Laughing Man

by Wright, T. M.

  "And speaking of which, I think I'm talking to my lawyer about suing someone here. You know, for false arrest, or harassment, maybe, or internal prejudice—wait. What is that? Internal prejudice? It just came to me out of the blue. It's nothing, right? It's something I made up, right? Okay. Sorry. I'll stick to those other things. Harassment and false arrest.

  "Because, I'll tell you, someone else killed fruity Fred, and I can guarantee it. And someone else did those Chocolate Murders, too. I heard about them. I read about them. How can you live anywhere and not hear about them or read about them? You'd have to be living underground, I think. You'd have to be living in the great bacterial underbelly that breathes and moves and reproduces just a thousand feet below our feet (hmmm, rhyme?). You'd have to be expelled from the great bacterial underbelly that lives and breathes beneath our feet not to have heard about the Chocolate Murders. How calculated. How human. How perverse. Better to eat poor fruity Fred because you're hungry and there aren't any vegetables around—no okra, no broccoli, no yummy asparagus."

  Erthmun flipped the interrogation sheet over, then back again, and said, "That's his whole statement?"

  Peabody said, "Uh-huh. Then he clammed up tighter than beeswax in Detroit."

  Erthmun gave Peabody a quick questioning look, wanted to say, "'Beeswax in Detroit'?" but didn't, because Peabody—who'd been with the force for twenty-five years—was known for talking strangely. Instead, Erthmun said, "And the confession?"

  Peabody said, "Isn't worth two hams in a cracker box. I guess the guy's lawyer walked in when someone was putting a little pressure on him."

  Erthmun sighed. "Well, shit, he did it."

  Peabody, who was tall and bald, shrugged. "Yeah, of course he did it. That's as clear as tomorrow's orange juice. But, Christ, the guy still isn't talking. He hasn't said a goddamned word since that interrogation . . ." Peabody glanced at the date on the interrogation sheet. "Ten days ago."

  Chapter Two

  Williamson's head felt like a jar of snails, and he desperately wanted some Mocha Frappucino. This was cruelty. Milk and bologna sandwiches on fucking white bread, and he a vegetarian. Didn't they know what all that goddamned protein could do to a body? Now if anyone knew about protein, it was him. He should have told them that. A rat couldn't live on bologna and white bread!

  Pictures of Mama. Good old fat Mama singing gospel songs on the porch in the fall and strumming her banjo, all three of her teeth as white as a fish's belly, voice as clear as a mountain stream, and all that lisping and mangled chords and farting. Marvelous as dewdrops, spring leaves, frogs' tongues.

  Williamson banged on the bars of his cell with his shoe. It made a dull noise that nobody beyond the closed door outside the cell would be able to hear to the point of annoyance, but the mere act of hitting the bars was gratifying. "Hey, coppers," he called, "you get that bitch in here and I'll teach her to go spilling her guts!" There was no bitch who had spilled her guts, but it sure sounded good. "Damn bitch!" he called. "Damn whore! Ludmilla! Ha!" He banged on the cell bars with his shoe. "Ludmilla is a stupid name. It's no one's name! Ludmilla! Ludmilla!"

  Head felt like a jar of snails. Williamson liked that. Lots of snails in a jar, moving around real slow, leaving slimy snail trails. That's what his head sure felt like. And there were marbles in there, too. And jelly beans. Little grains of wheat. Raindrops. Pieces of dreams. All in that jar. Big jar. Bug jar. Bugaboo. Bugaboo joy juice. Bug juice. We need more bug juice, Mama. Look at that windshield! Full of dead tsetse flies. Ugly! Stop there, get the bug juice!

  Williamson frowned. Awful to have a head full of snails, really. Like having a head full of mushy crap. Mama, Mama, wherefore art thou, Mama? And who knew? There was this Mama and that Mama, and that other Mama, a thousand Mamas, all different, all doing different things—swimming, knitting, cooking, hiking, laughing, crying, Mamas everywhere in his head, and Daddies, too. Daddies with rifles, briefcases, ladders, pickup trucks, limousines, Corvettes, and a thousand brothers and a thousand sisters—big ones, little ones, ugly ones, smart ones . . .

  Bang the bars with the shoe. Bang, slap, bang slap! "Okay, coppers, you get that bitch in here or it's curtains for the kid!" Bang, slap, bang, slap, bang, slap!

  He could keep it up all the damned long afternoon. Let them try to come in and stop him. He'd tear them ass from toenail, rip them up like they were soggy, chow down on them like they were escargot, then make clean his escape, into the dawning night, into the arms of his Gwynethe, Gwynethe waiting, Gwynethe the lithe, the lithesome, the libidinous!

  He dropped the shoe. Kerplunk! He looked at the shoe. So who wore shoes but the shoeless? Why deprive the sole of the good earth? The green and dewy grass. The dunes!

  Then there was Fred the fruit. Fred fruit. Apple Fred, Tomato Fred. Fruity Fred. Poor Fred without guts, hollowed out like a bowl of oatmeal, left to rot and stink up the place. Poor dead Fred. Eaten by the protein poor.

  Bang, slap, bang, slap!

  "What in the hell is he doing in there?" the visiting guard asked the resident guard.

  "He's banging his cell bars with his shoe. He does it all the time. Morning, noon, and night. All the time. He's crazy as a goddamned bed beg, a goddamned loon. Jesus, he ate someone."

  The visiting guard looked wide-eyed at the resident guard. "You're kidding!"

  The resident guard shook his head. "No. It's true."

  "Ate who?"

  "A guy named Fred. A big guy named Fred. Ate his guts."

  "All of them?"

  The resident guard nodded grimly. "Uh huh. Left nothing. Not even an entrail."

  "What's an entrail?"

  "Guts."

  "Oh."

  "Well, you know, it's the whole thing. All the intestines. They're entrails. That's what they're called." He gave the visiting guard a suspicious look. "You didn't know that?"

  "Well," said the guard, "I did, sure. I knew that. But I just didn't know the technical term."

  The resident guard gave the visiting guard another suspicious look. "Huh?"

  The visiting guard said, with a glance toward Williamson's cell, "Really ate him, huh?"

  "Yeah. Just his entrails. But the guy was big, so I guess that was enough."

  Chapter Three

  For a moment, Erthmun couldn't remember his name. For a moment he had to think about it. For a moment, he latched onto Jack Eberling, then Jack Entwistle, then Jack Earwig, which gave him a shiver. Then he remembered. Jack Erthmun. This temporary loss of memory had been happening quite a lot as he woke. His sleep had been very deep lately, deeper than dreaming, so he guessed that—somehow—his brain was merely shutting off, and that when he woke, his brain took a while to click back on. It was a good explanation, he thought. And it had happened more times than he could remember during his recently ended six-month hiatus from the force, six months he had needed away from chocolate murders, dead vagrants, and homicidal bag ladies more than an old dog needed a feather bed. Besides, come to find out that no one was within two hundred miles of solving the Chocolate Murders ("It's not just a dead end, Jack," Captain Hogarth had told him, "it's a slippery slope into a bottomless pit. The killings stopped, and suddenly we had nothing. Only some names and some suspects who just didn't pan out. Or they didn't pan out into gold."), well, no one much cared about dead vagrants, and although homicidal bag ladies were fascinating, they were few and far between.

  Erthmun was sitting at his little pale green dining room table and he was drinking coffee, eating a poppy seed and sour cream muffin, and looking at photos of the fat, middle-aged man named Fred who had been eaten by the loon named Williamson.

  Erthmun liked poppy seed muffins, even though his coworkers had warned him that if there were a surprise drug test, he'd flunk, because the poppy seeds would make him come up positive for cocaine. He thought this was stupid, though; "I'll just tell the guy doing the test that I've been eating poppy seed muffins," he said. "He'll understand."

  His coworkers laughed. O
ne of them said, "The guys who do these tests don't understand nothing but, 'Hey, we got a positive for coke,'" to which Erthmun merely shrugged. He wasn't going to give up his poppy seed muffins just because there were stupid people in the world.

  Fred, the guy who'd been eaten, was a handsome man, Erthmun thought. He was noble-looking, like a Viking. But if you looked at the huge, empty red bowl that was Fred's stomach, it was a different story. A goddamned bloody story. A horror story.

  Erthmun picked up one of Fred's autopsy photos and studied it very closely. He'd wanted to be at the actual autopsy, but had been too late getting back from the Adirondacks. So he had to settle for 8X10 glossies. Good glossies, prepared from very-high-definition digital photographs, and they showed every nuance, every white and red curve of Fred's emptied belly. They even showed the bite marks on Fred's ribs, and on his spine. Very good photography. But Erthmun missed the sounds and the smells of autopsy. The heady aroma of flesh on the verge of decomposition, the chatter of bone saws and the snap of autopsy scissors. It was quite a sensual celebration of the real meaning of death—the poking, the probing, the prodding, the ghastly invasion of privacy. It always put Erthmun in another place, in a universe where death and life intermingled as easily as coffee and cream, rainwater and earth, love and poetry. And hey, hell, he thought, death and life had always combined to produce the ultimate poetry.

  He took a great chomp of the poppy-seed-and-sour-cream muffin. It was the last of three he'd bought the night before at Vittorio's Deli, on Second Avenue. He'd eaten one before bed, with a cup of hot chocolate, and it had been soothing for sleep, but now he wished he hadn't, because two muffins simply didn't comprise an acceptable breakfast, and he felt empty, as empty as Fred, he thought, then sighed, grinned, and chuckled.

  Perhaps he had eggs.

  "Poppy seed?" he heard, and ignored it.

  He got up from the pastel green table and lumbered over to the refrigerator, way across the kitchen, pulled the door open, and peered in. Nothing much. A can of cannellini beans. A slice of bread. Half a glass of what looked like water. Some aluminum foil covering nothing. Odd stuff to keep in a refrigerator, he thought.

  But no eggs.

  He closed the refrigerator door, lumbered back to his table, and felt suddenly cold. Maybe it was time he put underwear on, at least. After all, who was he trying to impress—the old women across the way, who hung all their graying undies on a clothesline that sagged between their building and his?

  But being naked was okay, he thought. There were probably millions of naked people in the world at that moment, and very few of them actually ashamed of it.

  He took the last bite of his muffin, chewed it slowly, swallowed, and picked up several of Fred's autopsy photos again. He sighed. He wasn't interested, suddenly. Fred didn't matter. Fred was stale, his life over, his story finished, his photographs taken, and his entrails ingested by Williamson the Loon. Nothing more needed to be said or done, except to face Williamson and extract a confession in the usual way.

  Patricia thought that, ultimately, everyone was weird. They lived inside the sweaters and suits and gray pants of civilization, brushed their teeth, washed their hands, became enthralled with football or hockey or movie stars or swimming pools, attended church (some of them), where they genuflected or crossed themselves or ate wafers and decided that it was homage enough to the shadowy creator of the universe. But when the universe itself congealed and swirled around them like dirty laundry, they became weird, they became the people they really were beneath the sweaters and suits.

  It had happened to Erthmun. That was obvious. Why else would he be sitting naked at his table eating his favorite muffin with his front door wide open?

  She wanted to say the correct thing. She didn't care that he was naked. It was no big deal. And she knew that he didn't care either. But surprising him this way, while he was clearly embroiled in a process that brought him pleasure (looking at autopsy photographs, eating muffins, drinking coffee) required the right words.

  She thought of clearing her throat. No good. Obvious. Cliché. He'd hate it.

  Okay, then, blurt out something. Let it erupt from that sane, safe, and deliberate place in the brain that knew best about such things.

  "Poppy seed?" she asked.

  He said nothing. He put the remainder of the muffin on his plate, set the autopsy photographs down, stood, lumbered to his refrigerator, way across the kitchen, opened the refrigerator door, peered in a moment, shut the door, and went back to the table, where he put the last bit of the muffin into his mouth and chewed slowly.

  She repeated herself; "Poppy seed?" paused, then added, "Jack? Poppy seed?"

  He turned his face toward her, looked through her, looked back at the autopsy photographs, looked back again at Patricia, put the autopsy photographs down, said, "Yes, poppy seed." He looked at the autopsy photographs again, then again at Patricia. "I'm naked," he said, as if she hadn't noticed.

  She grinned. "Well, yes, you are. Do you want me to go away?"

  He shook his head. "I don't suppose so. Unless you're embarrassed. But you'd tell me that, I think. If you were embarrassed."

  "Yes, I think I would. Or I'd close the door."

  "Perhaps that would be a good thing."

  "To close the door?"

  "You can come in and close the door or you can stay out in the hallway and close the door."

  "Are you going to put clothes on?"

  He shrugged. "Yes, I imagine that I am."

  "I mean soon?"

  He shrugged again. "Would you prefer it?"

  "It might make having a business discussion more . . . businesslike, Jack."

  "Business discussion?"

  She reached out, put her hand on the doorknob, said, "Let me know when you're dressed, okay?" and closed the door, leaving herself in the hallway.

  Dark enough in this place, thought the creature who had named herself Tabitha. Darkness was as important as oxygen. She felt comforted in it, secure, able to breathe and see. She saw the now when it was dark. The now of her heart beating—clip, trip . . . clip, trip—and the now of her blood coursing through her body. She could not always hear the movement of her blood, but when it was dark and very quiet, as in this place, she heard it. It made the same rushing noise that a river makes, and she felt power in that sound. The power of water, and air. The power of stars.

  She was, of course, as powerful as the sun. She was made of stardust, earthshine and clouds, and—her real self—of soil and its great bacterial underbelly, which existed beneath granite and sandstone, which existed beneath the igneous layer, and the substrata, and which was the greatest mass of life on the planet—greater even than all the life in the oceans, all the life that moved on the land, all the life that flew through the air.

  She was not hiding in this place; she was merely seeking the darkness, because there was no need for vision when she had no need to see. Her only need here was to draw closer again to Mother and Father, now that she was sated.

  Now that nourishment had been inserted into the mouths of the always dead who lived and corrupted the earth and died and lived and corrupted the earth. The nourishment of their own design and need. The chocolate.

  Erthmun's mother couldn't believe the story that she had never told. The story of her son and her other children and her husband—God rest his soul (wherever God was keeping it). She couldn't believe she had never told that story, and couldn't believe, either, that it had happened, although she knew only too well that it had happened. Erthmun himself had been produced because of it, and Erthmun was undeniable.

  She didn't like looking at herself in mirrors and hating what she saw—a woman on the verge of disintegration. She hated her poetry, too—it was so self-indulgent now, so full of the angst of the aged and the depressed trying hard to avoid cynicism.

  But it was wonderful knowing so much more about the universe than anyone else. It gave her a feeling that she harbored a secret she would never share becau
se only she could understand it, because only she could understand her son and the others like him, who were so unlike him. It was like harboring the secret of creation itself, and it made her feel all knowing and all-powerful (because she was all knowing), even in the midst of disintegration.

  Chapter Four

  When Detective Vetris Gambol awoke, he found, and not for the first time, that his cat was sitting on his chest, kneading and purring with great pleasure. The cat's name was Villain and he was very large and usually quite unfriendly and standoffish, except when Vetris Gambol slept. At other times, it was all Vetris could do to get even a glimpse of him. Vetris fed him by putting a small plate of canned cat food on the kitchen floor and leaving the room. If Vetris tried to look in on Villain surreptitiously, Villain almost always seemed to know and ran off.

  Vetris had never been able to determine if the cat hated him, was afraid of him, or was simply, and painfully, shy. He thought it was very strange that the cat slept on his chest while he—Vetris—slept, although, at all other times, Vetris couldn't even get near him. Was it, Vetris wondered, because Villain sensed something warm and cozy about him—beneath his gruff exterior—but could only gain access to this warm coziness while he was asleep? Or was it because Vetris was simply immobilized during sleep, and therefore not a threat? Or was it something even deeper, something almost unknowable? Something that existed deep within the noble and nasty and predatory mind of the cat. (Perhaps, Vetris thought with some alarm, Villain was merely waiting for the moment, while Vetris slept, that Vetris's shallow breathing stopped at last and Villain could easily make several tasty meals of him.)