by Martin Seay
Naturellement any man possessed of a modicum of reason and intellectual courage is compelled to be anti-Jew, and anti-Christian as well— —hardly the greatest but surely neither the least of the Nazi errors manifested itself in superficial Wotanism and a lack of serious understanding of their Germanic forebears’ pagan wisdom.
In the brass wastebasket next to the desk Stanley finds five or six crumpled pages that bear minute variations of the same sentence. He crumples them again, slowly, and places them back in the basket. Then he sags into the chair again, scanning the room.
The key is in a goddamn book; it’s got to be. Probably a book by one of the goddamn names on the fucking list in his pocket, the list that Welles made, the list that’s smeared now, turned to mush by the rain. He wonders if he can spot the key just by looking—there’ll be a gap in the right book’s pages, or between its pages and its cover—but most of the spined-out volumes have others laid flat atop them; plus the bookcases all go clear to the ceiling, and Stanley isn’t tall enough to see the upper shelves. His eyes crawl along the spines, up and down the walls. Thousands of books. Which one?
He sits up. Then he rotates the chair, all the way around, and rises to his feet.
As soon as his fingers touch the frame of the old map he can feel it: the long sheet of glass that shields the yellow paper pivots on a small bump somewhere near its midpoint. Stanley lifts the frame, slips a hand under its lower edge, and finds the key hung in a little leather sheath just below what looks to be the island-city’s main plaza. He tugs it free, settles the frame in place. On the map’s surface an ornamental drawing of a muscle-bound god—nude, armed with a trident, mounted on a grotesque sea-monster—stares up at the spot where the key was, like he’d been trying all along to tip Stanley off, to give the game away. Thanks a ton, jack, Stanley whispers. Now you tell me.
At first he’s afraid the key won’t fit the lock. Then, of course, it does. The deadbolt slides with a low click.
Black curtains fill the doorway, flush with the inner wall. Stanley finds a gap, and parts them: abyssal darkness beyond, blacker than the curtains themselves. The weak green light cast by the desklamp seems unable or unwilling to cross the doorframe. Stanley can see an inch or two of wooden floor on the other side—same as the floor he now stands on—but nothing else.
He slips through. The curtains fall shut behind him. The room he’s entered sounds empty and big, much larger than Welles’s study. He waits for his eyes to adjust to the dark, and when they do, he still can’t see anything. He runs fingers under the drapes on both sides of the door but finds no lightswitch. Strange smells: sharp, sweet, cloying. Wrong somehow. Gooseflesh rises on his forearms.
He retreats to the study, finds a box of matches in the desk, strikes three on the doorjamb on his way back through. The pale flare of ignition barely reaches the walls: the room takes up the entire remainder of the floor. Stanley can make out low wooden benches a few paces ahead, a chandelier just past them, hung at his eye-level. Something big and shapeless beyond that, hung with colored drapes. White lines across the floorboards. Black curtains on the walls, all the way around. The ceiling is painted uniformly dark. Everything seems designed to devour light.
The matches burn down to his fingertips; he hurries to light more off their dying flames. The chandelier ahead is a real chandelier, not electric; Stanley passes between the two benches, stretches to light a candle, uses that one to light others. The rain is quieter, muted by the curtains, and by what must be an attic overhead. He wonders if he’ll be able to hear if someone comes through the front door downstairs.
Circles of yellow light appear on the ceiling, and the shape of the chandelier casts a fluttering web across them. The room’s furnishings all look antique, vulgar, made by hand. Stanley feels as if he’s slipped back in time, out of history, or into a history that nobody knows. Whenever he moves, the polished boards creak underfoot, singing like cricket-legs.
The shapeless thing at the room’s distant end is a massive canopy bed, its posts coiled and draped with sheer silks of red and black and gold. Fancy cushions litter the thick mattress; a pair of dark chifforobes towers behind. Stanley can’t look at it. He isn’t ready to think about what it is, or what it means. This has been a big mistake; he’s not sure yet how big. By now he knows he won’t find anything he’s been looking for in this room. But he needs to see it anyway. To get past it. To kill off something in himself that’s been hindering him, making him weak. Like yanking out a rotten tooth.
He looks down at the white lines under his feet, stoops to bring his light closer. Three triangles point toward him, away from a stepped wooden platform in the room’s right-hand corner. Small draped tables sit at the triangles’ tips, and each has something on it: a basin of water, vented metal cubes bristling with stick-incense, an upright black coffer covered by a veil. The platform and triangles are set at an odd angle to the walls, as if oriented by compass, not the slant of the shoreline. Everything seems precisely placed: distances calculated by ritual formulae. To the left is a small podium, set at the midpoint of concentric circles inscribed in concentric squares; the empty spaces between the orderly lines are crowded with writing in an alphabet Stanley doesn’t know: not Hebrew, or Russian, or Arabic, or Greek. He thinks of Welles on the beach, intoning that foreign phrase. A secret language. Something creepy little kids might make up.
Stanley sinks onto one of the benches. He’s dizzy; his breath sounds ragged in his ears. The candle in his hand tips as he leans forward, and drops of liquid wax spatter the floor: clear, then white. He counts the steady splashes, then loses count.
The platform in the corner has objects on it—red candles, brass dishes, dried flowers, a book, a painting of a black tree with runes labeling its branches—but Stanley can’t get interested in any of it. It’s too obvious a trap: not a trap that Welles has set for him, but a trap that Welles has fallen into. The book does not lead here. It’s time to get this over with.
Stanley comes to his feet, staggers a little, crosses the big room. A sour tightness rises from his belly—he tastes it at the back of his throat—but he keeps moving forward. The canopy bed looms plushly, flanked by two ankle-thick candles on huge brass sticks; behind it, between the two chifforobes, Stanley spots a low dainty vanity backed with a tarnished mirror. He sniffs the air, prods the red velvet comforter with a fingertip. Suspended over the mattress is a second mirror, bigger and newer than the first, parallel to the floor, hung from the bedposts by four even chains. Stanley’s own upturned face greets him there, childlike and frightened; he looks away, then spots himself again afloat above the dresser, a dim ghost wasted by the smudged and blistered silver.
His foot bumps something under the dustruffle and he stoops to pick it up: a hospital bedpan. He sets it on the comforter, opens one of the chifforobes. A few weird costumes hang inside—outlandish, almost obscene—along with ordinary blouses and sweaters and skirts, nylon stockings and black leotards, faded summer dresses, girlish brassieres and briefs. Cynthia’s room.
Stanley reaches in, pinches the sleeve of a sweater, pulls it and lets it drop. He stands staring for a moment. Then his stomach flops—like something’s hatched inside him—and he turns and vomits into the pale granitewear bedpan. He gasps, seizes the pan, carries it down as he sinks to his knees. On the floor he catches the sour smell of his bandaged leg and vomits again. He hasn’t eaten since the fish last night, so nothing comes up but clear liquid and a few celery veins. His diaphragm pistons; he can’t breathe. He feels transformed: a fleshy cannon, a debased crawling thing. As if he’s expelling every human feature of himself.
Eventually he rocks back on his haunches, clears his throat and spits, cleans tears and acid and mucus from his face with a pair of Cynthia’s underdrawers. He should torch this place, he thinks. Plenty of stuff in Synnøve’s workroom’ll burn. Turpentine. A flaming trail of it up the stairs, out the side door. Once those books catch this place will be cinders right down to the slab. But t
hen where will he stash Claudio’s stuff?
A door slams downstairs; a faint voice calls. Hello? it says.
Stanley stiffens—a jolt like a plunge into cold water—and then forces himself to relax, to listen. Once his pulse has steadied he puts his palms on the floor and pushes, rising like a puff of smoke to his feet, weightless and smooth. As he crosses the big room back to the study he tries to stay close to the walls, to step on spots where the floor is firm and feet have rarely fallen. A few planks squeal—it can’t be helped—but he keeps calm and breathes easily. Fighting the urge to run like he’d fight off a sneeze. The intruder is a relief, actually. Seconds ago Stanley was lost, a stranger to himself. Now he’s on familiar ground: the burglar who didn’t get out in time.
Welles’s desk is finely made; its drawers open and close with no sound. Stanley figures the Wehrmacht pistol for war booty Welles never bothered to register, so that’s the gat he picks; the .45’s too big for his hand anyway. He puts his blackjack in his front pocket, lets his belt out a notch, and tucks the pistol into it where the blackjack was, at the small of his back. It’s not comfortable, but he doesn’t need it to be. He’s pretty confident the safety’s on, pretty sure he won’t shoot himself in the ass by mistake.
At the top of the stairs he pauses, listens. No noises in the house. The staircase is a dark empty tunnel with a splash of light at its bottom, fallen from the entryway window. Stanley glances at his feet for an instant as he starts his descent, fitting his steps to the stairs’ rhythm, and when he looks up again the girl is standing right there in front of him, hardly more than an arm’s-length away.
He freezes, knees bent, hand on the wall for balance. Cynthia’s shapely white fingers rest on the banister—his jacket hung a few feet behind—and her sandal-clad foot perches on the next step. Her sharp chin is tilted, her spine and shoulders beauty-pageant straight. She doesn’t look surprised to see him, or worried, either. Her caramel-cream eyes are bright, like they’re caught in a moonbeam, though no moonbeam reaches them here. She and Stanley stare at each other for a long time. Rainwater is dripping from Stanley’s jacket: a quiet tap counting the moment down.
The girl speaks. So, Betty Crocker, she half-whispers. What cooks?
Stanley opens his mouth to reply, but all that comes from his vomit-scoured throat is a mute rasp. He swallows, tries again. What, he says, the fuck goes on up here?
A wild ugliness flashes across Cynthia’s face, like she’s inhaled a wasp. Then she goes blank. It’s a blood-drained, million-watt blankness, a blankness like the downriver side of a hydroelectric dam. Stanley has seen this once or twice before: on a woman about to jump off the Williamsburg Bridge, on a guy about to shoot three people in an Alphabet City snackbar. A face turned to a burnt-out mask, no longer broadcasting, overloaded by something it can find no right expression for. Often Stanley has imagined himself to be alone in the world, but this is what alone really looks like, and it scares him. He takes an even breath, keeps his knees bent, adjusts his footing, moves his free hand a little closer to the grip of the pistol.
Have you been in my room? Cynthia says.
Stanley doesn’t answer. He could put his shoulder down and run her over—grab his pack and his jacket and scram—but now the house seems to be shrinking to trap him, or else the girl is expanding, swelling like a white balloon to fill the stairwell. Part of him wants to just shoot her. He imagines the jerk of the pistol, pictures her vanishing with a moist elastic pop.
But he’s out of danger now, or nearly so. Her eyes flit everywhere, everywhere but his face, and the color creeps back to her cheeks like schoolchildren returning after a bomb scare. She’s a little shaky; she keeps fidgeting to hide her jitters. Her tone, too, is shifty when she speaks again: apologetic at first, then accusatory. I guess you probably think, she says, and trails off. Listen, she snaps, don’t think for one hot minute you understand—
Trust me, Stanley says. I don’t.
Cynthia cops a coltish Audrey Hepburn pose on the banister, getting back her cool by acting cool. Her voice is bright and thick and unconvincing, maple syrup dripped over spun glass. They’re not my parents, you know, she says. Claudio told you, right? I’ve just been shacking here for a couple months. I met Adrian on the beach, just like you did. They’re nice people, no matter what you think. Anybody who asks, we just tell ’em I’m Synnøve’s niece. Around here, nobody asks.
She’s staring hard now at nothing; her fingers fiddle with a phantom cigarette while her eyes dice up the empty space before her. Nobody makes me do anything, she says. I don’t get what’s wrong. There’s not any harm in it. Just because somebody says. It’s just different, dig? Like you and Claudio.
You don’t know shit about me and him.
She blinks. Then her eyes sweep the stairway—mechanical and eerie, like the eyes of an old porcelain doll—and they settle on his face. She fixes him with a watery sneer. You’re a child, she says. I don’t care where you’ve been, or what you’ve done. To me you’re just a kid.
She holds his gaze for a couple of breaths, then looks away again. Almost like she’s bored. There’s plenty of space now between her and the wall, enough to push through. It’s stupid for him to stay here any longer.
So, Stanley says. What’s with upstairs? The furniture. The marks on the floor.
Her sneer gets sharper, crueler. What do you think it is? she says.
He shuffles his feet. Magic shit, he mumbles. An altar.
I bet, Cynthia says, that you would just love to see what goes on up there. Wouldn’t you? To be a little fly on the wall. I’ll bet you’d sit there on the bench, and fold your hands in your lap, and you’d never make one single peep.
For a second—just a second—Stanley’s face feels hot.
I don’t believe a word of it, she says. Just so you know. All the mumbo-jumbo’s lost on me, dad. It’s all pretty silly, I think. Juvenile. All that time and effort, trying to catch ghosts. There aren’t any ghosts. It’s weak-minded and sad, thinking like that. You read that book Atlas Shrugged? That’s where I’m coming from, man.
Stanley leans against the wall, crosses his arms to hide the shake. Well, he says. I guess that pretty much makes you a goddamn whore, then. If you don’t believe it.
Her mouth falls open with a tiny gasp. Not shocked: surprised. Like he’s just handed her a flower that he’d kept hidden behind his back.
Then she throws her head back and laughs. It’s not a fake laugh, either. It sounds a little relieved, a little insane. Stanley’s mother laughed that way when his grandfather died, for hours and hours. It was about the last sound Stanley ever heard her make.
It’s a while before Cynthia can breathe well enough to speak. Poor Adrian! she wheezes. He thinks he conjured me. Did Claudio tell you that? No joke. It’s pathetic, dig? Wanting to see! Wanting to know! I don’t get it. I mean, it’s not like I enjoy what we do. It can be kind of a drag, honestly. But I get home-cooked chow, I get a nice place to sleep, I get some extra pocket change. I make choices, just like anybody. This is a whole lot better than where I came from, believe me.
Yeah? Stanley says. Where did you come from?
The question snuffs what’s left of her smile; a flicker of the blankness returns. Then she grins: a broad bottomless grin. She looks like a kid who’s figured out how to burn ants with a magnifying glass. Hell, she says. I came from hell.
That brings on a fresh round of sniggering. Soon she’s doubled over, wracked by hiccups, wiping her watery eyes. A whore! she says. That’s perfect, Clyde. And not just any old whore, either! Oh, no! Man, that’s really good. That’s a regular scream.
Yeah, Stanley says. Hilarious.
He draws the pistol from his belt and tips up the safety-lever and points the slim round barrel at her face. Cynthia looks at it, confused. Her wide mouth closes; her full pink lips curdle into a frown. She doesn’t seem scared. The two of them stare at each other. She hiccups again: a soft fleshy cluck in the dim quiet.
Get up here, Stanley says.
He marches her into the study, then across it, to the black door. Where are we going? she says. What are you gonna do?
We’re not going anywhere, toots. I’m dusting out. First I gotta lock you up.
Where is everybody? Did you kill them?
She asks the question in the same mildly curious tone that she might ask Have you heard the new Johnnie Ray album? or Is that a new Van Heusen shirt you’re wearing? It wrongfoots Stanley for a second. My buddy got hurt, he says. Synnøve and Adrian took him to see a doctor. I got cops looking for me. A lot of cops. I don’t want to be around when people get home.
As Cynthia draws the black curtain aside, she stops and turns to face him with a toss of her hair. Her eyes are wide, thrilled. The boardwalk? she says. That was you?
What? Did you see something?
I saw cops. Some ambulances. They said it was a gang brawl, that three guys got hurt real bad. Was one Claudio?
No. The kid’s fine. Just a little knocked-around is all. Did they say—did you hear if anybody died?
She pivots on her heels, still hiccupping quietly. The curtain’s draped like a toga over her shoulder, her left breast. She shakes her head no.
Stanley looks at her. Then he looks at the floor. Then he sighs. Okay, he says. Step back. I’m gonna shut the door.
They want me to have a kid, Cynthia says. Did Claudio tell you?
Stanley stops. His left hand rests on the smooth black wood near the doorknob. The heavy door sways easily with his touch. Is that a fact, he says.
If I do it, she says, they’ll get me my own pad. They’ll pay the rent, for six whole years. They’ll pay my tuition to UCLA if I want to go. I just have to have the kid, and give it to them. Do you think I should do it?