by Dana Cameron
The raking started up again and I sighed. I took another long, sour sip and tried not to think about thinking. A pile of mail on the desk held no interest for me, and the only thing I opened, from a gardening company in California, held a packet of lily of the valley pips. I couldn’t find a note with it, but I assumed it was from Brian’s mother and realized with a heavy heart that I would have to call to thank her for thinking of me, sometime soon. Maybe Brian had told her what had happened, and she was trying to cheer me up. I didn’t know, and couldn’t bring myself to care; I didn’t feel like talking to anyone either.
I crumpled up a piece of paper and threw it for Minnie to chase. She went after it with all the enthusiasm I lacked. As Bucky had promised, she was a slender cat the color of cocoa powder dusted over black velvet, with fine little bones, and dainty slipper feet. Her tail was like the short stroke of a calligrapher’s brush. It gave me no pleasure to watch her gamboling.
The raking ceased and I heard the side door slam. Uh-oh, I thought. Time for another round. I poured another half inch of bourbon into my glass and braced myself when I heard the inevitable knock on the door.
I took a sip and thought about it for a moment before I decided I could take it. “Yeah?”
As the door opened I deliberately swung around again so that I was facing the computer screen, ostensibly busy at work. “I’m sort of in the middle of something, sweetie—”
“I’ll say, Auntie,” said a familiar voice that wasn’t Brian’s. “About halfway through that bottle, aren’t you?”
“I didn’t open it today, if that’s what you’re asking.” I turned around and saw Michael Glasscock pick up the bottle of Maker’s Mark from the desk. “What the hell are you doing here?” I asked.
Michael was dressed as he always was, the eternal overcoat shrouding dark clothing and an Anna Sui tie. There was one significant difference, however. A bright turquoise silk scarf was tossed carelessly over one shoulder. A pinstripe suit and banker’s brogues would have been less a surprise.
Michael arched one eyebrow in response to my unwelcoming tone and set the bottle back down. “My, my. A tribute to Jack? Why are you drinking that stuff? I had you favorably categorized as a single-malt girl.”
“Bourbon’s for working days. What do you want?”
“Ah, working days.” He sauntered over to the bookshelf and began rifling through the titles. He picked out one book, read the back, frowned, and put it back. “A fine spring Saturday afternoon—for God’s sake, even I’m out—and you’re inside drinking and pretending to work. A bit Gothic, don’t you think?”
I stared. “Excuse me, Mr. Sit-in-the-Dark-and-Mope? People who live in glass houses—”
“Shouldn’t have sex,” he finished, “unless they both are exhibitionists. Besides, I’m not brooding, I’m composing.” Then squinting and sucking his teeth, oozing disbelief, he said, “And by the way, sitting in the dark is in my character, not yours.”
Michael paused in front of a stack of CDs and scrutinized them. He looked around the room, his face troubled. “This isn’t really the office I pictured for you. I had this very clear image of you when I was driving up here and this isn’t it. The National Geo’s are okay, but the science fiction? Real vinyl albums? An autographed photo of Ziggy Marley? Not you at all. It’s a nice collection, real nice, but it’s not you.”
“It’s not my office,” I said dryly. “How did you get in?”
“Your husband out there—Brian, is it? He let me in. He said you’d be here, staring and flagellating yourself.” Michael pulled a long face and pretended to knuckle away imaginary tears. “He’s worried sick about you, you know—”
“Brian never said any such thing,” I interrupted. Thinking of my husband, I wrestled briefly with a small pang of guilt, then decided it was below the legal size limit and threw it back. I took another drink and offered the bottle to Michael.
He looked at the bottle askance, then shrugged. “When in the rural backwater,” he murmured, raising the bottle to his lips. After a couple of glugs he grimaced. “Good God, that’s sweet.” He took another sip anyway. “No, of course, he did not say that. His words were, ‘Em’s in the downstairs office working. Stay for dinner.’ From which I deduced the rest correctly.”
I looked at him, doubtful.
Michael explained. “I’m sure he’s evolved as hell, but he’s a guy. And a guy does not admit to a comparative stranger that his wife is freaked out and drinking alone, pulling an Emily D.”
I was starting to lose patience. “Michael—”
“And then something—I can only assume it was a small wolverine that was blown off course—began to growl at me from under the hedge. Biggest goddamned teeth I ever saw outside of a Spielberg dinosaur movie. I swear to God it was winking at me when it charged—”
“Quasimodo is a cat. Felis domesticus. And he only has one eye.”
But Dr. Glasscock wasn’t concerned with accuracy or details. “Anyway, I barely made it in here alive. I could feel the hot breath of hell searing my ankles as whatever-it-was snapped at me.”
“And so it’s a pity that you’ll have to go past him on your way out,” I said, rising. “Still, if Quasi didn’t actually draw blood, he may just be playing. I’ll get Brian to distract him while you—”
“I’m not going. Show me your office,” he said unexpectedly.
I sighed. “If I do, will you leave me alone?”
He took another swig of my booze. “Nope. But I will tell you a secret.”
“What secret?”
Michael only rolled his eyes back at my simple question. “Upstairs, I presume? C’mon, you can take your glass with you. I’m not one to stand in the way of someone else’s party.” He opened the door and bowed with a broad flourish.
Just to show him I didn’t give a damn about his jibes, I took another big gulp and led the way up to the third floor. Minnie bounded along beside me, and then raced up ahead to check out this new territory. Bucky’d dropped her off a week ago, and she still hadn’t been up there yet.
The door stuck a little as I opened it; it was the first time I’d been up there in the weeks since I’d been home. The air was warm and stale and familiar and I felt another pang of remorse and loss.
Michael pushed past me to stand in the middle of the room. “Now this is more like it. All these bookcases, with the glass doors, 1920s Arts and Crafts, right?”
“They belonged to my grandfather. Oscar. Some of the books are his, too. The rest went to Harvard when he died.”
“Perfect,” he replied. “You’ve got your overstuffed couch, your Oriental carpet, also Oscar-vintage, right? You’ve got your desk and chair and”—he paused to count—“three work tables. Filing cabinets. You’ve got your collection of little bits of rock and cultural shit over there, pictures of dirty children—”
“Those are graduate students. Field crews.”
“—dirty children and postcards from exotic locales, lovely, good, more stacks of books on the floor, and papers, papers everywhere. A couple of color photographs of portraits of early 18th-century dead people, a couple of tasteful repros of Dutch genre paintings. This is much more like what I was thinking. Now what are we missing?”
Michael put his hands on his hips and tilted his head perkily and quizzically. I was starting to get tired of his antics, curious as I was. Minnie crawled under the couch and I could hear her sneeze; she backed out hastily, dust bunnies stuck to her whiskers. She glared at me with disgust, and then began to wash herself.
“Ah, that’s right. Just as I suspected.” He pranced over to the doorway and swung the door closed again. “Your diplomas. Hung up, but modestly, out of direct sight. Coolidge U., huh? I should have guessed. Classic archaeology background.”
“Michael, what do you want from me?” I said tiredly. My carefully cultivated buzz was wearing off and that annoyed me.
“Nothing, nothing. I just wanted to see if I was right, that’s all. And I was. I’m usually
a very good judge of character.”
I looked hard at Michael, giving a healthy dose of a skeptical eyebrow. “Yeah, right.”
“Well, you know.” He shrugged. “Apart from wives.”
He walked over to a little glass-topped case where I had some of the earliest stuff I’d ever collected, things Oscar had given me—found out of context, of course. Without asking, Michael opened up the top and started picking up artifacts—my things—randomly, looking at them with no sign of interest, and putting them back any which way. I bristled.
“Give me that.” I took a little burin out of his hand, replaced it, and shut the case firmly.
Michael peered at my bookshelves as if he’d never seen books before, then yawned. Apparently none of my reading impressed him. “You know, Emma, I have a truly world-class collection of comic books.”
I should have been used to his nonsequitors, but I couldn’t conceal my surprise this time. “What, comics like Archie?”
“Oh, well. I’ve got a few of those.” He shrugged helplessly. “My mother thought they were nicer, say, than Sergeant Rock and Ghost Tank. But I kept right on collecting them, still do sometimes, started with Superman, Batman, and have you seen Miller’s The Dark Knight? Unreal. I eventually moved into indies, of course, with Fat Freddy’s Cat and The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, Love and Rockets, Stray Toasters, anything at all by Bill Sienkiewiedz, Japanese manga, H-manga—”
I had to interrupt Michael’s monologue. “Aitch munga?”
“H-manga. Cartoon porn in books the size of small phone directories, really not to be confused with Archie,” he explained impatiently, as if everyone else in the world but me knew about erotic Japanese comic books. “The reason I still keep the collection is because I got two things from comic books that made me what I am today.”
I took another drink and mumbled, “I can’t wait.”
“The first was women. When I discovered Sue Richards—y’know, the Invisible Girl from The Fantastic Four?—it was the first time I was aware, really aware, of women. And that women had breasts—” he screwed up his face in near ecstasy, his hands reaching out as if to grab the items he was imagining. “When Sue appeared, I was in love; she was gutsy, she was gorgeous, she was powerful, and she was also a mom. She was perfect.”
Michael’s happy memory suddenly clouded over. “Well, shit. Now that I think of it, I seem to be running to type here. I never knew how profoundly the Invisible Girl affected me.”
“Huh? But you just said—”
“Yes, yes. But Mrs. Reed Richards was a blonde brainy bombshell with large ta-tas. Ring any bells for you? Rang ’em four times for me—wedding bells, that is—and now…” He looked troubled for a moment, then shrugged it off. “Ah, fuck it. At least I’m consistent. Next. You ever read any comic books? Any at all?”
“No.”
“Well, if you hadn’t been raised in a tightly lidded cultural Mason jar, you might have known that at the end of every main story line, there’s some sort of pious moralizing. Deathless prose like ‘If only they had used their power for good, and not evil.’ That was my first introduction to philosophy. I mean, if some alien race was trying to destroy Earth, but only to save their planet, was that really evil? It made me start to question things. And that led me to the glamorous, high-paying world of academic philosophy and its history.”
“So?” Although I was still feigning indifference and had no idea where he was going with all this, I sensed it was terribly important that I listen to him. Nonsense and all.
“So. After many long years of studying the mystic arts, all histories, philosophies, and religions, living and dead, and by the way, drinking way too much strong coffee in illlit places with women in secondhand camouflage fatigues and berets, I finally came to a conclusion. And that was the same as what I’d learned from my comic books.”
“Okay. I’ll bite.” I shrugged. “What was it?”
Michael took a deep breath. “With great power,” he said, “comes great responsibility.”
I don’t know what I was expecting, but that surely was not it. “Jesus. I was an idiot to listen to you for this long,” I said angrily. “Don’t let the door hit you on the ass as you leave.”
“Wait, wait!” he said. “You haven’t heard my secret yet!”
“I don’t care what your secret is! I’ve got better things to do with my life—”
“No, no you don’t,” he retorted. “You can’t even decide whether your own life was worth saving.”
His words were like a slap in the face. He was right, but I wasn’t about to admit it. “Well, that was impolite.”
Michael didn’t know from impolite, apparently. “Pshaw, and similarly, horseshit.”
Here it comes, I thought. A long pause settled on the room like a lead apron from the dentist office, an intensely physical presence that suddenly suggested danger. I slowly took a sip of the bourbon. “You’re talking about cartoons, Michael—”
He looked pained. “Comic books, please. Graphic novels, in some instances.”
“I—” I screwed up all my courage to say it out loud, reluctance overcome by a desire to preserve my protective self-pity. “I killed someone.”
“And you really shouldn’t do it again, unless you can’t think of some other way that you won’t die yourself. See,” Michael wandered to the other side of the room, lecturing to himself. “See, I thought that you, having a nodding acquaintance with Darwin, you would have gone that route. Bump off a fellow species-member, successfully reproduce your own genetic material, and, eventually, die happy having fulfilled your biological imperative. Seems terribly simple to me, but then of course I haven’t considered the high price of daycare—” He started to chew his lip. “That’s something maybe I’d better start thinking about.”
I couldn’t believe him. “Jesus, Michael, are you listening to me? I killed Harry. I, me, killed—”
Michael batted his hand at me, all impatience. “I couldn’t not hear you, you repeat yourself enough. Yes, yes, you killed Harry, you believe you’re responsible. I’ve been thinking about that, and it sure sounds like agency, direct or indirect, to me. Even if you get around to believing you were the hand of God or something, you’re still what did the deed. Of course, the cops, not being troubled with coming to some irrefutable philosophical conclusion, have called his death a suicide. That’s not your problem, though—”
“It is my goddamn problem,” I said furiously, but Michael began to laugh. I looked at him, disconcerted.
He sat down on my chair and pushed off, rolling across the floor, shaking his head. “Oh shit, Emma. You really do think you are the center of the universe, don’t you? First it’s ‘I can’t leave, I’m involved in this,’ all very martyr-ly and fatalistic. Now you’re blaming yourself for the way everything turned out. A little internal consistency, puh-leeze!” Michael wiped his eyes, hauled himself out of the chair, and began to pace. “Sure, I could argue you’re the center of the universe, plenty of evidence for it. But you gotta go one way or the other. If you are, then you don’t have to worry about your actions—you are, after all, the prime mover. If you aren’t, then it doesn’t matter in the first place. You’re just an insignificant bundle of water and nutrients on a wet little rock that’s quickly getting overheated by a cold and dying star.”
I felt a flash of adolescent impatience: He was totally missing the point. “Can’t you see? I’m just like Harry. I am no better than he is…was.” I walked over and looked out the window. Down below, Brian was inspecting the early daffodils critically. I rested my head against the glass and watched as he scraped cautiously at the dirt to see if the tips of green showing were really going to be tulips. I sighed. “When he burnt my…that letter, I knew what he was feeling—I nearly drove us both off the road to get at that letter.” And, I thought, what about the rage I felt at the dean, that night he called up to prod me about my tenure review? It scared me to think how tightly I’d wound that phone cord around my hand
, almost wishing it was his throat. I was capable of the same feelings as Harry. The same kind of passion. The same violence. And that scared me to death.
“Okay, that’s where you’re getting hung up.” He gestured emphatically with both hands, framing the issue, rendering it moot. “Empathy is not the same thing as sympathy. When you did finally drive off the road, was it to save yourself or to punish Harry?”
I didn’t really want to go back there, but I also wanted to be convinced, so I told him. “I was just trying to get out of there alive—”
Michael threw his hands up, Q.E.D. “There you go. There’s nothing wrong there. So, in simple terms, you’re fretting about being angry that a bad person hurt you and might have done worse—to you and who knows what other innocent bystanders, if there are actually such things—and not thought twice about it. And you’re upset that you were the force that stopped him from doing those things?”
I didn’t answer.
He wasn’t discouraged yet, and settled comfortably into searching out a rationalization that would work for me; rationalization on short order was a specialty of his. “Hmmm. Look, there are a thousand versions of the truth, I must have one that fits. Okay, how about this? What about vengeance? Jack and Faith, flawed as they were, didn’t deserve to die. You made Harry belly up to the cosmic bar and pay his karmic tab, would you buy that?”
I shook my head, watching Brian pick up the rake and walk back toward the house.
Michael seemed to take all this as a challenge, trying to come up with every angle ever thought of. “Well…What if, by stopping Harry, giving him that one moment of realization of what he’d done, you’ve redeemed him?”
I turned and looked at him askance. “You don’t believe in redemption.”
He waggled his hand back and forth, mezzo-mezzo. “Jury’s still out, as far as I’m concerned, but the real question is, did Harry?” Michael wagged a finger, sure he’d hit the answer, and began to pursue his point. “And, more important, do you? Every one of us has the capacity for evil or good. You had the power, you made the choice. All you have to do is make the decisions for the right reasons. And wasting your time worrying about why you’re still alive is silly.”