Thirteen Phantasms

by James P. Blaylock

  “Why on earth …”

  “Well, largely because in his mind he always imagined them without wings. Take their wings off and they’re pretty horrible. Nothing but long, fleshy bugs. Anyway, he couldn’t bear the sight of them. But it was awful, being deprived even of that little bit of beauty. It was like finding music intolerable.”

  “They’re miniature works of art, nature’s art.”

  “That’s it in a nut. That’s just what I told him. I bought him one of those cardboard caterpillar farms and had him raise a crowd of butterflies from babyhood. He named them, kept them in his kitchen window box, in among the potted plants. Do you know when he let them loose?”

  “When?” Laurinda Bates stood with her hand held gently over her mouth.

  “On the morning of the Harmonic Convergence.”

  “No! Perfect.”

  “Indeed it was. It was almost artistic, wasn’t it? I like to think that when those butterflies flew away, one of his most profound fears flew with them, evaporating into the morning air.”

  “It’s poetic, really.”

  Ted nodded, setting Clyde on the counter. He was doing it again. The young Beat at least had been a little skeptical, but Ms. Bates was willing to buy the bridge. He should sell her a book instead and send her on her way. She didn’t deserve all this tomfoolery. It was just five now, time to head home. The thought of heading home didn’t much appeal to him, though. He found himself thinking about her brushing against him in the doorway.

  Also, there was something in what he was saying. There had been an almost instantaneous change in his attitude when he had made a home for the roach. Now it wasn’t a cockroach and spider living on his countertop; it was Moe and Clyde, his bug friends. There was no way on earth that he could empty them out onto the floor and step on them. It was a matter of interpersonal relationships.

  It occurred to him that he was in considerably better spirits now than he had been a half hour earlier, and that there was nothing at all to account for it except for his treatment of the bugs. Who cared that all the Harmonic Convergence and Nepal stuff was lies? He caught himself eyeing the top of her dress when she bent over to read a book spine, and he realized that he was getting stirred up. He couldn’t decide, though, whether the stirrings were good news or bad. She looked up at him and smiled, and he began talking without wanting to.

  “There’s a cumulative effect, though. In fact, that’s the theme of my thesis on the subject and the beauty of the whole process. Befriend a half dozen different sorts of spiders and all of a sudden the distinction between species starts to blur. It’s a sort of therapy in which there’s an almost absolute, visible threshold, if that’s the word I want. There’s a point where you’re cured, and the only thing that will throw you is running up against some new, really outlandish bug—some South American thing, maybe. In other words, unlike other psychological therapies, this isn’t just maintenance; it’s nuts-and-bolts repair work.”

  “Thesis?” she said, blinking at him. “Have you published your findings, then?”

  Ted shook his head. He smiled steadily at her, on the edge of admitting that the whole bug notion was a monstrous joke, that he hadn’t read New Age philosophy except to ridicule it, and that on the morning of the Harmonic Convergence he and his friend had netted a batch of butterflies in order to drop them into killing jars and mount them.

  Instead he said, “Well, writing the thesis was instructive. It was a centering exercise, really. I don’t regret its not being published. To some extent publishing is vanity, isn’t it? On the other hand, there’s the matter of helping people. To my mind, mere publication of one’s results is like sending money to a charity for other people to spend, maybe unwisely. Setting up workshops, though, therapy sessions, hands-on exercises—that’s like rolling up your sleeves and wading in. It’s the Calcutta approach. Mother Theresa. That’s where the joy lies.”

  “That’s where the joy lies,” she repeated. “When will you have another of these … hands-on sessions?” She smoothed her dress again and widened her eyes at him.

  He shrugged, unable for the moment to speak. “Soon,” he said. “I’m … I mean to say …” What did he mean to say? Right then and there? On the countertop, maybe?

  “I know a number of people who would attend. I belong to a literary group, actually.” She made her way farther up the aisle and stood fingering through the volumes, squinting at titles. She was just a little red-faced, as though something she had said or was thinking had embarrassed her. The still air of the shop was suddenly saturated with a sexual charge that made him both uncomfortable and agitated. He listened to the clock tick and to the press of traffic rushing past outside.

  “Do you have the book by the man who was abducted by aliens?” she asked abruptly, not looking up at him.

  “That would be the gentleman who was carried downstairs by space elves and taken into the woods?”

  “Yes. I understand that they did the most … awful things to him. Devices, you know. Probes. They … Nothing was private. He found the examinations … stimulating. Have you read it?”

  “Yes,” he lied. “That is, part of it. They wouldn’t let him rest, apparently. I read that he had mistakenly swallowed a glass eye, in a martini glass, I think. And that night they came to him in his sleep and took him away in a ship—strapped him down to an antigravity table and. … This is actually very delicate. It’s science, of course, but maybe I’m presuming too much to talk about it”

  “No,” said Ms. Bates. “We’re adults, aren’t we? I find the study of humankind utterly fascinating. There’s no part of us that’s taboo, is there? Really, though, a glass eye?”

  Ted shrugged and moved toward the counter. For a moment he thought he’d locked the door after she had come in, and was terrified. In a pinch he could simply bolt, out the door and across the asphalt of the parking lot. “That’s the claim. Anyway, they took a good look through this camera. It was referred to, not to be indelicate, as a posterior probe, and, well, what did they see but the glass eye, wedged into the intestine, apparently, peering down into the lens.”

  “No!”

  “Honor bright. So the alien doctor looks up at his patient and says, ‘Don’t trust us, eh?’ ”

  It took a moment for Ms. Bates to laugh. “You’re full of sunshine, aren’t you?” she asked. “Full of play.” She took a step toward him and favored him with a lascivious glance. It was a come-hither look if he’d ever seen one. He had thought that the joke would put the hands-on business behind them. She took another step forward, saying nothing and with a look on her face that seemed to imply that everything had been said already.

  For a moment he stood just so, regarding her with a look that he hoped was noncommittal. His mind spun. What would be the consequence of his taking a step toward her? They would be face-to-face then. In an instant he could lock the door, dash the lights. Would such a thing cure him or kill him? She stood before him now, silently.

  Responding wildly to an impulse, he checked his watch, touched his forehead in surprise, and said, “I’ve got to call my wife. I should have been closed up ten minutes ago. Damn it, twenty minutes. I’ll have to tell her to try to hold up dinner. She’s cooking up something nice. It’s our anniversary, actually.” He smiled broadly, backing toward the counter, where the telephone sat.

  “Oh,” Laurinda Bates said, visibly deflating. She cast him a last, appraising look, as if to say that she hadn’t given up on him altogether, but would grant him a temporary reprieve. “I’d better be on my way.” She wrapped her hand around her quartz crystal, sucking up its imprisoned energy. “I’ll carry the memory of the butterflies with me. Every day brings new insight, every moment an unfolding flower.” She nodded at him in a slow, mystical way.

  He was dumbstruck for a moment. “Of course,” he said weakly.

  “Have you made a study of past lives?”

  “Not a very intense study, no.”

  “I have stirrings in me that su
ggest we might have known each other, known each other well—in Egypt, I think, in the days of the Pharaoh. I’ll see you again. I’m sure of it. Do you have a flyer for your next session?” She picked up one of his fluorite crystals and held it for a moment before laying it gingerly on the glass, as if it were evidence of something.

  “Session?”

  “The phobia therapy.”

  “Oh, that. Of course. I mean, no—no flyers or anything. What I believe in is—what is it? Spontaneity.”

  “So do I,” she said, and let herself out the door, giving him one last gap-toothed smile.

  He slumped against the counter, sliding around behind and sitting down hard in the chair. There was a finger of scotch left in his glass, so he drank it quickly and then started to pour another, but caught himself. In twenty minutes he’d be home, and would have to be on his best behavior.

  He let himself out into the evening. He would come in early tomorrow to count out. It wouldn’t take five minutes. Surely the woman would forget about the bug nonsense and him both. That was the way with these flighty, faddish types. They were fascinated with what was new, whether it was worth anything or not, but they lost their fascination just as easily. Today’s ankh was tomorrow’s junk. He drove home unsteadily, trying to make sense of the afternoon and wondering what sort of anniversary surprise poor Nona had cooked up for him.

  •

  When he got home it was just coming onto six. There was the smell of cooked chicken in the air of the living room, and of something else that he couldn’t identify. He peeked into the kitchen, looking for Nona, but she wasn’t there. A pan on the stove had cubes of flaccid whitish stuff in it, mixed up with bloated raisins and nuts and little round gray slices of something—mushrooms, maybe, although not apparently of any terrestrial variety. All of it was settled into a spiced broth floating with cinnamon sticks and oddly-shaped seeds. There was a tofu wrapper on the sink, which explained things. Bean curd, it said. God almighty. It didn’t smell bad, anyway. Nona had been incorporating Asian elements into their diet, cutting out salt and dairy products.

  Next to the wrapper, propped into an upright plastic sleeve, a magazine stood open, listing recipes for an entire soup to nuts dinner. The heading at the top of the page read, “Turn Your Man Back On!” and then provided instructions not only for cooking the dinner but for serving it too—in the bathtub. There was an illustration, sketchily drawn, of a couple lounging in the tub, dinner on a tray between them, glasses of champagne in their hands. The man looked insanely happy. Nearby were smaller illustrations of ingredients, including one of a phallic-looking mushroom pushing up through what must have been a lawn—one of God’s little jokes. Ted took the lid off the pot again and studied the round gray slices, wondering if he could force himself to eat them.

  He heard Nona shifting around upstairs. He stepped across the room, full of determination, and there, sitting on the kitchen table, were the sad flowers he’d ordered—a fat, mixed bouquet, mostly purple. A clear plastic forklike prong jabbed up out of the middle of them and gripped a tiny card. There was something artificial and horrible about it that depressed him unspeakably, and for a moment he fought the urge to pitch the entire thing out the front door.

  The smell of cooking spices almost choked him, forcing him out of the kitchen and up the stairs toward the steamy bedroom. Surely that little bit of stuff on the stove couldn’t be giving off such an odor. There was soap mixed into the cinnamon, like the smell of a shop full of scented candles or bath supplies. He could hear running bathwater and soft, rainy-day piano music.

  The horrible thing was that he simply wasn’t in the mood for a dinnertime frolic in the tub, or a frolic of any sort. How long had it been? He fought down the compulsion to calculate it. Instead he thought about Laurinda Bates to see if he would still react to the idea of a tryst in the darkened shop. Then he stomped on the idea almost as soon as it started to work on him. He had always been fiercely monogamous, partly out of an unnameable fear. He topped the stairs and peered around the corner.

  Nona jumped in surprise. She was dressed in nothing but a loose blue bathrobe and she had her hair clipped up. She smiled at him with a look that suggested he’d been a wicked boy to startle her so, but that she was ready to be a little bit playful herself, and then, oddly, she began sprinkling chopped-up shrubs into the steamy bathwater. “Rough day?” she asked, seeing something in his face.

  He shrugged. “Lunatic woman came in right at closing time. Full of notions about crystal power and aliens. I had to shoo her out, but it took a while. I developed a kind of interesting notion regarding phobias, actually.” He stepped into the bathroom thinking to sit down on the closed toilet, but there was already an ice bucket and bottle of white wine on it.

  “You’ll have to use the downstairs,” she said, grinning slyly. “This one’s being put to special use tonight.”

  “No. I only … I didn’t want to …”

  “Oh,” she said, and then stirred the bathwater with her hand. There was no end of stuff floating in it. “Phobias?”

  “Bug phobias, actually. What’s all that?” he asked, trying to sound both curious and pleased. Why such a thing as leaves in the bathwater should please anyone he couldn’t say, but he could see straight off that it was safest to be pleased.

  “Bath herbs,” she said. “They have a medicinal effect. Did you know that lemongrass and ginseng are aphrodisiacs?”

  He shook his head. “No, are they? In tea, do you mean? What is this, some sort of Oriental bathtub gin?”

  “After a fashion. You don’t drink it though. Glass of wine?”

  “Thanks,” he said, relieved. She handed him an already-full glass that she’d had waiting. The bottle on ice hadn’t been touched. She was planning to liquor him up, wash some of the starch out of him. He pointed at the tub. “How about those lumps?”

  “Rose hips,” she said. “And the flowers are lavender and shredded hibiscus. Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  “Very colorful.” Obediently, he forced himself to think about the tub full of floating vegetation. It ought to have been an erotic notion. Maybe the wine would help. He picked up an apple core that lay on the sink counter and dangled it over the tub, dropping it like a bomb into a cluster of lavender leaves.

  “What was that?” Nona asked.

  “Apple core.”

  “Why on earth?” It bobbed to the surface and she plucked it out, shaking it off over the sink. She opened the cupboard door and tossed it into the trash can.

  “I thought it was part of the mix. Sorry.”

  “It was my afternoon snack. I’ve been working up here for two and a half hours.”

  This was meant to sting. She’d been slaving over a hot tub, and he wanders in off the street and starts throwing apple cores around. “Honestly,” he said, looking around as if to appreciate the spent time. “I thought it went into the stew.” The bathroom had been scrubbed clean. The blue tile shined in the lamplight. She’d even polished the faucets and replaced the old shower curtain with a new curtain made of transparent plastic. Nona must have exchanged the two lightbulbs for one of lower wattage, too, because the place was dim and moody.

  “Give it a try,” she said, in a gentle but general sort of tone that took in the whole bathroom, the whole effort.

  He leaned over and kissed her. She was doing what she could; what more could he ask? Fewer herbs in the bathwater, maybe. She slipped past him and started down the stairs, then stopped and looked back in. “I’m afraid that to do this right you’ll have to be all comfy in the bath, with the board set up. I’ll slide in under it after serving us both. Be a dear, won’t you?”

  He winked at her, and as soon as she was gone, he drank off the rest of the wine in his glass. He looked around for an open bottle, but there wasn’t any, nor was there any bottle opener, so he couldn’t have a go yet at the bottle on ice. Just as well. He’d be staggering in an hour if he kept at it. He was already feeling a pleasant, sleepy-cheerful rush f
rom the wine. Must be his empty stomach. That would teach him to feed his lunch to bugs. He wondered idly how Moe and Clyde were getting on as he undressed, walking out into the bedroom to toss the clothes onto the chair. Then he went back in and eased into the bathwater, ignoring the floating herbs and appreciating the heat. This was really tip-top, a hot bath was.

  He heard her footsteps coming up the stairs. “Bring the corkscrew?” he asked.

  “Pocket of my robe,” she said, stepping into the bathroom and turning so that he could fish it out of her pocket. She held a vast tray full of stuff that he couldn’t quite glimpse, and which she set on the sink counter before going back out. There was a chicken there—he knew that much from the magazine—but it was hidden under a silver dome.

  He reached back and pulled the wine out of the ice bucket. She’d bought a vintage chardonnay from a suspiciously French-sounding winery in Monterey. After opening the bottle and pouring a taste into the glass, he made a show of swishing it in his mouth, of doing things right. It tasted of grapefruit and charcoal.

  Leaning against the counter was a piece of enameled plywood with strips of wood tacked onto the ends to keep it from sliding off the curved rim of the tub and into the bathwater. She’d clearly been planning this extravaganza for weeks. He pulled the board across the tub, almost up against his chest, settling back against the faucet to give Nona the comfortable end.

  She came back in, carrying a silver plate, which she laid on the board in front of him. Then, carefully, she set the tray full of food next to it before slipping out of her robe, grabbing up her wineglass, and climbing into the water. She looked happy, as if things were finally coming together.

  “Oysters?” he asked, nodding at the silver plate. “What happened to the shells?” The oysters were heaped there, a couple of dozen of them, damned in by a wall of lemon wedges.

  “I shucked them all. Less debris this way, isn’t there?”

  She picked up an oyster and laid it out onto her palm, giving it a good hard look. Ted did too. Somehow this whole bathtub dinner business seemed very carefully choreographed, and he was determined to play his part with the oysters and to play it heroically. The soft and flabby oyster lay there in his hand, glistening like—what?—folds of. … He poked at it idly with his finger but then Nona raised her eyebrow at him. He smiled at her, not knowing what to say.