by Ronald Malfi
Dropping to my knees, I administered a procession of quick little slaps to the sides of Charlie’s face in an effort to rouse him. After a few moments, he uttered a garbled, unintelligible series of words, and then his eyes fluttered open.
His first discernible word: “Gloria…” Only he stretched it out to such an impossible length—Gllllll-orrrrrrr-orrrrr-orrrrr-ieyyyyyy-ahhhhhh—that I thought he was actually singing. Finally, his eyes focused on me...and they did not seem like Charlie’s eyes at all. In fact, just having him stare at me caused the hairs on my arms to stand at attention.
“I thought you were dead,” I told him.
He blinked twice. “Aren’t I?”
“Not yet. You just passed out. You’re sick, Charlie. I need to take you to the hospital.”
“I don’t need a hospital.”
“What happened to your head?” There was a shiny bulge, purplish around the circumference, pushing up through the center of his forehead.
Charlie touched it and winced. “Damn. I think…I think I walked into the post…” And he pointed to the nearest of the load-bearing struts that stood in the center of the stable, holding up the roof, only two feet away from where he’d collapsed.
“How the hell did you manage that?” I asked.
“It’s the displacement. It’s widening. Everything—Marcus, everything is off-center.”
I helped him walk back to the house. His weight on me the entire way, I was astonished at how light he felt, as if he were merely a husk of the man he’d once been. (And then it occurred to me that, in fact, he was.) So I helped him into the house and down the hall to his bedroom.
Charlie dropped like a rain-drenched scarecrow onto his mattress. “Uhhhhh,” he moaned.
I peeled his shoes from his feet—Lord, how they stank!—and departed the room, only to return moments later with a glass of water and some aspirin. I told him to sit up and take the aspirin. “For your head,” I said.
“Don’t want any,” he answered quickly although, to my surprise, he reached out and plucked the two white tablets from the palm of my hand, and dry-swallowed them.
“Now sleep,” I told him.
He slept for two days.
In that time, I felt the house close in all around me. Jerry and Demitris phoned and said they’d be longer than expected on the road and hoped everything was going well. After their phone calls, I became too aware of being alone. Every creak of the house was unsettling. Often, I found myself pulling rotations outside Charlie’s bedroom door, too, just to make sure he was still breathing. At first I couldn’t tell, but as the day grew longer and Charlie drifted deeper and deeper into sleep, his breathing segued into a steady, consistent growl that helped to ease my concerns. At one point that first day, I was startled from my work by a knock on the front door. Standing on the other side was a meek-looking, bird-faced man in thick glasses and a checkered sports jacket. He seemed surprised to find me answering the door.
“Is—uh, is Charlie around?”
“He’s asleep,” I said. “He isn’t feeling well.”
“He’s—he’s—”
“Is there something I can help you with?” I asked. Peering over his shoulder, I could see a black Jaguar idling in the driveway.
“No, no. Sorry for the disturbance. Auf Wiedersehen.”
When Jerry and Demitris returned late that evening, I caught them up on what had transpired in the stable. Demitris reacted with his stereotypical consternation while Jerry merely raised his eyebrows and fluttered his eyelids and looked like there weren’t enough words in the world to say what he truly wanted to say. He walked across the foyer, peeling off his topcoat, and started whistling to himself. In the parlor, he poured himself some fruit brandy.
“I think I should take him back to London with me for closer study,” I said, coming to rest in the doorway. Demitris was so close at my back, I could feel his hot breath jabbing the nape of my neck. “There are other doctors at the university with whom I could consort, and there’s an entire facility, fully staffed. It’s something we should consider.”
“I think we should consider euthanasia,” Jerry remarked snidely, fed up.
Behind me, Demitris asked what this had to do with Chinese kids.
“I’m not going to argue with you, Marcus. You’re the professional in these matters. You can do whatever you like. I’ve officially thrown in the towel. After today’s meeting with the promoter, I’m officially waving the white flag.” He twirled one finger in the air without enthusiasm. “Problem is getting the sorry son of a bitch to leave the compound. He won’t go.”
“We will have to convince him,” I said.
“He won’t go,” Jerry repeated. “But you can try. You can try till your head spins around and your eyes bug out and paper streamers come spouting from your mouth. But you can certainly try.” He offered a grim smile that could have been a grimace. “Here—have some brandy, Marcus. You’re starting to look like a ghost, too.”
“We all are,” I admitted.
Charlie slept through the following day as well, and the house was unusually quiet. Not because Charlie made much noise while awake, but his constant hovering presence and his peculiar behavior seemed to provide some sort of fuel to our conversations and behind-the-hand whispers. All of that was extinct now. In my room, I began to write out a plan of attack: how to get Charlie to come back to London with me. I had my fears that Jerry was correct and that Charlie could not be convinced. Roadblocked, stymied, I paced the entire house while lost in deep contemplation. Jerry was on his cell phone seemingly all day, often arguing with people, sometimes cajoling or patronizing them. Demitris slept most of the day on the back porch with his feet propped up on a chair, his mouth agape and attracting flies, a tongue of spittle sliding down the side of his face.
At one point, I found myself in the parlor, staring up at the portrait of Gloria.
How in the world had it gotten back here? Had Demitris hung it back on the wall? The very notion caused an angry tumult in my chest.
Her features were too sharp, too cold, to be attractive, and the look in her eyes—which the artist had captured with a near supernatural ability—was severe. I recalled childhood tales of Medusa’s stare, freezing a man to stone with a single glance.
I pushed one of the armchairs against the wall and, standing atop the seat cushion, removed the portrait from the hook. It was extremely heavy. I tried backing down off the chair as careful as possible, but I was not careful enough: I felt myself tumbling backward and, in my instinct to prevent the fall, released the portrait and grabbed for the wall. There was nothing on the wall to grab, however, and I toppled backward, cracking my back smartly on the floor. There was the dry peal of tearing cloth and then the solid thwack! of the gilded frame crashing to the floor. Sitting up and scooting back on my hands and feet, the seat of my slacks clearing a dustless path across the otherwise filthy floor, I looked at the busted frame and the torn canvas.
Footsteps flew down the hall. A moment later, Jerry was helping me off the floor. “What in God’s name…”
“I fell.”
He was looking at the ruined portrait. “I though Demitris got rid of that horrid thing?”
“So did I.”
On the back porch, I roused Demitris from his slumber and was prepared to strike him with a barrage of reprimands when he held up both hands in the most defensive of postures and assured me that he had indeed taken the portrait down and driven it to the dump just outside of the village.
“Then how did it wind up back on the wall?”
“I have no idea, Doc,” Demitris said.
“Someone must have located it and put it back,” I went on.
“Yes,” he agreed. “Someone must have.”
I made up my mind to speak to Charlie about it when he woke up, but he never woke that evening. If not for his rauco
us snores, I would have feared him dead. Instead, I skipped dinner in preference of working on Charlie’s case in my bedroom. I flipped through the textbooks I’d brought with me—I always carry textbooks with me, even on those infrequent occasions where I took a few days’ vacation—and used Jerry’s cell phone to call the university. Of my office assistant, Marla, I requested files pertaining to cases similar to Charlie’s—not that I could think of a single case that was exactly similar—to be placed on my desk awaiting my return. I was determined to get to the bottom of this, to fix it.
It was close to ten o’clock in the evening when Demitris brought me a plate of roast beef and onions and a glass of Madeira wine. I did not realize how hungry I was until I smelled the food.
“Is he still asleep?” I asked.
“Like a baby.”
I ate half the food and drank all the wine. Moments later, as my eyelids turned to leaden weights, I crawled onto my bed for a quick nap, but wound up falling asleep for several hours. Until I was shaken awake by a sound from directly beneath me.
Charlie.
My eyes flipped open. I did not move. Listening, I waited for the jarring sound to repeat itself—and finally, when it did, I realized it was the door that led to the back porch slamming shut on its frame again.
But no—he wasn’t outside, as I heard footsteps directly beneath my bedroom, padding across the floor. He’d opened the porch door but hadn’t gone outside after all. Listening, I found myself hating him. What the hell was he doing? I couldn’t understand it.
From downstairs there arose a muted thud, then a second smattering of bare feet on the hardwood floor. There was an urgency to the footsteps this time, I noticed, although I could not fathom the reason. Something almost childlike in their anxiousness…
“The crazy fool,” I whispered to my darkened room.
It was at that moment I was scared straight out of my skin by Charlie’s booming voice channeling up the winding stairwell and the upstairs corridor. It was as if the fool were standing directly outside my bedroom door! What in the world was he doing?
“Up!” Charlie cried. “Get! Up! Wake! Up!” He would not stop. “Up! Up! Up!”
I dumped myself from my bed and dragged my body out into the hallway. I was aware of another presence hovering somewhere behind me in the shadows—Jerry or Demitris or both—as I crossed to the balustrade and looked over the balcony to the landing below. In an instant, Jerry was beside me, leaning over the railing as well, his pale white legs poking like branches of an ash tree from beneath the hem of his nightdress.
“Up!” Charlie barked from the foyer. “Wake! Up!”
“We’re up, Charlie!” I called down. “What in the name of God are you doing?”
“Get down here. All of you.”
Even in the gloom, I could make out the stern look on his face, and the way his eyes smoldered like burning embers. He paced like a caged lion, those eyes blazing up at us and never leaving, his movements deliberate but wavering at the same time.
I turned and hurried down the stairwell, Jerry right behind me. Still upstairs, Demitris materialized on the second-floor landing, dazed from sleep, and nearly tumbled down the stairwell in an attempt to keep up with us.
“All right,” I said, coming toe to toe with Charlie. He was breathing heavy, out of breath and fuming. “Now that you’ve woken up the whole damn house, what is it?”
“Who was it?” he demanded.
“Calm down, Charlie,” I soothed.
“Don’t tell me to calm down, damn you!” he growled, his teeth clenched. It was enough to make me flinch. Despite his withered state, if he decided to throw a punch, it would do much damage. “In fact, I don’t even care who did it! I just want to know where it is. Tell me where it is!”
“Charlie,” I said, “we don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You don’t? None of you?” His eyes bounced off me, off Jerry, off poor Demitris. It was like watching a pinball game. “I mean, it couldn’t—it couldn’t be—it…”
“Charlie,” I said. “Take a breath. You’re going to hyperventilate.”
He reached out lightening-quick and grasped my wrist in one hand. From seemingly far away, I heard myself utter a meek little yelp just as Charlie jerked me forward and led me down the hallway. Behind us, Jerry and Demitris hurried to keep up. We approached the open parlor room door, only Charlie didn’t stop here: he pressed forward, still pulling me along by my wrist—and with a loud, skull-rattling crack, slammed into the frame of the doorway instead of passing through it.
“Ouch,” Demitris said from the back of the line.
Temporarily dazed, Charlie took a step back and shook his head. He released the grip on my wrist and pressed both heels of his hands into the sockets of his eyes. “Can you see?” he muttered, his voice much lower now. “Can you see what happens?”
“What are you talking about, Charlie?” Jerry asked from directly behind me.
More cautious this time, Charlie entered the parlor and we followed. Perhaps I should have known what he was getting on about before entering the room, but in the midst of all that had transpired this evening, I’d forgotten all about it.
He pointed to the empty place on the wall where the portrait of Gloria used to hang.
“Where is it?” Charlie demanded. “I don’t care who did it. I just want it back.”
“The portrait,” I said, clarifying it for the sake of the others, who appeared to still be somewhat under the influence of sleep. To Charlie, I said, “It was me. I took it down earlier this afternoon…”
“Why would you do that?”
“Because I’m here to help you move on and get over all this, and that’s not going to happen with your ex-wife’s picture staring down at us every time we come into this room.”
“You’ve got a lot of nerve, Marcus Llewellyn,” Charlie growled, fuming. The purplish knot on his forehead stood out like a third eye. “You’ve all got some goddamn nerve! All you’re doing is displacing me more and more. All you’re doing is knocking me loose again. And I need to keep it together, Marcus. I need to keep it together until Gloria comes back!”
“Gloria is not coming back!” I shouted, surprising everyone—surprising myself—at the voracity of my voice. “Do you understand that, you fool? She left and she is not coming back! Not ever! She doesn’t want any part of your sad little self-depreciating life and so she left and she’s never, ever coming back! And who would?”
In the wake of my speech, the silence that followed was nearly deafening. Charlie could only stare at me, wide-eyed, unable to move. At my back, I could feel Jerry’s and Demitris’s eyes boring into the back of my head. I, too, could not move. In fact, we might have all stood there until sunup if Charlie hadn’t sighed and moved past us, filtering back out into the hallway. Finally, as if snapping from a trance, I spun around and followed Charlie through the house and out onto the back porch. He was a good ten yards ahead of me, his stride greater despite the recent awkwardness of it, and I did not bother pursuing him farther than the porch. I merely stood there and watched him leave. I thought about shouting, about calling out his name, but what good would that do, aside from conceding to the bastard?
At my side, breathless, Jerry uttered, “Where’s he going?”
“Let him be,” I said.
We watched as Charlie staggered through the field of Rape and nettles, of pine cones and Birke saplings, of alternating panels of moonlight and grass through the canopy of trees. When he reached the stable, he struggled to grasp the door handle—actually struggled, as if he were reaching for it blindfolded—and, finally, when he managed to get the door open, stumbled quickly inside. I waited for a light to turn on—to see that familiar flicker of the oil lamp being light—but it never came.
“The man has lost it,” Jerry sighed, shaking his head in near disbelief. “Not to in
sult your professional opinion, Marcus, but the man has taken a dive off the proverbial deep end.”
“He’s moving around in there,” Demitris said, squinting up and into the darkened maw of the stable. “I can see…I can see…something…”
Charlie, perched like the headless horseman atop the mottled stallion, came bursting through the stable doors.
“Jesus!” Jerry tittered.
At first, it looked as if he were headed straight for the house—straight for us. But as he cleaned the corral, Charlie jerked the reigns sharply to the left and the stallion bolted up over the swell of the lawns and toward the deepening shadows. The horse’s legs were a blur; Charlie bent forward over the animal, making himself as small and sleek as possible, and for one insane moment I thought the two of them might simply lift up off the ground and sail through the air.
“I didn’t know he could ride like that,” Demitris marveled.
“He’s riding, all right,” Jerry returned.
The next moment, both Charlie and the stallion were gone, having lost themselves in the thick black veil of pine trees that surrounded the long, sloping yard. The three of us remained on the porch, watching and listening (although there was nothing to watch for and listen to) until Demitris turned and skulked back inside. Jerry stood a bit longer, an intent look on his face. I have no idea how long the two of us stood there, looking out over the empty lawns, expecting Charlie to come back. It must have been a long time, though, because when Jerry spoke again, the sound of his voice cracking the silence startled me.
“He isn’t coming back, is he?”
“I really don’t know,” I said, though I thought Jerry might be right.
“Shame, really. He was a good egg.” He expelled a cloud of pent-up breath. “Ah, hell, I guess that’s the end of that.”
It was Jerry’s turn to leave, and he did so without another word. I remained on the porch by myself, lost in my own head, my own little world. I thought I could still hear the ghost-gallop of the horse. Maybe I could. Or maybe it was all in my head. Maybe it had always been.