Epitaph

by James Siegel

  There. Quite a speech. But he'd told it all, all he knew; he hadn't held a single thing back.

  "Your turn," he said.

  "What if I don't want a turn?"

  "We had a deal."

  "You can get out of the deal if you want."

  "I don't want."

  "Maybe you do, and you don't know it."

  "Now you're losing me, Doctor. Come on, this was I'll- tell-you-mine-if-you-tell-me-yours."

  "You don't want to hear mine."

  "Why?"

  "Because mine's worse. Go home."

  "I can't."

  "Go home, William."

  "I can't. Why did you know him?"

  "I can call you a cab."

  "Fifty years later and you knew his name. Why?"

  "Because I couldn't forget it. I've tried."

  "It's your turn, Doctor."

  "If I tell, you'll wish I hadn't."

  "I wish I hadn't read the obits. One wish to a customer."

  "Okay," Dr. Morten said. "Okay," his voice trailing off like a muffled prayer. And what was he praying for? For William to listen to him maybe, for William to take the next cab home, and leave what was buried, buried. But William had gone too far; he'd crossed that point where going back was longer than going forward. He was committed to the journey now, no refunds, no cancellation insurance. Like Mr. Leonati on another journey to hell, he was good and stuck.

  "Okay," he repeated. "But I've got to figure out where to begin. Do I begin with him or with me? We're both important here. Take me. I was a kid, a psychiatric intern, just starting out. He wasn't much older. But he'd been through it. Like the rest of them. Bones-walking skeletons with that dead stare in their eyes. He wasn't different, just more bitter than the rest of them. Help him, they said. Help him. He was my first-you never forget your first, right?"

  Clarence the cat was pirouetting crazily on the end table, like a music box ballerina gone haywire. Dr. Morten didn't seem to notice. He was back in time, a fresh- scrubbed intern about to shrink his very first head.

  "He's a hero, they told me. Lost his family in the camps. Refused to eat when they liberated him. Wanted to die. Help him, they said. Sure thing, I answered. After all, this is what I wanted, what I'd gone to school for. I was going to make him forget, make him come to terms with his loss.

  "At first, he was uncommunicative. Sat in the corner and didn't say a word to me. I let him stew in it too- tried to use the silence as a tool. But it didn't work with him. He was back there sizing me up-even then I knew that. So I started to talk-telling him a little about me to see if he'd bite. Of course, before I knew it, I was doing all the talking and he was doing all the listening. See- he'd turned things on their head-reversed roles with me. He was the doctor and I was the patient. It didn't take him long to come up with a diagnosis either. Terminal tenderness-the fatal desire to help others. He had me right where he wanted me then.

  "So he began to talk. And talk. Suddenly he wasn't so dead anymore. Suddenly he wasn't so pathetic and tortured. Because suddenly I was. I thought about getting up and leaving him. Just refusing him as a patient. Wishful thinking. We were stuck with each other. At least till the next session when he decided not to show up again. He didn't have to. He'd said everything he wanted to."

  Dr. Morten leaned forward.

  "But to tell you about Jean, I have to tell you about someone else first. Someone you may find it hard to believe was real. Except he was. Afterward, I looked up everything I could about him. There wasn't a lot. But there was enough-even today. In the absolute butchery that was World War II he was just an afterthought. Maybe he didn't have the right press agent-his numbers weren't up there with the big boys. But he was smarter than they were. Much smarter."

  As Dr. Morten continued, William could sense something had changed. No, Clarence still sat on the end table licking his paws with undisturbed relish, the blinds still lay drawn and shuttered, the door still firmly shut to the world. But there was another visitor in the house now. No doubt about it. Someone had sneaked in through the cracks, drawn up a chair, and put up his feet on the kitchen table.

  Had he ever heard of Marcel Petoit, Dr. Morten wanted to know. Dr. Petoit?

  "No," William replied.

  "Now you will." And as he told him what he knew, William felt like he was six years old again and listening to a fairy tale in the dark, one of those gruesome fairy tales from the Brothers Grimm. Just a fairy tale. Because when you got right down to it-it was easier that way.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Once upon a time in the little French town of Auxerre there lived a boy called Marcel. Marcel Petoit. One day, when Marcel was nine years old he took his aunt's dog, Max, for a walk. Good dog, he whispered, as Max trotted faithfully beside him. Good dog, as he settled down beneath an ancient ash tree, rubbing the soft fur between Max's eyes. Very good dog, as he used some hatbox twine to tie Max to the trunk of the tree. Great dog, as he lifted the carving knife from his coat pocket. Excellent dog, as he slit Max's stomach from his collarbone down to his tail. Dead dog, as he watched his intestines slide out onto the autumn leaves. Little Marcel Petoit decided then and there to be a doctor.

  ***

  Once upon a time Marcel joined the army.

  Three months later, he joined the walking wounded in the military hospital at Sers. Just about a stone's throw from the Aisne valley where he'd gone and had his leg blown up on ordinary maneuvers.

  Marcel didn't much like the military. And he liked the military hospital even less. What he particularly disliked about it was the haunting babble that surrounded him every night like crickets in the dark. His fellow soldiers, his comrades in arms. Some of whom had injuries just like his. Though, strictly speaking, that wasn't why they were there. This ward's business had nothing to do with healing injured bodies. This was the mental ward. This was the ward of babble. Which is where they put you when you did things like blow up your leg on purpose. Or, at least, when they caught you at it. He'd been hoping for his discharge papers. Instead, he'd been rewarded with an admission to loon land.

  It quickly occurred to him that the only way out of the crazy ward was to act crazier. Too crazy for the French army. Sure, they wanted you insane enough to charge a hill with several hundred automatic weapons trained at your head. But not crazy enough to turn one on yourself. It was all right to yell charge. As long as you didn't do it in strange tongues.

  So he added a few more symptoms to his file. He developed the shakes, the trembles, and the faints. He was constantly seen rubbing his hands together as if trying to start a fire. He threw in a little self-mutilation here and there as well.

  There was just one problem with all this. He was starting to have a little difficulty telling the difference. The difference between the charade and the non-charade, between the mentally disturbed him and the non-mentally disturbed him, between faking it and feeling it. He found himself trembling when he hadn't asked himself to do it. He found himself recovering from a dead faint when he'd never actually planned on fainting. And his hand rubbing had gotten completely out of control.

  There was a bright side though.

  It worked.

  Four months later he was discharged with a noticeable limp and an eye-catching diagnosis of severe paranoid psychosis.

  Once upon a time in a little French village somewhere in the Dordogne, there lived a doctor called Marcel.

  The doctor fell in love. With a charming local girl called Lousette. Then the doctor fell out of love with the charming local girl called Lousette. She no longer seemed so charming to him. She had, in fact, become annoying and irritating.

  It was, truth be told, her complete and maddening inability to understand him. To understand his little thefts, for example. His little transgressions. His little faux pas. To comprehend, for instance, that it wasn't the things he took that excited him, but the actual act of taking them. To understand that there was something positively, dare he say it-godlike-about his astounding ability to
rearrange the physical world. For example, to rearrange Madame Rouel's diamond necklace from her bedside jewelry box right into his armoir. Something godlike about his ability to get away with it too. And yet she seemed completely unable to grasp that.

  She'd begun making vague noises about exposing him, to issue veiled threats about restitution, to talk about his having to own up or else. This was a major mistake on her part. It had, he was sad to say, doomed her. Too bad too. It wasn't like he wasn't just a little fond of her. Still, there was one Godlike act he hadn't yet attempted. One he'd been musing about, pondering, even planning. The one reserved solely for God.

  And on a warm summer night when the cicadas were in full chorus, the time came to try it.

  They were lying naked in bed. Not exactly in post- coital bliss either. More like postcoital tension, regret, and recrimination. So he whispered some soothing words in her ear. Words like love and marriage and children. In no time at all they were fast approaching bliss again. She relaxed and dug herself into the crook of his arm.

  She'd been complaining all day about her woman's pains. He'd been promising all day to give her just the thing to cure them. It was time to keep that promise.

  He reached into his black bag, where the syringe lay primed and waiting. Roll over, he told Lousette, roll over so you won't see the shot and become scared. Dutifully, she rolled onto her side, her small body tense and barely trembling; for a moment, for just a moment, Marcel had second thoughts. She was, after all, pretty-and not too bad a cook either. But then it was as if he was back in his aunt's garden, with Max the dog staring stupidly up at him. He eased the needle into her hip.

  The syringe was filled with water and air, the two basic elements of life, the irony of which wasn't lost on him for a second. In fact, he kind of relished the irony-saw an almost beautiful symmetry at work here. The water, of course, was for show-it was the air that would carry the day. And God breathed life into Adam. But what God gives, God can take back.

  He withdrew the needle from her trembling body, leaving the tiniest bubble of blood, which he wiped away with an alcohol-soaked cotton ball. You have a soft touch, Lousette told him, I wish… But she didn't complete her sentence, not because of the air bubble he'd injected into her body-that would take a while-but because she wished for so many things, and couldn't, at least for the moment, decide on one. She fell asleep.

  Marcel cradled her from behind, cradled her for an hour, then two, and then into the third, when suddenly, it started. She began to twist and shake; her eyes popped open, her mouth contorted. He'd expected convulsions, absolutely, but not like this. He watched, completely bug- eyed fascinated. She fell off the bed, but like a maimed insect, she couldn't stay still. Her elbows and knees beat a weird tattoo against the floor while she writhed about like an earthworm on a hook. She saw him now-help… she mouthed the word as best she could, though even with him straining to hear her, not very loudly. He stood up to get a better look as her hands reached for his ankles, reached and almost touched them. But three quarters there they suffered one last spasm and froze, resembling, he thought, unearthed roots-so crooked and hungry were they.

  Death didn't become her.

  Now the hard part. The murder hadn't taken long- cleaning it up would. The white enamel bathtub was waiting for her body; he'd have to slice it in sections and drain the blood from it. Not exactly a walk in the park. Then everything into the stove-nicely stoked for her faithful heart and pretty little head. Preparation was his strong suit, he thought. And given the relative ease with which he'd managed so far, he was beginning to feel the satisfaction of a job well done. And beginning to feel something else, of course, too. The power and burdens of God.

  Once upon a time, Marcel moved to Paris.

  He had a thriving practice.

  He had a wife.

  He had two sons.

  But what he didn't have on the night of May 12, 1939, was an excuse.

  He was in the house of Aime Hausee's mother. And Aime Hausee-the daughter-was dead. He'd overshot her with morphine, a clumsy mistake. Of course, he'd been a wee bit preoccupied at the time. Mainly with staring down at her teeny breasts as he got ready to pull her wisdom tooth. The fact is, she should have gone to a dental surgeon-impacted teeth weren't exactly his specialty.

  An hour after he left, the mother, the hysterical bitch, had called him up screaming. Her daughter wasn't re- sponding-not to her name, not to long and repeated prodding, not to anything. Caught in the middle of his favorite dinner, veau a la creme with scalloped potatoes and a good Cabernet, he'd had to leave it half eaten and rush out into the night. Once he'd arrived, still hungry, still irritated, he'd told the weeping mother to wait downstairs.

  Aime-his wife's dressmaker, and not at all a bad one- was not dead yet. She was in the more remote stages of coma, remote enough so that there was nothing he could do for her, nothing that is except loosen her nightgown, which he'd already done-loosened it enough so that her little breasts were now more or less exposed.

  This would be his fourth. Imagine that.

  And this one more or less an accident. Not like Madame Debaure for instance-who'd run a dairy cooperative, who'd entertained Marcel in her bed, but who, in the end, had refused to go along with his plans concerning her money. Not like poor Frascot either, who'd had the unfortunate luck to know about Madame Debaure, and worse yet, the dumb effrontery to try and profit from it. And of course, this one was nothing at all like Lousette. Four now. He had four, and the truth was, it was getting easier all the time.

  He grasped the bottom of her powder blue nightgown and lifted it slowly up, up, up… underneath she wasn't wearing a thing. Look at that. He was struck dumb by the smoothness of her skin, by the color as well, pale as skimmed milk, except, of course, in her cleft where the color was rosy pink. He wondered how long the grief- stricken mother would wait downstairs before she'd be back up knocking at the door, yakking at him, blaming him too no doubt.

  Ah well. He separated her legs, separated them in a wide welcoming V as he moved his mouth to her nipples warm as sand.

  Then he literally fucked her to death.

  ***

  Once upon a time in the city of Paris, the good Dr. Petoit went house hunting.

  He found himself staring at 21 Rue la Soeur.

  Then he found 21 Rue la Soeur staring back. He was quite sure of this, absolutely positive. The house was looking back at him. And it was talking too. It was telling tales out of school. Hidden, beastly, dark little tales. He didn't know exactly what they were yet, not the details, but he knew they were filled with blood and fury. Which is what most of Paris was filled with those days.

  It was July 1941, and Paris was occupied. Paris was occupied and so was Marcel. He was occupied with this house. Twenty-one Rue la Soeur. It had housed nobility, no question, princesses and dukes and regents and chancellors. It was four and one half stories high; it had twelve gaunt windows. It was yakking away at him.