“You pay taxes?”
“When there’s a 1099. But maybe writing will be good for you. Horrible as that thing with Susan is, it might be the kick in the butt you need to do…something.”
Mingus snorted in his sleep, as though agreeing.
Bodine said, “Well, if you’re going to do it, I hope you don’t use a pen and paper.” He made the writing tools sound like horse and buggy. “This is the twenty-first century, Ray.”
“I’ve got a computer.”
Bodine groaned. “What, that old piece-of-shit PC?”
“What’s wrong with it?”
Bodine held up a finger—one minute—and disappeared into the closet. They might be best friends, but vast reaches of Bodine’s psyche were off limits. And so was his closet. Given all the stuff Ray had seen come out of it, it must be huge.
Ray went over, leaned down and scratched the dog’s head, the way Mingus liked. Bleary eyes looked up at Ray. Would he rather be still sleeping or being petted? Ray didn’t care. He was a dog. His job was getting petted.
Ray heard Bodine returning and stood. The object in his friend’s hand gleamed in the overhead halogens. It was a different color, but the same shape as the placemat. And the same shape as something else. They formed a series. One, two…Ray frowned as he lined them up in his mind.
Bodine looked at him. “Ray?”
He raised a hand—nothing. Bodine handed him the laptop. It was cold. It was completely different than the placemats. Just a computer. There was no series.
Ray said, “You don’t need it?”
Bodine pointed to his array of hardware. “Does it look like I do? Got one exactly like it in the living room.”
“Where’d you get it?”
Bodine lifted a finger to his lips. “Must have fallen off a truck.”
A perk of Bodine’s mysterious computer business.
Bodine scowled. “This is going to be like trading in an old shitbox for a Ferrari. You don’t watch out, it might run away from you. But hook it up to Wi-Fi and you’ll be able to go online anywhere you want in that house of yours. But please promise me you’ll get some security.”
“Security?”
“Nobody would have the patience to hack into that old clunker of yours. But this new one… You never know when someone in some white van is gonna sneak up outside your place with a satellite dish and break into your computer.”
“Come on. What do I have that anybody wants?”
“You never know. There’s some good freeware out there. You can Google it. Hacksafe, Botgard.” Bodine’s eyes flicked to the closet. “You need anything else? Crack cocaine? A rocket launcher?”
They both laughed. Bodine was a confirmed pacifist and didn’t have any rocket launcher in there. Or crack.
Other illegal substances were another matter.
Ray headed home. He turned onto Warren, the main street of Hudson, the funky-chic little city on the river that gave it its name. Only a few thousand folks lived in town, but it boasted 165 antique stores. That naturally encouraged specialization. An icy wind raced toward the water, blasting him in the face.
Ray’s eyes may have become useless for making art, but they hadn’t lost their habitual hunger. Nor their capacity for judgment. The next block was like stepping back through time in the period rooms of a museum, each shop covering a different era. He frowned into a big display window packed with mid-century modernist crap. He smiled at the store with its svelte Art Deco lamps and chaise lounges. Gave an appraising eye to a smaller shop with Victorian chairs and couches, and finally yawned at a stuffy Second Empire living room.
A fast rattle of Spanish from some guys entering a bodega reminded him that Hudson wasn’t just a weekend playground for upscale New Yorkers. A block north of Bodine’s, seedy Columbia Street crawled its way down to housing projects by the river. A couple of blocks to the south, a state prison hunched under a bluff.
But this section of Warren east of Sixth Street was headed upmarket. And here was a brand new women’s clothing store with silk dresses in dazzling colors, flowering a little early for spring. Shit.
Liz. This was the kind of stuff she just loved. He started sliding down a familiar muddy slope. His home was across the street in the next block. He peered up at its brooding face. Bodine called it the House of Usher, and it definitely had a gothic vibe. It stood tall and unnaturally thin, like a severe old man, its ornate cornice a brow, and tucked beneath it a single, round, cyclopean window. What that architecture course back in art school had taught him was an oculus. Right now it was glowering down at him.
This was night and day from seeing it the first time, ten years ago. He and Liz had driven up from the city house hunting. Laughing and chattering away the whole length of the Taconic Parkway, his hand in her hair, her popping chocolate truffles into his mouth.
They’d been right where he was now when a flash of light caught Ray’s eye. The sun gleaming off the round window. He pointed and said, “Look,” but the gleam was already gone, just a trick of the sun’s angle. Later, Ray would joke with her: “It was winking at me.”
“You made that up. You and your famous imagination.” She liked it, then.
He eased the key in the door and pushed it open, his other hand muting the string of bells he’d chosen for the creepy mismatch of their tones. Their purpose was fair warning to all who entered, though the window display ought to ring a few bells as well. It contained the last of the reliquary parodies he’d made his stock in trade in recent years, somewhere in the uncanny valley between fine art and horror movie props. If you still didn’t get it, there was Ray of Darkness painted in shiny black Gothic script on the display window. Weenies and kids not admitted! The sign in the door said Closed, but there was no need to flip it: The gallery only opened mornings, and even then at his whim.
While he was fond of his sculptures, he did not like the twin phantoms that haunted his house. The ghosts of Liz and his muse were the cause of his extended funk. He slipped his shoes off and stepped softly so as not to wake them. He tiptoed up the rusted spiral staircase, making only a faint metallic hum. He glanced across the kitchen at the closed door of the bedroom, which he hadn’t dared enter in months.
Though it made no sense, he gripped the laptop like it was a shield or talisman that might protect him. He headed up the continuation of the spiral steps to the third floor. Tiptoed down the narrow hall past his studio. Nothing stood between him and that mausoleum of hopes and ambition but the red curtain he hadn’t pulled open since that last day. He couldn’t see the chisels, brushes, half-finished pieces, and stacks of musty materials entombed there, but he could smell their charnel breath of linseed and old glue. And he could feel them, accusing.
He retorted: It wasn’t me who left. Two more steps, and he entered the turret room behind the oculus, with the comforts of the purple velvet wingback couch, the window, and his bottle of absinthe. The one place in his house where he was safe from the ghosts.
He sat, pulled a placemat from his pocket, and read, shaking his head. He eyed the silver laptop. Maybe Bodine was right. Use the tool of the times.
He opened it, fired up a Word doc, and started typing.
The fall I met Susan, Bodine had moved to the City with his current girlfriend and I was sharing a house in the country with our rhythm section. It was a big step up from our previous place on Alton Road—no roaches, a working furnace, and a downstairs bathroom that didn’t have the one upstairs leaking down on you while you sat on the toilet.
Our band, The Nightcrawlers, was scrabbling its way up into the big time. We weren’t rock stars yet. Not just another bar band, either, but the money was still short. When our drummer Frank moved out we needed a new roommate. Finding one might have well precipitated a psychotic break in Bassman, so I had to do it.
Susan was a grad student. I showed her the room and made
her instant coffee. We sat downstairs, she on the shabby couch and me in a sprung armchair. My plan was to interview her, find out if she could pay the rent, and make sure she wasn’t too crazy.
Somehow the questions and answers stopped, because I found myself looking at her, and her at me, silently, for the longest time. We stared directly into each other’s eyes. Soon there were just those eyes and a clock ticking more and more faintly from the kitchen. Her face began shifting, almost melting, like I was seeing different people in her. Or maybe past lives, though I’ve never believed in such things. My limbs felt heavy, my head dreamy, as she hypnotized me with her incandescent gaze.
Finally, I moved. I crawled to the couch and embraced her. We didn’t make love, didn’t even kiss. If there was a sexual element to whatever brought us together, it was only in the sense that there’s a sexual element in everything.
She moved into the house and, some months later, my room. Within the year we were married.
Susan was studying for a religion degree, but that was just the cover for her burning desire to find it, find The Answer, Enlightenment, God. I was surprised that she hadn’t done psychedelics, had never even smoked pot. She said, “I need to get to this on my own, without artificial tools.” Like some people won’t touch food that isn’t pulled right from the ground, grown without chemicals, she needed her God served up straight.
So where did I figure in the equation? Did she really care about me, or was I just a spiritual project?
She said, “Ray, I believe in you. Not who you are, but who you can become. You’re a seeker, like me.” Was I? I didn’t know much about religion, but drugs had shown me without a doubt that there was something out there, beyond this mundane world, something even greater than rock and roll.
A car horn from below rocketed Ray back to the present—his butt on the couch, the cold wafting from the window, the late afternoon sun burnishing rooftops across the street. He’d returned from far away, because he hadn’t just been writing about the past. He’d been there. Conjured his younger self and brought Susan back to life, and them together. Happy.
And so it was a shock to be back here in a haunted house. With a third ghost now, lurking in the laptop. And unlike Liz or his muse, Susan was really dead. Knowledge that still ached in him. Yet there was also a new spark: The inkling that this writing might be magic. And this silver tool might be part of it.
The stuff on the placemats had just been words. This had…juice.
The sex was good for me. It seemed just okay for her. I asked and she said, “Oh, no, Ray, it’s fine.” I always felt that she wanted more than I or lovemaking could give her. What was an orgasm next to the promise of reuniting with the Godhead?
Whatever her motivations, she got me setting my sights higher. Which was why I married her. I’d hitched my spiritual wagon to her star. Marriage was the guarantee that she’d forever carry me up and up.
Which makes the next part ironic. Without me, she would have never met…
Karl. Like that, Ray was violently coughing, tears running down his cheeks. Must have gotten something caught in his throat while he was consumed with writing. It took minutes to get the cough under control. Better now, but his throat still felt wrong. Was he coming down with a cold? He gazed out the round window and drank in the late afternoon light. A whirring of rush hour out there. His eyes flicked to the floor next to the couch and he smiled. It was almost time for his medicine. It should soothe his throat.
Every day it worked its charm, chasing away his twin ghosts. It ought to work against this third phantom, Susan. But Karl? There was one way to find out. He looked at the clock on the computer. It read 4:55. He slapped the laptop closed, stuffed it under the couch, and waited. Rituals must be honored. He sat still, his mind a blank.
Five bells sounded from the Episcopal Church down the street. As the last faded, he reached over the armrest and lifted the bottle.
It was half filled with green liquid, the word Absinthe rendered in Art Deco script above a picture of a voluptuous specter seeping like green vapor from the top of her own bottle. Her arms transformed into vines as they reached down to embrace the man sprawled in his chair, eyes closed and lips open in anticipation of the kiss of the Green Faerie. That’s what they called this drink back when it became fashionable in Victorian times. Ray’s patron saint, Edgar Allen Poe, had loved the Faerie. Ray was getting there himself.
It was potent medicine. Not only 180-proof but infused with the psychoactive ingredient in wormwood.
He fished around next to the couch for his tumbler and flask of water. He popped the cork and splashed a generous portion into the glass. Chased it with water and the green paled, remained clear for a second, then turned opaque. It was like some magician’s trick, as if the Faerie had slipped from her abode in the ether and into his glass.
Back when he was making sculptures and just drinking beer, his five o-clock ritual had been more than an excuse to drink. His theory was that after putting out all day creating things for people to look at, you needed to take in. The first act of visual art was looking, just as the first act of music was listening. Daily practice honed your inner eye so that you came to see in more detail, depth and nuance. As Ray peered out of his oculus, and as the booze took hold he’d imagined it as an eye, his house itself sentient, an art machine that drank in the visuals of the street and popped sculptures out the door below into the hands of his customers.
Nothing fashioned by his hand left this building any more. But he still needed to look from his window. The root of this impulse was his terrible, insatiable desire to see the invisible. The setting sun painting the ice dams on the eaves across the street was a fine sight, but he wanted more.
He wanted to see inside the houses, see how the people lived. He yearned to peer inside their heads and hearts. To know what it was like to be another person, to live another life.
He’d long ago admitted this was a hopeless quest. But a proper dose of green medicine and he didn’t care. The first sip lit a dot of fire in his belly. With each additional sip, it grew and grew, into a pulsing, molten golden coin whose heat radiated to the tips of his fingers and toes. As the Faerie wrapped him in her velvet embrace, the round glass of the window hummed in sympathy with the coin inside and began to glow itself with faint phosphorescence.
The Faerie rose to full strength. This was the sweet spot, where body and heart were fully satisfied. No more longing for Liz, for his lost muse or billions of lives unseen. Perfect bliss.
A streetlight glinted on the glass in his hand. It had passed its midpoint, from half full to half empty, warning him that the Faerie’s embrace, like all embraces, would not last. Outside, fine snow had begun sifting past his window. The desire burst in his chest to see every snowflake before it fell. And a twinge pinched his belly, as he knew it couldn’t be.
And now the ghosts stirred in the empty house.
Before they got him, he’d be asleep. He lay down and pulled Liz’s afghan over him.
Ray woke to the sun peeking through the top of the window and stabbing his eyelids. He was sweated up under the cover. Even with the register up here turned off, the heat from downstairs came up the stairs and pooled in this little room at the end of the hall. He stood. His head was fuzzy. While absinthe chased the ghosts away, with its hangover they returned with a vengeance, taunting him.
He limped past the red curtain, the stink of his muse’s breath causing his stomach to do a half flip. He shuffled downstairs, careful of that missing step.
Liz hissed at him from her fancy coffee machine, shooting a needle between his eyes. Caffeine would fix that, at least. He brought the steaming cup down to the gallery. The sculptures glared at him. What’s the matter, big boy, can’t get it up any more? With the exception of the pieces in the window, his gallery was filled with the work of other artists.
He sat at his old clunker PC and remembered
the laptop upstairs. And Susan, and the writing…
The discordant bells announced customers. A couple with teenaged daughters shuffled in, sleepwalked around the gallery past all the bizarre works with the bemused looks of Walmart shoppers, then marched out into the street without a word.
As they were leaving, an impeccably dressed Asian man arrived and stared for a long minute at Ray’s friend Maurice’s “Untitled #13,” which Ray privately called “Psycho Ax-Murder Baby.” A doll’s torso and head, eyes staring blankly, the right leg a weathered ax with a rusty blade for a foot, the left a small chainsaw. Ray suppressed laughter as the guy asked about the provenance of the materials: “What brand of chainsaw is this?” “How old is this doll?” as if any of it mattered. The man stood back, gave it a last look, thanked Ray for his time, and left.
The third customer made Ray’s morning. The dusty little guy looked around for a few minutes, then came up and got right in Ray’s face, saying, “You are one sick man.” He stalked out and Ray laughed out loud. A moment later, his spirits drooped. What horrified the guy was not Ray’s art, but only his curations. Ray’s identity was bound up in his creations, not his questionable skills as a gallery owner.
Now that he was idle, he felt it in his hands again. The itching.
He climbed upstairs, got more coffee and the laptop from under the couch on the third floor, and brought them downstairs. He opened the computer to the last words he’d written.
Without me, she would have never met…
He closed the document and launched a blank one, as if it would make a difference. But there was just a cursor blinking, wagging at him like a scolding finger.
His fingers needed to write. But he wasn’t getting any further with this piece of Susan.
Flipping the sign in the door to Closed, he headed to Jo’s. He sat in his usual spot. She was busy with customers. His fingers tapped rhythms on the table—or was that frustrated writing?
Never Speak: A Mystery Thriller (The Murderous Arts Series) Page 2