as honey. The school won all the tournaments. The taxes were a song.
How could she blame them for feeling secure? They’d made a collective stand against eventuality, just being here. They had the deeds to prove it.
Yet the feeling was so strong she could not keep it checked. A tightness gripped her skin till she thought it would rip like fabric. Palms flat out on the booth’s glass door, her lips pulled back against her teeth, she looked
for a moment like someone about to be buried alive. Though her heart was all stripped bare from leaving home, she seethed with dread and pity for these people, living out the rag end of their lives in a place where time was running out.
For none of these ordered ways would last. If the instruments of pain were limp and harmless now, tomorrow all the penalties would double. Iris felt a throb of joy to think that she could flee. This town was a burning house. The death that hadn’t come to pass fed beneath the surface like the yellow in a sore. And no one dared to look it in the face. No one had a plan.
The more she took it in, the more her pity faded. A murderous logic beat against her temples. Clearly, they had brought it on themselves, these dim and buttoned people. Their gods and devils were one with their indifference to the dark. A wild, anarchic hunger seized her, to let them see how short the distance was between an autumn day and the end of the world. She pounded the walls of the phone booth. She remembered nothing.
Then all of a sudden she froze.
A boy and girl had met beside the obelisk. So hypnotized were they by love, it might have been a fountain spouting water out of dolphins. All they required was a rendezvous. The roll of the dead was nothing to them. He touched her hand and made some plea. The girl looked off and shook her head. They weren’t yet twenty. It seemed they had only a moment more before he had to go back to work and she to her aged mother. Their hearts beat fast, like birds in flight. She tossed her hair as he took her hand. His chest puffed up like a rooster while he promised her the moon.
Which one would she follow, Iris wondered dreamily.
The grocer’s porch was empty. All she had to do was dart across and snatch the shears and slip them under her coat. If she went for the girl, she’d kill her in her room, surrounded by her keepsakes. Iris knew just how this would feel—like throwing a stone at a mirror. With the boy, she would have to lure him into an alley. They would start with the act of love and go on from there. With the barest flick of an eye, she watched them back and forth, first one and then the other, as if she were pulling petals off a flower. If only she could do them both at once.
With a terrible will she fought it. She opened her mouth to tell them to run and found she couldn’t breathe. In a panic, she beat back the accordion door of the booth and reeled out into the street. As the startled couple glanced at her, she lurched away to the right. “Mrs. Ammons?” the girl called out, as if to try to wake her. Iris turned and ducked between two buildings. She raced along the alleyway, one hand over her mouth to keep from screaming. If she had to wreak some vengeance, let it be on strangers.
But somehow she’d gone the wrong way. Thinking to reach the parking lot, she emerged in another street, beside a florist’s thick with underbrush. She took another right to double back. She averted her eyes from everyone she passed so as not to seek out victims. She read the notices in shops, reeled off the numbers on license plates, took note of every sign. Including this, in a whitewashed doorway, etched on a bright brass plate: Iris Ammons, Ph.D., Private Consultations.
For all she knew it was a trap. She’d never been here before. But after all, she had this extra hour. Mostly, perhaps, she lifted the latch and went on in because she wanted to know what she did it with. Tea leaves? Tarot? The parlor room she entered was quite cheerful. Dimity curtains and chintz-covered chairs and a copper bucket filled to the brim with pinecones. No sign of paraphernalia, clinical, psychic or otherwise. A slightly rumpled man sat hunched on a footstool, gloomily reading the daily Times.
“I knew you wouldn’t disappoint me,” he said, with a certain smug assurance.
Careful, she thought. She looked around to try to figure where she was meant to sit. Not clear. And where were her things, whatever they were? She replied with a quiet, noncommittal “No.”
“You should have seen your nine o’clock,” he said as he stood up. “She was fit to be tied.”
“Who?”
“The girl with the sensible shoes. You just missed her.”
He turned to open the door beside the fireplace. He made a knightly bow, so Iris would precede him. She passed on through, suspiciously. They were in an inner office now, with books around the walls and a desk she could repair to. The young man didn’t seem to need his cues from her. As she slipped off her coat and sat in the desk chair, staring down at a blizzard of papers without the slightest clue, he settled himself across from her. He sprawled on the tweedy sofa and talked a mile a minute.
“You know what I was thinking, Iris? You know what my big problem is? My mother never let me cry. She said it was weak. I’d grow up to be a girl, she said.” And he heaved a sigh. “Jesus, it’s a wonder I can feel at all.…”
She listened with half an ear. Spotting her daily calendar, she ran a finger down to find out who he was. 10:15—Donald Sand. It didn’t ring a bell, but he seemed content to sit there, saying whatever came into his head. She scanned the memos and riffled the stacks of mail. Nothing struck her. She poked at a pile of dreary-looking books. A three-panel frame stood open beside it, with pictures of Tim and the boys out sailing. She closed this up and slid it into a drawer.
She began to think there was nothing here to which she still had access. All her work had simply disappeared—slipped through her fingers like the long road home. Strangely, she didn’t much care. The age of books was over. Quaint and slightly ridiculous, like the longing to live in old houses. She was fidgeting through a washed-out journal, wondering how she would ever get rid of Donald Sand, when she caught her own name in a list of contents. She zeroed in on the title. The Cultist Adolescent, by Iris Ammons. Page 118.
She flipped ahead to find it, at the same time pulling the left drawer open and taking out a jar of candy. It faintly amused her to think how earnest she used to be. She’d filled up twenty closely printed pages. Subheaded under the title, she read: Sexual Growth and Mind Control: The New Monastic Order. This seemed so oddly irrelevant that she nearly laughed out loud.
“Sometimes,” said Donald Sand, “I think I ought to go back to the farm. At least they let me cry. I mean, so what if I have to give up the real world? Some people aren’t equipped for reality. I’d rather be following orders, Iris. I’m tired of all this thinking.”
It was as if the clouds had lifted a bit. All morning long, she hadn’t been able to string two words together. Now she could read a whole paragraph through without a break. There was a jumble of terms she couldn’t grasp, and the I of the piece was a woman of whom she wouldn’t have asked the time of day, yet she sorted out the drift of it immediately. It was as if, for the space of an empty hour, the forces didn’t know what to do with her. Or else they meant to let her see just how pointless her information was.
From what she could gather in the first few pages, she’d worked one day a week in a clinic in New Haven. It had fallen to her to set up a course of treatment for students who were coming out of cults. She’d personally been in charge of half a dozen runaways, all of these from a single sect. There was never a question of anyone’s being kidnapped: this lot wanted out. They’d escaped in the dead of night. They’d hidden out for months before they turned up at the deprogramming unit. They believed they were marked for certain death. At first they would not even go into separate rooms, preferring to sit and hold hands in a ring. One stood guard while the others slept.
“I don’t think you really care, you know that?”
“Care about what?” she asked abstractedly, running ahead two pages to find a specific case.
“Me,” said Donald Sand, in a flurry of self-defeat. “You don’t know any more than I do. Why don’t you admit it?”
“Listen, Donald, I’m not your mother.”
This, like the strains of an old song, sent him off in a gale of reminiscence. Iris put a knuckle of horehound in her mouth and began to read the account of a girl called Linda S., who’d been with the Revelation Covenant eighteen months before she fled. She sold leaflets on the streets of Houston. She subsisted on rice and green
tea thick with honey. Slept on a flattened cardboard box. They gave her pills four times a day, for what she did not know or ever ask. Sex was forbidden. When asked what she felt like all those months, she replied: “I didn’t mind. I thought I must have died or something. Like somebody pulled the plug.”
She was seventeen. Her hair was mackerel gray. On her one day out for a Sunday drive she had pumped four bullets into her brother’s cat. The last few weeks she spent in Texas, they swathed her in white and fed her cactus boiled in a soup. She first met the Reverend Paradise the night before she ran.
Donald was crying. He leaned across, pulled open a drawer, and drew out several tissues. He stared at the wall of books just opposite, rather as if they’d betrayed him. Iris, meanwhile, turned to the cabinet under the window. She tried to think where her research was. She had boxes of file cards, some of them yellow with age, but none addressed to the matter at hand. On the top shelf was a wire tray full of bits and pieces clipped from magazines. Next to that, an index of the world’s religions, living and dead together. There was even a bowl of charms: crosses and relics and dashboard saints. But none of this was any use. The connections were far too indirect, or the target much too large.
On the bottom shelf was a tape recorder with microphone, a stack of cassettes beside it. Iris reached down and grabbed up three or four of these. Affixed to each was a strip of white adhesive, bearing a name and date in boldface. Joe Weir, May 3. Linda S.—7/29-31. 12 Sept., Ross.
She felt a sudden rush of power to think she’d tracked the past to its lair. If Donald would only go, she thought, she could play it all start to finish. There was something here.