I waited for her to speak again.
“Rick,” she said. “I’m afraid of Rick.”
Part Six
60
I wanted my brother at home, in the house that belonged to my family. I wanted to be in the rooms that had heard my father’s voice, felt the whisper of my mother’s step.
There were questions I needed to ask him, and there was something I needed to destroy.
I had lost track of time. It was night, and I was surprised at the darkness. We left the hospital, and I felt like someone recovering a land he had lost, a survivor of a one-man voyage. The parking lot was not especially remarkable, but it looked, with its red lights and carefully delineated parking spaces, like a fragment of a beautiful world.
Ask him, I told myself. Ask him why Nona is afraid.
Something about Rick. Something about Rick isn’t right. Something about Rick has never been right. Has it?
“Hurry up,” said Rick, but I was amazed at the sounds of the darkness. I gazed around at the buildings, the sky. A car started. Someone laughed. People were talking, their voices far away.
I reminded myself that I couldn’t leave Nona here. Something bad would happen to her.
Underfoot was the solid, gritty asphalt. I would have to call Renman. I would have to tell him that his experiment had worked. No doubt he had known that I would eventually end up with the same constellation of symptoms as my mother. Renman must have figured that I would do no harm, given a chance to spin out some of my own plans. The wise, careful man had won. I could bear him no malice. I had enjoyed my hours in the light.
“We’re not driving straight there,” I said. “There’s something I have to do.” It had nothing to do with Renman, or with packing one of my bags for a long stay away from home.
“Dr. Ahn’s meeting with Dr. Skeat. They’ll be waiting.”
“I insist.”
“Absolutely not,” he said, but his determination was flickering.
“It will take just a few minutes.”
No response.
“A few minutes. That’s all.”
Rick examined the keys in his hands. He looked around at the cars, the obscure figures of passing people on the sidewalk.
“I don’t like it,” he said after a long moment. The stiff, distorted conical shapes of the junipers, the winking red brake lights of passing cars, all seemed to trouble him.
An older brother has a lingering, minor sort of authority. “What harm can I do?”
We both seemed to find that amusing, in a grim way. Rick gave a toss of his shoulders, as though to say: murder, suicide. Nothing much.
He started the car. “I can have clothes shipped up to you. Books, tapes. You name it.”
“Home first. Please.”
“It’s a bad idea.” There was, however, no force in his words.
I thanked him, but the way he drove troubled me, wrenching the Alfa from one lane to another, glancing into his rearview mirror. At one point I asked him to slow down, and he did not seem to hear me.
It is an ancient irony, which Milton illuminated perhaps without fully understanding it himself: in the old story Adam fell because he loved Eve, because he was enough like God to be unable to forget his heart’s companion.
I found the feather in the calfskin Milton. It left an imprint on the page, and the blood left a trace of black dirt.
It was a dim object, the blood filling its shaft. I found some matches in a drawer. A feather burns quickly, with the same frizzled swiftness with which hair will be consumed. I needed a second match to reignite it, but soon even the blood, which smoldered and gave off smoke, was gone, leaving a waxy residue of ash in the ashtray, and a sultry, clinging smell.
I put the volume carefully back into its place on the shelf.
Stratton.
I am still here.
I buried my face in my hands for a moment.
I didn’t want her. I knew she did not exist. She had nothing to do with reality, with the land of day and night. The flickering image was there, to one side, that figure I had begun to realize was a symptom, a lapse of consciousness rather than a presence.
She had nothing to do with me. I averted my eyes, feeling the beginning of pain in my skull. Don’t talk to her. Whatever you do—don’t say a word.
She spoke my name again, a sound like a page turning.
She had never existed. Grab a few shirts, I ordered myself, and get out of here. I was a man sitting in the presence of a drug that had mastered him, poised, waiting for the toxin to take its grip.
She ascended into half-focus. And stood, milk-gowned, watching me, flickering, spinning. When I looked at her directly she dimmed, and when I looked away she grew sharp and bright.
“I’m finished,” I said. I had meant to say: I am finished with you.
Her voice was like wind in sails, rippling. “You have not lost us, Stratton.”
It was a struggle to remain upright. I did not answer her.
“What did you want? Your name. You wanted fame. And beyond that—nothing.”
I hurried through drawers. I packed this shirt, that notebook, feeling futile, my acts senseless, my shadow falling and flowing over the room. “I am a creature of my time,” I said.
I bit my lip. Don’t. Don’t talk.
“Ask, Stratton. Ask for something great.”
“Great?” I echoed the word mockingly.
Tell her to leave. Silence her. But I couldn’t—that was the problem. She was proof of how sick I was.
But her words caught me. Great.
No, don’t think, I told myself. Hurry. Leave now. My lip was raw. I whispered, “You’re challenging me.”
Ask, I thought.
Why not ask?
I was excited for a moment. “I would like you to do something wonderful.”
“What is it you want?”
My emotion faded. “You won’t be able to do it.”
We are real.
I was disgusted with myself. “What are you?”
“Something beyond your grasp.”
“An angel?”
The silence pulsed around me. “You’ll never understand.”
“The ghost of my sister—who died before she was born. Is that what you are?”
There was a laugh, like the rush of wind in a tree.
“All of the unborn, all the people who never had a chance to live, the shadow people who want a part to play in life.” I stopped myself. “Am I right?”
She did not answer.
“Nothing. An absence.” I took a deep breath. “You did harm.”
I was answered by the sort of silence a monument casts, a promontory, immense and dumb.
“I’m beginning to see that you can do nothing for me. The death of my adversaries, the conversation with my father, were all empty theater. It was all an effect of my imagination. And perhaps I actually killed Blake. And DeVere. With these hands.”
These hands. I knew it was the truth.
A whisper, from all around me. “Nona’s return to life?”
I did not want to talk about Nona. “Valfort is a great physician. Besides, maybe you had her nearly killed, and kept her, until I almost took my life. As a game.”
The thought-voice was beautiful. “Have you lost faith in us?”
I wanted to laugh, but I felt sick. “You don’t exist.”
She spoke as with the voice of a stadium, packed with voices: You’ll never understand.
Don’t listen. “I have no interest in you. It’s all in my mind.” I was panting. “You’ve been proving that to me, little by little, and now I’m convinced.”
“We are what you believe us to be.”
I shook with quiet laughter, but it was a furious laughter, and I ached to seize this smudge of light in my hands.
I closed my eyes. Even so I could see her radiance through my eyelids, suffused with the color of my own flesh. Was she toying with me? Or did she, in truth, have power?
Bring Stu
art back, I thought. Bring him back to life and health.
But I turned away. When we mature we climb to higher ground, leaving the quicker, lower years behind. The view is greater. The tower of our own making enters the sky. We see more of the landscape around us. We press brick upon brick and stand ever taller in the countryside of our lives. And if all that happens is our flowering ignorance, what have we accomplished?
Perhaps something. Something small. Perhaps we have exchanged one sort of ignorance for another, finer kind, a fabric old and human.
“Bring Stuart back,” I said.
There was no response.
The light had vanished.
61
My mother had a wonderful singing voice. It was, however, a secret voice. She sang only when she thought no one was listening, and she would sing music that I had assumed were obscure snippets of madrigals or arias, tunes that I had not yet run across in Covent Garden or the Arena di Verona.
I would never find these songs in any library, although I tried. I came to realize that these songs were her own creation. She composed them, these private fragments of opera. They were hers, perhaps one of the gifts the spirits had given her, a corollary to her insanity.
If only I could recall any of the lyrics to her music. Or perhaps what had sounded like words might have been a language of her own invention. As so many times before, I found myself wondering what it was like to be my mother. Did she feel, sometimes, as I felt now?
The night of my good fortune was at an end. The consequence of my contract was about to unfold. If it had all been in my mind—as I now believed—then it was my sanity that I was about to see lifted away from me, that caul of thought that was about to be stripped.
What I was facing was the possibility of my madness returning, now, tonight. My shadow slipped down the hall ahead of me.
I descended the stairs. I called my brother’s name, but there was no answer.
Each room was empty. Until I found him at last.
It was an out-of-the-way room, one I did not enter except on rare occasions, like this, when something—or someone—was lost. “You took so long,” said Rick. He had picked up a book somewhere and had busied himself with it, but tossed it down with an expression of relief.
It was one of Father’s favorite books, his well-thumbed Plato. I lifted my packed bag as proof that I had been busy.
“How are you feeling?” he asked.
“How do I look?”
“You know what they say about appearances.”
“So I must look all right.”
I realized that Rick had found some of his old clothes somewhere in the house. He had dressed this well once during a trial for drunk driving. He had been acquitted, the jury persuaded, many people felt, by his appearance. He had found his way into the pages of Esquire over the caption, “Sway the jury with hang of your tie.”
The heavy old Plato did not belong here. Rick stood in what my mother would have called the sun parlor. I had redesigned this room as a memorial to my mother’s taste, the way a concert pianist might include, in his repertoire, a Liszt or Schubert that his family had always enjoyed but which he himself did not especially like.
The room was decorated in the manner she most admired, the style of Louis Phillippe, big vases with cherubs, and straight-legged chairs upholstered with pink, romantic figures. I dismissed this period as precious and overly pretty, but the furniture in this room was authentic and well-constructed, and there was something about this evening that made this the right room for what might be my last moments in my own house.
“You can’t run away,” he said.
I found a place just outside the doorway in the hall shelf for the big old volume. When I returned I said, “I wouldn’t dream of it. Where would I go? Montreux?”
“You could go anywhere.”
I considered his tone. “You’re serious.”
“You don’t have to come with me tonight.”
“Dr. Ahn is expecting us.” The final pronoun was a deliberate choice.
He made his familiar pistol-finger gesture, meaning: You’re right.
My brother and I had often engaged in fraternal combat, of the happy sort. He and I were well matched, dissimilar, similar, and my father had called us “two thorns in a pod.”
I was reluctant to begin. “Tell me, Rick—why is Nona afraid of you?”
We had walked down the hall before he made any response. He turned at the front door. He gave an incredulous laugh. “She can’t be.”
“Forgive me for asking. My thoughts are hard to control. Perhaps I’m speaking so much word salad. Why does she think that you tried to kill her?”
His head shook, just slightly, as though he were ordering himself to say nothing. “I’m not going to talk about this sort of thing until we meet with Dr. Ahn.”
“You think what I am saying is the raving of a diseased mind.” This was not a question. I let the nearly classical phrasing of the remark settle between us. Our talk would be direct but formal.
But he said exactly the wrong thing. It was his flippant, unfeeling manner that stung me. “If I tried to kill someone, they’d be dead.”
“Unless you were interrupted before you finished by a nurse or an aide, or maybe just changed your mind at the last moment.”
Rick did not bother to respond. He tucked my leather bag into what my family had always insisted on calling the “boot” of the car, in this case a very small storage compartment.
We sat in the car, shutting doors, busying ourselves with our own thoughts.
“My son the playboy” my mother called him. The phrase smacked of smoking jackets, martinis, party girls, an obsolete set of images. My mother had stopped paying attention to the world at some point in her young adulthood.
I did not plan my words. I did not know, really, from what part of me they originated. But I spoke clearly. “You resented Father for the pain he caused. You helped Mother kill him. Was it oleander, or did you use something else? You must have quadrupled Dad’s tranquilizers. Must have taken a lot of it. Or some other medicine—poison,” I corrected myself. “Something one of your starlet friends took for fun. I remember belladonna being all the rage at a party or two.”
I stopped myself, aghast at my words. You can’t say this sort of thing. You’re talking to your brother about patricide. Think what you’re saying. Look at your hands now. You’re shaking. Don’t say another word.
There was a light mist on the windshield. We sat silently in the car, the engine idling, my brother hunched at the steering wheel, staring ahead.
Then I broke the silence. The thought of anyone hurting Nona goaded me. “Maybe you resented me, too. Maybe you wanted me to succeed and at the same time destroy myself. Maybe you hired people to attack me. Maybe it wasn’t the work of DeVere’s friends at all. Maybe you told your gambling associates that if I died you’d inherit what little money I had—this house, for example. Or maybe you knew enough commissions were coming in to make the calf just fat enough to suit your purposes.”
He nearly spoke but stopped himself. He looked away, through the small side window of the sportscar.
He’s angry, I told myself. Of course he’s angry. Or maybe he’s afraid. Wouldn’t you be afraid of a brother who sat right next to you in a car talking about such things?
But I would not stop. “Besides, you always felt that I was the good brother, the brother destined for something great. You tried to kill Nona because you knew that I was on the edge of complete mental collapse. You wanted me hospitalized. I think you like the thought of it even now. I can tell what you must have been thinking: Strater cracks up. I look good.”
Rick broke his silence. “Mom’s just like that. Under that genteel surface she’s all venom.”
“And how about you, Rick? Under your surface, what are you?”
He wrenched the car into first, the gears whining, then pulled away from the curb. The velocity forced me back into the seat.
I let Rick
drive in silence for awhile. I knew that he was one of those people who find outlet, even expression, in driving. His way of cornering, tires squealing, his way of barely slowing at a stop sign—these were all silent counterarguments.
An intersection approached. Rick sped up.
In movies there is usually a chance for a stunt driver to swerve, skid, and avoid a lumbering vehicle or two. This was like nothing so much as Russian roulette. A light turned red.
And before the cars could start up and enter the intersection we were through it.
After the event I closed my eyes for a moment. “You’re going too fast,” I said.
Rick forced the engine to a higher pitch. I tensed, my hand stretched out to the dash. It had taken less than a minute to go from sporty momentum to lethal speed, but now we were racing down Nineteenth Street, cars and buses a blur.
We were going the wrong way.
We should have been heading north, but we were heading south. I struggled in my seat, twisting to look one way, turning to speak to Rick. “This is wrong!”
The speed forced me back into my seat.
I steadied myself. “Maybe I’ve been talking about things I don’t understand,” I said, trying to placate him. “What I’m saying can’t be true.”
We were on 280, the sportscar fishtailing across the lanes of freeway traffic. We shot around a truck in the fast lane, and whipped from lane to lane, avoiding cars on the mist-dampened freeway.
We were going too fast.
I glanced at the speedometer and the needle was jammed to the right. The cars, the lanes, the shrubbery and the overpasses, were indistinct, erased by our speed.
The highway twitched, straightened. We were on Highway 1, the reflectors in the middle of the road a steady streak. At one time I had enjoyed danger, I told myself with thin humor. My voice was steady. “Slow down, Rick. Slow down and let me out.”
The car went faster.
“I want out!” I shouted. I even thought of grabbing the steering wheel, but then cringed away at the recognition of the disaster that would result. “Slow down!”
Then he spoke. The feeling his voice was not anger, and it was not fear. “You’re right,” he said.
The Horses of the Night Page 30