by Marc Parent
THE SEDATION, THAT last time, felt particularly fine. I was covered in a net of fluff and borne away with Winken. The retrieval needle seemed sheathed in silk, and I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, I was in the recovery room, sun streaming in, falling in bold strokes across the squeaky floor. In the bed next to mine, Tiffany was lying there, moaning. I could see her bare bottom through the sheet, the extra bags of fat. “Tiffany,” I whispered, “Tiffany, Tiffany,” and she turned slowly towards my sound, and opened her hurting eyes, and looked at me. “What,” she said, and then, I don’t know, she tried to get up, she wanted to escape me, or she just thought it was time, but in order for implantation to succeed, a woman should lie flat. “Don’t move Tiffany,” I whispered, “you have to lie flat for thirty minutes,” but she kept struggling to stand. I should help her, I thought. I should just take her hand, lead her wherever it is she wants to go. For how long, after all, can a person dwell in a perfectly decorated sphere? My egg store was getting depleted. My colors could not be managed. There are discordancies: angels in pudding, babies in ancients, and then there’s plain old pain. It cannot be helped. In a farmhouse, in Nyack New York, there are built-in bookshelves, fir floors. Janice, she could be four months along already, I’ll never know. What I knew then was Tiffany, struggling to stand, so I gave her my hand, and I pulled her up, and we walked across the sunlit floor together, two people from ordinary eggs, two people taking first steps to some unnamed place. Where it was, I had no idea.
There Is No Palindrome of Palindrome
HE HAD A SHARP-CHINNED HEAD that could split wood, a nose that was merely a smaller version of his head, an angular torso. His hands, too, his flat feet, were ax-shaped and sharp. In the silver light of morning, he looked like a many-bladed knife, with all of the blades pulled out for display. At night, in the dark, he looked merely amphibious. You would have thought he was a mortician or toymaker, his hands white and muscular, made for life’s hardest or gladdest work. He was a pharmacist. Of course. Look at him again, the spatulate fingers, the long limbs, the exuberant yet deadly serious mustache. Not a knife after all, not sea-life come to suck the rarefied oxygen at water’s surface. Halfway between a mortician and a toymaker: a pharmacist’s hands. Now he steadied a woman’s chin in the L of his right thumb and index finger. He had his other hand on the back of her neck. He was looking at her tonsils. They were both at a party.
“Babe is examining tonsils again,” said Mal, the evening’s host. “Babe has a tonsil fetish.”
“Yes?” said the woman’s Dutch husband. “This is very original.”
The woman had the artificial, trustworthy, fiber-optic blond hair of a CNN foreign-policy pundit, lit up with Aqua Net. Her head was tipped back. Her eyes scanned the ceiling in an attempt to make the examination seem incidental: she was thinking great thoughts, she was multiplying great sums in her head. She tried, the way you always try when being examined in a room full of strangers, to look unworried. Besides, it was hard to look directly at Babe. His eyes didn’t exactly match. The left one was slightly smaller and lower than the right.
“Pretty as an Arizona sunset,” he said, still peering.
It wasn’t true, what Mal said. He didn’t have a fetish. He just liked looking down women’s throats, and when you put it that way, yes, it sounded terrible. But he felt he was performing a service. He admired women’s tonsils at the drugstore (he worked for a national chain), but he preferred parties. So yes, all right, yes. A fetish. He was a voyeur and an exhibitionist, both. Sometimes he sat a woman down in a chair, to look down her throat from above. Other times he targeted a tall woman and had her lean over. Every angle had its pleasures, and every pair of tonsils had its beauty. Jealous husbands gathered, waiting to catch him in the act. Did he look down her blouse or let a hand slide somewhere it shouldn’t? Maybe he was about to lean in for a kiss. No. He didn’t even glance at her tongue. If he was feeling naughty he might raise his oak eyes a fraction of a millimeter to the woman’s uvula. “Beautiful uvula,” he’d say.
The woman with the blond hair was named Connie. She felt on her cheek twin spots of intermittent hot breath from his nose, warm and damp as her own tonsils but with a whiff of well-groomed mustache. She’d never seen her own tonsils face-to-face. Why was he so interested? She breathed in. She crossed her legs and kicked him in the shin, felt him wince, instinctively caressed the shin with the same toe that had done the kicking. He stood up.
Her mouth still hung open. She raised her eyebrows and gave a quick nod to ask the diagnosis.
Babe shrugged. His leg hurt. “I’m a pharmacist,” he explained apologetically. He reached over and closed her mouth for her. He could feel her jawbone under his thumb. When she got up to leave, he saw how badly put together she was—bow-legged and pigeon breasted and spraddle elbowed—and also how pretty. She looked like the sunniest, dopiest person he’d ever met. That kick, her toes. They were the thin edge of the wedge, he’d think later.
BLACK-AND-WHITE film combined with murder makes any room look small and sordid. The corpse lowers the ceiling, the film and flash turn all the surfaces to dented metal. In this case, in this crime-scene photo, the room is large—a suburban kitchen overlooking a dining room, a cathedral-ceilinged addition to an old house—but you can’t tell. There are two bodies on the floor underneath sheets. Aren’t all corpses back sleepers? Not the one closest the camera. All you can see is an ear turned wrong way round, one curl of light hair. Even so, the blood on the sheet is patterned in a physiognomic way. The head’s wearing a mask: a pair of dark eyes and a long nose, a stroke victim’s sloppy mouth. Never mind that it’s in the wrong place. The face on the sheet is singing something but failing to remember the words. It seems to be backing up in the song again and again, the way you do when you hope the chorus will remind you of the verse. The other body is visible only as a pair of men’s feet, one wearing an untied shoe and the other bare. The bare foot is clean. The rest of the body is hidden behind a kitchen island.
Nothing is happening in the photo. Things happen up until the photo, then continue afterwards. For the moment, the two people under the sheets are not dying. They’re alive or dead. Their pulses are beside the question, being undetectable. In this way every photo is a photo of a corpse, devoid of circulation, synaptic function, liver function, brain function, kidney function, respiration. Even the third person in the photograph, she is a body, too, her chest thrust out towards the camera and her brown eyes open very wide, a teenager wearing a Shetland sweater. The semicircular pattern across her shoulders and chest looks under the circumstances like some kind of restraint. Her complexion is tarnished, her blue jeans are hammered tin. She’s pointing to the right. Her mouth is hanging open. Her name is Constance Lafferty, she is fifteen years old, and she’s about to be arrested for the murder of her parents.
BABE KNEW NOTHING of this. Connie was one of Mal’s strays, or her husband was, the doll-like Dutch Jules. They’d introduced themselves at the wine table in the dining room. “This is my husband, Jewels,” said Connie, and Jules—pale blond hair, brunet eyebrows—said to Babe in a merry voice, “Hallo I am Zhool.” They seemed perfect for each other. Connie was one of those brash, intensely American women who nevertheless develop a deep identification with a foreign country. He’d known them in college, the girls who dated only foreigners. They were the girls who’d never had a date in high school. In college they’d order widely off the atlas: the chubby friendly Kenyan, the vest-pocket Malaysian Romeo, the Irish engineering student with the smelly feet, the Argentinian painter with hearing loss and a crush on his sister. These girls always had the loudest voices in the room. They’d go on dates with their foreigners, and all you’d be able to hear would be the American girl blaring out her love for all things Kenyan, Malaysian, African, South American, and the low murmur of her date agreeing. Eventually, the girl would settle on a region. She might even go to graduate school and major in it, in some way—Comp Lit with a specialty in writings of the A
mericas, Public Health with a focus on East Africa. Connie, clearly, had landed on the Netherlands, and here was Jules, patient and practical and Dutch, to feed her chocolate on her morning toast and listen to her monologues. Both of them seemed made out of a jumble sale, Connie with her seaworthy torso and spindly legs, Jules with his clashing hair and eyebrows. Like all mismatched couples, they seemed suited to each other. Which was why after all Babe asked to look at her tonsils. It was the happily married women he was interested in, having once been happily married himself.
He was a widower. Women felt stirred by such tender concern for a part of themselves they’d never seen straight on: tonsils—who knew? His wife had been killed in a car crash, a hit-and-run in the crosswalk in front of the stationery store where she worked. Let’s be honest, he’d done the tonsil thing when his wife was still alive, and now it was unsettling, but who’d refuse him? Sad man with a mustache, unhandsome until he smiled, which he almost never did. He had a billboard cowboy’s smile, open-mouthed to show his perfect white teeth. He rocked back on his heels in a silent impression of belly laughter. He even touched his stomach then, as though to ask it, D’ja hear that, buddy? Smiling scrunched his eyes up till they matched. His voice seemed made of pencil shavings: grubby, sneezish, insinuating. People thought he was making fun of them when he said what his name was.
His wife was seven years dead, enough time for a sense of humor to regenerate, at least a little. Babe liked puns, palindromes, horror movies. Family pleasures, in other words. What is so sad as a solitary punster? His friend Mal, a doughnut-shop owner and giver of dinner parties, cocktail parties, surprise parties, invited him to everything.
So what if Babe sometimes had a few drinks and turned to somebody else’s wife and suggested, “Say ah?” So what if he put his hand on her neck and inhaled, in a professional way, her patient, personal breath. He was tactile. He was a letch, but in an old-fashioned cocktail-napkin way. Harmless.
He was a decent guy! He was still in love with his wife, poor thing. Everyone knew that.
THE SMALL FLOCK of pharmacy assistants filled most of the actual prescriptions. Babe checked them, argued with insurance companies, consulted with customers, gave advice, worried about the string of Oxycontin holdups in the area. Mostly the store was prey to teenage theft of condoms, pregnancy tests, protein bars, Dramamine for the dimenhydrinate, Robitussin and Coricidin for the dextromethorphan. A group of local high schoolers held a Robitussin Round Table by the dumpsters. They cracked jokes about their hallucinations, they announced they were tripping, they informed each other they were tripping.
Yo, dude: you’re tripping.
I am, I’m totally tripping.
In the afternoon you could hear them laughing. Later, you could see the tiny unused cups, the plastic wrappers, and slicks of vomit.
“It’s called Robodosing,” said Hilary, the pharmacy assistant with the rusty-bedspring hair. She was sorting NutriNate, a chewable prenatal vitamin that smelled disconcertingly of merlot. “Or Robocopping. Or plain Roboing.”
“I know,” said Babe. He didn’t know what was more depressing, kids getting high on motion-sickness pills and cough syrup, or coming up with slang for it. Teenagerland. Adolescent Narcissiville. Some days Babe longed to travel there with shoplifters, look around. The land of teens, its mufti and customs, Babe understood none of it. He hadn’t even when he was a teenager himself.
The teenagers never approached him. They merely squinted at him standing at the pharmacy counter as though he were the goalie of the opposing team and he better watch out for flying pucks. Then they left by the far door.
A pharmacist is fluent in mime. Fingers flutter around cheekbones to explain one kind of sinus pain. They straddle the nose for another. Some symptoms can’t be articulated except by pulling faces. Some need both arms and one foot. In the fluorescent lights of the pharmacy, Connie-from-the-party had a sugar-cookie complexion. She wore pants in a lavender-based plaid and a bulky, bumpy sweater that seemed carved out of dirty snow. In her hand she held four hot-pink daisies wrapped in blue tissue paper. Babe stood on the raised flooring behind the Drop-Off counter.
“The florist said they’re very masculine flowers,” she said. Maybe she wanted a second opinion. He couldn’t tell whether she’d be disappointed to have the diagnosis confirmed.
“They’re pink,” he said.
She sighed. “Pink’s pink, I guess.”
“A manly pink!” he answered. “The color of Sylvester Stallone’s prom dress.”
At this she smiled. “Yes!” she said. “They’re—what’s the word?” Her pink tongue tapped against her very white teeth.
“Testosteriffic?” asked Babe.
She laughed briefly, then frowned. “They’re for you.” She hoisted them higher. Then she put her free hand to her own throat and stroked it. She opened her mouth.
Was she crazy? Was everyone? Pharmacists weren’t supposed to examine people. The roof of her mouth looked ribbed like a cathedral. You could dive down that throat. Her tonsils were inflamed but small, and for the first time Babe wondered what was past a pair of tonsils. He’d always thought of them as landmarks, just not on the way to something.
This time she steadied her own chin. He stared at her fingers. “What do you want?” he asked her.
She leveled her head but still held her throat. Her mouth was ajar. Finally she said, in her loud voice, “What do you recommend?”
“Truly?” he said, and his hands shook. “You should go to a doctor for a culture.”
She shook her head. Her hair didn’t move. “My mother was a doctor,” she told him.
He led her to the Cough & Cold aisle. “So,” he said, to indicate that he hadn’t forgotten the facts of the matter, “how long have you and Jules been married?”
“Four years?” she asked. “Depends on how you do the math. Four years for real, but we didn’t live together till about six months ago.”
“Because he was in Holland?”
Connie hooted. It was an actual hoot. She threw back her head like someone impersonating a rare suburban owl. Hoohoooo! “You don’t know!” she said. “Mal didn’t tell you!” She looked directly at Babe. Her eyes narrowed and she leaned in. She touched his forearm. When she spoke, she was as loud as she’d ever been. “Not because he was in Holland. Because I was in prison.”
“Right. OK. What for?”
At the end of the aisle an old woman pushing one of the store’s pygmy shopping carts appeared. “I killed my parents!” said Connie.
“You killed your parents!” he answered, which seemed the only appropriate response to such a statement. He could hear the little old lady’s cart quiver in shock. OK: Connie was crazy. Of course. Whenever a strange woman seemed the least bit interested in him, it turned out to be in a Rescue-Me-from-the-Space-Aliens way. The bottle of grape-flavored Chloraseptic he held in his hand—for children, she was so childlike—would not cure her problem, no matter how zealously she operated the spray pump. Haunting pharmacies, claiming to be a parricide. Very classy, to go crazy in the way of the Greek myths. Very sensible, to go crazy near a stock of antipsychotics. We will of course be delighted to meet your future pharmaceutical needs.
She raised her eyebrows and nodded. Was that delight on her face?
No, not quite. Babe looked closer and saw how thin the line between shock and cheerfulness was on this particular face, and how troubling the similarity had been for her, all her life.
She left with a tin of Sucrets. “I like the box,” she said. “Do they work?”
When he’d returned to the pharmacy counter, the little old lady, who’d been browsing the Seasonal Items aisle, came wobbling up. The shopping cart had a long pole with a red plastic pennant at the top, to discourage theft. The woman herself had a large red mole on her forehead, an eyebrow-pencil beauty mark on her cheek, and an Eastern European accent. She rested her breasts on the consultation counter. This wasn’t unusual. The counter had supported plenty of geriat
ric, confidential breasts. She beckoned at him though he was already very close to her and said in the voice of a spy, “She did, you know.”
“Did what?” asked Babe.
“She did kill her muzzer and fazzer. I have zeen on the—” the woman drew a square with her index fingers. “Channel 5. She goes to jail, and now she leaves, maybe zix months ago.”
“No,” said Babe.
“Yez,” said the woman. “When she is a girl, she haz kill her muzzer and fazzer. Now she haz sore t’roat.” The woman shrugged. Make your own conclusions.
CONNIE MURDER. MURDER PAROLE. Teenager parole. Doctor murder. Mother murder. Mother father murder. Everything he stuck in the search box of the city paper’s website sounded like the name of a bad rock band and brought up nothing.
Constance murder.
Her name was Constance Lafferty, and she had beaten both parents to death on October 11, 1982, first her mother, and then her father. First with a candlestick, then with a hammer. A two-blunt-object job. Her mother had been dead drunk, according to the autopsy; the father had been slightly tipsy, if tipsy could be applied to the dead, if that wasn’t too trivial a word. The daughter, the murderer, the blond woman who that day had given him four flowers, Connie, may or may not have had a boyfriend, a drug problem, a friend in the world. The parents were loving or absentee. She’d been on the honor roll.
No mystery to who, how, when, where. Lots to why. She confessed, she pled guilty, she went to prison. She’d found God, of course. God seemed to spend a lot of time in the federal prison system. No one ever found God at Disney World.
The picture he instantly recognized: it had been famous and shocking, once upon a time. Even on a computer monitor, the gray blood looked like wet newsprint. He couldn’t get the dead parents and the live girl on-screen at the same time, and wobbled them back and forth. Her hair was darker and longer, all one length.