But the woman ignored him, walking into the dining room. "I suppose we could set the altar here," she said.
"Altar?"
"For my baby. The faithful will need a place to worship
her."
"Look ...," Ray said.
She stared at him. "You don't know who this is?" The ugly monkey grimaced at Ray. "She is the Christ child, the Second Coming. She was born to me a virgin and—"
"I'm sorry," Ray said quickly. "You'll have to go." He pressured her toward the door.
The monkey chattered angrily.
"You'll be damned to hell," the woman said, and there was nothing soft about her voice now. "You're like all the rest of them, and you will burn forever in the fiery pit, your skin will melt and your bones—"
"Get out of here now!"
"My baby damns you for eternity!" Lilly was screaming as she backed out the doorway. "Your teeth will crack open and your cock will rot and—"
He slammed the door.
She was still screaming her curses as, with trembling hands, he locked the door and retreated back into the apartment.
The answering machine broke the next day, and though he could tell that a message had been left, Ray had no way of hearing what it was. The recording mechanism had gone out on him and would play back only garbled static. On the off chance that it was someone who was interested in looking at the apartment, he washed and put away the breakfast dishes and threw away the newspaper that was spread out over the dining room table.
He was just straightening the magazines on the living room coffee table when there was a knock at the door. He ran a quick hand through his hair, rubbed a finger across his teeth, cleared his throat, and opened the door.
The man who stood there could not have been more than three feet high. He was wearing only a dark green bathing suit and his hairless skin was albino white. He was completely bald, and even his eyebrows had been shaved off. "Mr. Feldman?" he asked in a high squeaky voice.
Ray nodded, and the man stepped inside, looking around the apartment. "TV!" he squealed and ran quickly across the living room, plopping down on the floor in front of the television.
Ray waited a moment, but the small man remained un-moving, mesmerized by the commercial that was on.
"Do you have cable?" he asked.
"The apartment's been rented," Ray said in as an authoritarian voice he could muster. He didn't like lying, but this was just getting too damn weird.
The little man stood up and faced Ray. His lower lip was trembling and tears were forming in his eyes. His small white hands began clasping and unclasping.
"I'm sorry," Ray said, softening. "But I rented the place out yesterday—"
With a loud wail, the man streaked past Ray and out the door. By the time Ray turned around, he was gone, the hallway outside empty.
"I'm sorry," Ray called out, but there was no answer, no sound outside, and he closed the door.
He walked back into the living room and sat down tiredly on the couch. What the hell was he going to do? The month was almost over, and if things continued the way they were going, he was not going to find a roommate. There was no way he could afford another month by himself—
The front door opened.
Ray jumped to his feet. The man who stood in the doorway must have weighed four hundred pounds. He was bearded and bespectacled, wearing a faded Star Wars T-shirt, which bunched in folds around his gut. Next to him on the stoop were two suitcases and a huge piece of sheet metal. "You saved my life," he said, picking up the suitcases by their handles and clamping the sheet metal beneath his arm. He walked into the apartment, looking around. "Nice place."
"W-What..."
"I saw your invitation at the university."
"That wasn't an invitation. It was an advertisement. I'm just interviewing applicants—"
"Well, you can stop interviewing. I'm here." The man put his suitcases down on the floor. He leaned the sheet metal against the wall next to the dining room table and opened one of the suitcases, taking out a hammer and some nails.
He began nailing the sheet metal to the wall.
"What the hell do you think you're doing?"
"This here's for my war game."
Ray ran across the room. "You're not putting that on my wall."
A cloud passed over the man's face, and his smile faded.
He pushed roughly past Ray and strode into the kitchen, pulling open drawers until he found the one he wanted. picked up two carving knives, one in each hand, and advanced on Ray, the expression on his face one of furious rage. "What's all this talk of knives, boy?" He drew out the) word knives, stretching it into several syllables.
"I—" Ray began.
One of the knives whizzed by his head as the man threw it.
"What's all this talk of knives?"
Ray ducked. "I don't know what you're—"
Another knife flew past his head, embedding itself in the wall above the couch.
"I'm calling the police!" Ray ran toward the phone.
The fat man stood there for a moment, frowned, blinked his eyes, then smiled. He picked up his hammer and began nailing the sheet metal to the wall. "I put game pieces on here," he explained. "They're attached with magnets."
Breathing heavily, angered adrenaline coursing through his veins, Ray turned toward the man, dropping the phone. "Get out!" he yelled. He pulled one of the knives from the wall and advanced on the fat man.
"What'd I do?"
"Get out!" Ray rushed forward, and the man, panicking, dropped his hammer and ran out the door. Ray picked up first one suitcase, then the other, throwing them out the door. Comic books tumbled out. And pewter fantasy figures. And game pieces.
"My board!" the man cried.
Ray picked up the sheet metal and tossed it out the door.
Fury swept over the huge man's face once again. "Knives!" he said.
Ray closed the door just as the man started to run. He turned the lock, drew the dead bolt. There was a loud roar and a monstrous thump as the man rammed into the door, but the door miraculously held.
"I'm calling the police!" Ray said again.
But there was no answer, and he knew the man was gone.
"Hello. My name's Tiffany, and I'm calling in regard to the roommate-wanted ad in the paper." The woman's voice was lilting, almost musical, possessed of a thick southern accent.
Ray said nothing, only sighed tiredly.
"I'm getting desperate. I really need to find a place."
He took off his tie, throwing it on the couch. Cradling the receiver between his neck and shoulder, he started taking off his shoes. "Look, Miss—"
"Tiffany. Tiffany Scarlett. I'm a nurse at St. Jude's." She paused. "Look, if you haven't found a roommate yet, I'd like to come over and look at the place. I don't know what you're looking for, but I'm very quiet, and although my hours are sometimes a little weird because I work the second shift, I can assure you I would not disturb you. You probably wouldn't even notice I was there."
Ray was silent. This was sounding good. Too good. This was exactly what he wanted to hear, and he tried to read between the lines, searching for a catch.
"Just let me come over and take a peek. It's only five thirty. You haven't found a roommate yet, have you?"
"No," he admitted.
"Well then."
"Okay," he said. "Come by at seven."
"Seven it is."
"Do you know how to get here?"
"I have a map."
"See you at seven, then." "Okay. Bye-bye."
"Bye." He hung up the phone, closed his eyes. Please God, he thought, let her be normal.
The knock came at seven sharp. He stood for a moment unmoving, then opened the door.
He immediately stepped back, gagging. The smell was familiar, that unmistakable compound odor of putrescent filth and bodily waste which had permeated Ira's living quarters. He stared at the young woman who stood before him. If she had been clean, she would have been
a knockout. She possessed the thin graceful body of a model or a dancer, and her face was absolutely stunning. But she was wearing a man's coveralls stained with food and mud and God knew what, and her face and hands were brown with grime. Her hair stuck out from the sides of her head in greasy matted clumps.
In her hands she held two metal pails filled with dirt.
"This'll do nicely," she said in her thick southern accent. "This'll do fine." She stepped into the apartment and immediately dumped both pails of dirt onto the rug.
"What do you think you're doing?" Ray demanded.
"The rest of it's out in the truck," she said. She walked straight into the kitchen and began filling up one of the pails with water.
"You have to leave," Ray said flatly.
Tiffany laughed. "Oh, don't be silly." She walked back into the living room, poured the water on top of the dirt, and dropped to her knees, mixing the dirt and water into mud and spreading it over the carpet.
"That's it!" he roared. He picked her up around the waist and carried her to the door.
"But—" she sputtered.
"No more!" He threw her outside. She fell hard on her buttocks, and before she could get up, he threw her pails out after her. They bounced and clattered across the concrete.
He slammed the door, locked it.
He threw himself down on the couch, opened the paper and started looking through the classified ads.
Ray glanced down at the small square of newspaper in his hand:
GUESTROOM: M. N/Smoker. N/Drugs. N/Parties.
Clean, $350 mth. Mike. 1443 Sherwood #7.
He looked up at the address on the side of the apartment building. This was it. 1443 Sherwood. He smiled. It was even better than he'd expected. He'd known that this address was in the nicest section of town, and he'd expected it to be well kept, but he hadn't thought it would be this nice. He walked through the wrought iron gates and looked down at the freestanding map of the complex in the entryway, finding number seven.
It was upstairs, and he walked alongside the wide banister, around the corner, until he found the right doorway. He stood there for a moment, looking down at the manicured shrubbery, at the blue swimming pool.
He knocked on the door.
The smell assaulted his nostrils the moment the door opened: the clean scent of flour and sugar. He looked past the smiling man who stood in the vestibule. The floor of the apartment was covered with wet dough, as were the walls. In the center of the room was a barbed wire pen, and in the pen a snorting, snuffing creature that looked almost like a pig.
Almost, but not quite.
"As you can see," the man said, gesturing toward the pen,
"it's just my sister and me—"
"I'll take it," Ray said.
Llama
"Llama" was basically my response to astrology, numerology, and those sorts of pseudo-sciences. I wanted to show that patterns can exist, can recur, in nature, in society, and not necessarily mean anything. In the story, the protagonist's wife and unborn child died during the act of childbirth, and this man sees patterns everywhere, in everything, telling him what to do to avenge those deaths. The patterns might exist, but a lot of them are coincidence and have meaning only in the guy's head. They have no real objective meaning at all. That's how I feel about the fortune-telling arts.
When I wrote this story, there really was a llama living across the alley from my friend Dan Cannon's bookstore.
_________________________
Measuring:
The leg of the dead llama was three feet, two inches long.
And everything fell into place.
Three feet, two inches was the precise length of space between the sole of my hanging father's right foot and the ground.
By the time my wife's contractions were three minutes I and two seconds apart, she had only dilated 3.2 centimeters and the decision was made to perform a caesarean.
My wife was declared dead at three twenty.
The date was March 20.
I found the llama in the alley behind the bookstore. It was already dead, its cataract eyes rimmed with flies, and the retarded boy was kneeling on the rough asphalt beside it, massaging its distended stomach. The presence of the retarded boy told me that secrets lay within the measurements of the dead animal, perhaps the answers to my questions, and I quickly rushed back inside the store to find a tape measure.
In 1932, Franklin Roosevelt bought a new Ford coupe. The license plate of the coupe, which Roosevelt never drove, was 3FT2.
My father voted for Franklin Roosevelt.
I thought I saw my wife's likeness in a stain in the toilet in the men's room of an Exxon station. The stain was greenish black and on the right side of the bowl.
I breathed upon the mirror above the blackened sink, and sure enough, someone had written her name on the glass. The letters appeared—clear spots in the fog cloud of condensation—then faded.
In the trash can, partially wrapped in toilet paper, I saw what looked like a bloody fetus.
I left the llama in the alley undisturbed, did not tell the police or any city authority, and I warned the other shop owners on the block not to breathe a word about the animal to anyone.
I spent that night in the store, sleeping in the back office behind the bookshelves. Several times during the night I awakened and looked out the dusty window to where the un-moving body lay on the asphalt. It looked different in the shadows created by moonlight and streetlamp, and in the lumped silhouette I saw contours that were almost familiar to me, echoes of shapes that I knew had meant something to me in the past but which now remained stubbornly buried in my subconscious.
I knew the dead animal had truths to tell.
Weighing:
The hind end of the llama, its head and upper body still supported by the ground, weighed one hundred and ninety-six pounds.
My dead wife's niece told me that she was sixteen, but I believe she was younger.
I have a photograph of her, taken in a booth at an amusement park, that I keep on the top of my dresser, exactly 3.2 inches away from a similar photo of my wife.
The photo cost me a dollar ninety-six. I put eight quarters into the machine, and when I happened to check the coin return I found four pennies.
My father weighed a hundred and ninety-six pounds at his death. He died exactly a hundred and ninety-six years after his great-great-grandfather first set foot in America. My father's great-great-grandfather hanged himself.
A hundred and ninety-six is the sum total of my age multiplied by four—the number of legs of the llama.
***
The Exxon station where I saw my wife's likeness in a stain in the men's room toilet is located at 196 East 32nd Street.
I do not remember whose idea it was to try the pins. I believe it was hers, since she told me that she'd recently seen a news report on acupuncture that interested her.
I showed her some of the books in my store: the photographic essay on African boys disfigured by rites of passage, the illustrated study of Inquisition torture devices, the book on deformed strippers in an Appalachian sideshow.
She told me that if acupuncture needles placed on the proper nerves could deaden pain, wasn't it logical to assume that needles placed on other nerves could stimulate pleasure?
She allowed me to tie her up, spread-eagled on the bed, and I began by inserting pins in her breasts. She screamed, at first yelling at me to stop, then simply crying out in dumb animal agony. I pushed the pins all the way into her flesh until only the shiny round heads were visible, pressing them slowly through the skin and the fatty tissue of her breasts in a crisscross pattern, then concentrating them around the firmer nipples.
By the time I had moved between her legs, she had passed out and her body was covered all over with a thin shiny sheen of blood.
When the retarded boy finished massaging the llama's distended stomach, he stepped back from the animal and stood there soundlessly. He looked at me an
d pointed to the ground in front of him. I measured the space between the retarded boy and the llama. Five feet, six inches.
At the time my father hanged himself he was fifty-six years old.
My stillborn son weighed five pounds, six ounces.
Five times six is thirty.
My wife was thirty years old when she died.
According to the book Nutritional Values of Exotic Dishes, a single 56-ounce serving of cooked llama meat contains 196 calories.
This information is found on page 32.
The young man did not object when I took him in the men's room of the gas station.
He was standing at the urinal when I entered, and I stepped behind him and held the knife to his throat. I used my free hand to yank down his dress slacks, and then I pressed against him. "You want it, don't you?" I asked.
"Yes," he said.
I made him bend over the side of the lone toilet and although his buttocks were hairy and repulsed me, I made him accept me the way my wife had. All of me. He tensed, stiffened, and gasped with pain, and I felt around in front of his body to make sure he was not aroused. If he had been aroused, I would have had to kill him.
I slid fully in and nearly all the way out fifty-six times before my hot seed shot into him and with my knife pressed against his throat I made him cry out "Oh God! Oh God!" the way my wife had.
I left him with only a slight cut across the upper throat, above the Adam's apple, and I took his clothes and put them in the trunk of my car and later stuffed them with newspaper and made them into a scarecrow for my dead wife's dying garden.
I hoped the young man was a doctor.
***
I realized the importance of measurements even as a child. When my sister fell out of the tree in our yard, I measured the length of her legs and the total length of her body. Her legs were twenty inches long. Her body was four-foot-five.
My mother was twenty years old when she gave birth to my sister.
My sister died when my father was forty-five.
Requirements:
I was required to pay for the knowledge gained from my sister's measurements.
My sister had two arms and two legs.
I killed two cats and two dogs.
The Collection Page 19