Irrational Fears

by Spencer, William Browning

  The mental illness sounded, at first, like a metaphor. “I got an evil spirit inside me,” Ezra said. “I can’t keep it down, sometimes, when I drink.”

  Hubert had been there; he understood. First the man takes a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes the man. What alcoholic didn’t know about being possessed?

  But, as time went by, Hubert understood that Ezra’s demon was, for Ezra, utterly real.

  “So it was snowing!” Hubert roared, as though, by brute force, he could leap ahead, wrest control of this unruly history. But then he shook his head, realizing that he wasn’t there yet, sighing.

  “I guess I gotta go back some still. Before it was snowing, it was a blazing, dog-weary August, and I was stopping at Ezra’s because I’d told him, just the day before, that I would. He’d only been out of detox, that time, a week, and I was trying to keep an eye on him, take him to some meetings, listen if he had a mind to talk. I pulled into the driveway and saw Anita sitting in the rocking chair on the porch and smiled and said hello and saw then that she was crying, rocking and crying. She looked up and said, ‘No sense in taking him tonight. He won’t get much out of a meeting tonight.’ Anita was twenty years younger than Ezra, but worry and defeat looked to be closing the distance. She looked beat.

  ‘“I’ll just say hello then,’ I said.

  “I found him in the basement. I just followed the racket. He was down there, hammering nails into a two-by-four. He was in his underwear, dead drunk, hair falling in his eyes, going at that board like it meant something— only it didn’t. He would fish a nail out of the jar, hold it upright over the board, and try to slam it with the hammer, miss as often as not. The nail would ping out, spinning on the floor. Occasionally he’d get lucky and hit one right on, driving it down. ‘Bingo!’ he’d holler, a shout of satisfaction. He wasn’t making anything, just whopping nails into the board. I didn’t think he knew I was there, but then he spoke to me, ‘Don’t let Anita down here,’ he said, not looking at me. ‘He’s crazy tonight, Hubert. You get her away, you hear?’ Bang! He slammed the hammer down again.

  ‘“Who’s crazy?’ I asked, but he didn’t hear that, whacking that board in a sudden fury, making it jump.”

  Hubert was going to speak again, shout, but something caught his attention, a green blur in the air. It was Anita’s parakeet, Nigel, flying from one ceiling beam to another.

  As Hubert watched, the bird wheeled in the air and descended, landing on Ezra’s shoulder.

  Ezra hadn’t been expecting it, and he shouted, surprised, panicked. He turned, the hammer in his hand knocking over the jar of nails.

  The bird took to the air again, a fist-sized fury—and a silver cloud of steel wasps pursued it.

  “I didn’t know what I was seeing,” Hubert said. He saw something, but his mind was way behind what was happening, as though he were a translator thrown off by some unfamiliar, alien language.

  The parakeet was harried by a swarm of nails. In less time than it took to tell, this ball of splintered steel engulfed the bird, shot through the air, and slammed against the pegboard behind the workbench, knocking a hanging saw to the floor, nails flying everywhere.

  What was left, pinned to the pegboard, looked like a crushed flower made from green and yellow feathers, leaking a blood-red glue. That was Nigel, one wing still ticking reflexively, bristling with bright nails.

  “Get out!” Ezra shouted.

  Hubert remembered turning to stare at Ezra’s sweating, frightened countenance. Behind Ezra, a glittering cloud of nails was rising.

  Hubert scrambled up the basement stairs, raced through the kitchen and living room, banged out onto the porch and shouted for Anita to run to the car as he closed the front door behind him.

  She ran, knowing better than Hubert, no doubt, the occasional need for sudden, decisive flight.

  They were in the station wagon, already moving, already rounding the corner, when she said, “You’re hurt.”

  Preoccupied with escape, he hadn’t noticed the throb in the side of his palm. The nail had gone in an inch.

  There was a toolbox in the back of the station wagon, and he’d had to root through it and find the pliers.

  “Thought I was going to heave, working that sucker out,” Hubert said. “Course, it was fear more than pain. I was scared sick.”

  * * *

  “So it was snowing,” Hubert said. That August day had passed and been damped down by reason and distance. But, sitting in the backseat of Heller’s jeep while he and Heller and Jim Wallace raced to Anita’s aid, Hubert had to fight an urge to shout for them to stop, to turn around.

  “Anita let us in when I rang the doorbell. She had that tired look, but, coming in out of the blowing snow, the room felt, for just a second, like sanctuary.” The house was quiet, warm, full of cooking smells, spices, onion and oregano.

  “He’s in the kitchen,” Anita said, and she led the way.

  “If Anita hadn’t felt the urge to take us back there,” Hubert said, “things still might have turned out different. But, I don’t know. I’ve thought about it. The way my mind replays it, it always seems inevitable. If it hadn’t happened, something like it would have.

  “Ezra was sitting at the kitchen table, wearing a white shirt, his sleeves rolled up. He was quiet, looked at us all and nodded. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said. ‘To what do I owe the pleasure of your company?’”

  Hubert could see that the man was drunk, red-faced, his composure an effort of will. His words were only slightly slurred; Hubert remembered that struggle for control, like feeling your way through a dark room. There was a cutting board on the table, diced onions like frosted ice chips on the wooden surface. A knife, its silver blade blurred by the brightness of the overhead fluorescent lights, lay next to the cutting board.

  A shadow flickered in the corner of Hubert’s eye, and he turned to watch something pale writhing on the wall. He saw, then, that the walls were splattered red. He saw the overturned sauce pan on the floor near Ezra’s feet. His mind connected the dots (visual to olfactory to visual). The walls were painted with spaghetti sauce and cooked noodles. The noodles were peeling free, dropping to the floor in a grisly simulation of life.

  “You’ve come to fetch my wife, haven’t you?” Ezra said.

  “Yes,” Hubert said.

  “A man drinks a little in his own house, just looking for some peace of mind, a little goddam relief, and his wife walks out. Is that right? I ask you, Hubert, is that goddam standing by your man?”

  There was a noise, and Hubert looked at the table. The knife was beginning to spin.

  “Ask her is she ever coming back?” Ezra said. His hands were shaking now, and he clasped them, his eyes bulging, watching his hands wrestle. He seemed unaware of the knife, now spinning more rapidly, the handle going clack, clack, clack on the tabletop.

  “Ask me yourself,” Anita said.

  Hubert couldn’t take his eyes from the knife. It rose into the air (a miniature helicopter blade), leaving the table-knocking noise behind (replaced by the huff of air being sliced).

  Ezra was now looking straight at Anita. Neither of them paid any attention to the knife. They were caught in each other’s eyes, like old warriors impaled on twin swords, so full of old antagonisms that they were unaware of the killing steel.

  “We are just taking her to her sister’s until you get right,” Hubert said, hearing his voice rattle with desperation, sounding like a hurried lie.

  “I’m not coming back,” Anita said. “That’s right, Ezra. I’m going for good.”

  “Bitch!” Ezra shouted. He jumped up, knocking his chair back, trembling like a small dog in a rage. “You think—” He stopped, struck dumb. His eyes widened. He’d seen the knife spinning in the air (or, more precisely, his brain had finally logged it). His voice changed, a hoarse, dead-sober whisper. “Don’t move, honey,” The blade was moving toward Anita.

  “Give me your jacket,” Ezra whispered.

  “
I was wearing one of those big, down-stuffed quilted jobs,” Hubert said. “I shucked it off and tossed it to him. I think I understood what he intended as soon as he asked.”

  Ezra flung the jacket over the hovering blur. “Run!” he screamed.

  They all just stood there, silly with shock, watching Ezra clutch at the bottom of the jacket. It strained away from him, ripping, a gray fuzz of feather dust suddenly blooming in the air.

  Hubert ran past Ezra, yanked open the fridge door, screamed, “Here!” and Ezra understood what was required, fell backwards dragging the jacket with its upward-straining, rending fury.

  He pushed the animated, down-spewing jacket into the fridge and Hubert launched his shoulder against the door.

  And, in one last frenzied burst, the knife spun free of its shroud, leaving its slashed cocoon behind to collapse amid jars of mayonnaise and pickles and aluminum-wrapped leftovers.

  Anita had turned, was fleeing through the doorway. The knife careened far to her left, powered wildly by its violent escape, scratched and screeched (a frustrated banshee) as it banged against the brick facade behind the stove, then flipped and darted past Anita and stuck, quivering, in the wooden face of the cupboard.

  Hubert saw that Ezra was bleeding, one of his hands cut in his battle with the ravenous knife.

  Hubert helped him to his feet. “It’s okay,” Hubert said.

  “Anita!” Ezra screamed, standing up, pushing Hubert away.

  “She’s all right,” Hubert said.

  Ezra stumbled past Hubert and through the doorway.

  Hubert heard him scream.

  “I was wrong,” Hubert told them, his voice choked with the dust of old, remembered emotion.

  Anita lay face down on the floor. Her husband turned her over, and Hubert, coming into the room, thought she wore a dark scarf.

  The knife had, indeed, darted past her as she turned and fled the room. It hadn’t even paused as it flashed in front of her flight, had cut her throat in one elegant, mortal second, and she had lost consciousness and tumbled into death as blithely as a child, racing through a long day, falls into sleep in a tangle of limbs.

  The ambulance came and they took Anita away. They took her husband too.

  Ezra attended Anita’s funeral in the company of two orderlies from Winchester Hospital (where he’d been sent for another detoxing) and a young, solemn boy of perhaps ten or eleven. Hubert and his companions testified that an accident had occurred, and the lawyers that Ezra always retained leapt into action, devising a story that was, essentially, true without taxing the court’s credulity. In the end, no charges were filed.

  Ezra’s grief was genuine. He was numb, dead and ancient, a dwarfed husk. It was time, certainly, for him to drink himself to death. The only person he had ever loved was dead, and he was, no matter what any court might rule, the guilty, living one. But he did not drink, at first. Instead, he got out of detox and continued to go to AA meetings. After five or six weeks, he began drinking again, sporadically, and he was always in a rage, drunk or sober, and he was governed by a single, burning obsession: To convince the world that an evil entity had robbed him of his beloved Anita.

  “I believe,” Hubert said, “that Ezra Coldwell killed Anita. I don’t believe in ghosts. Somehow it was Ezra, his rage and drunkenness and craziness, that animated that knife. But he could never look at that, never face up to it, so he told himself a ghost story. We alcoholics are always on the lookout for someone to blame. Ezra blamed an invisible monster. ‘An evil spirit killed Anita,’ he would say. It was a pathetic self-deception. Then the boy came to stay with Ezra, and that boy... Ezra was already in Hell, I guess, flames flapping round his soul. That boy was gasoline.”

  “At the funeral—” Martin said.

  Hubert nodded. “That was the first time I laid eyes on Dorian Greenway.”

  Hubert stood up, shaking his head. He looked at his watch. “Tell you what,” he said. “I’m damn sick of my own voice, and we’ve still got time to make a late-night AA meeting that will be very instructive. It’s called the More Will Be Revealed Group—and it’s the best example of Dorian Greenway’s influence on AA in this town. Satan... no, better I don’t say anything now, and you judge for yourself.”

  The meeting was held in Harken’s high school auditorium. There were probably a hundred people in attendance. Incense burned, candles flickered, a generic sort of New Age music floated in the air (vague, synthetic, faintly asthmatic sounds, “The Universal Star Dance of Asynchronous Time/Space/Love”—that would be the title of this piece, something like that).

  The meeting was already in progress, and a woman in a purple robe was saying, “After they inserted the probe, their leader, whose name is not translatable but, in our time continuum, means One-Who-Can-Multitask-Effortlessly, said, telepathically, ‘Earth One, you are the lost goddess of the seventh moon of Mercor, and your memories are waiting for you there. But before you come to us, you must solve your alcoholism, which is a problem, like a math equation. The solution will require four tasks and three mentors.’”

  The next man introduced himself as a sex and love addict. He described, in explicit detail, an explosive sexual encounter with a cousin (“very distant and well over the age of consent in many countries”). His wife had discovered him, and he was now seeking a sofa to sleep on until he could rent an apartment or reconcile.

  “I am shot through with remorse,” he said.

  Jack doubted the man’s sincerity. Remorse shouldn’t come with so much enthusiastic detail. Instantly, Jack reprimanded himself. Let he who is without sin lob the first stone at some poor pervert.

  No one in the meeting seemed offended by the man’s detailed narration of his sexual encounter (another example of A A’s commendable tolerance/indifference).

  A skinny woman with blond hair and large, mascara-enhanced eyes told about her dream animal (an otter) and how it had been captured by the white man’s death-science and tortured. Her alcoholism was the otter’s bad dreams. An angry man spoke of his outrage at having been cloned as a child and cast off, sent to an orphanage. “I was robbed of my birthright!” he shouted. This created some crosstalk (from a man whose psychiatrist had been cloned, and another man who had realized, two years ago, that he was, himself, an “experimental” clone, the nature of the experiment being to determine just how much alcohol abuse a man could endure. At night, when he was sleeping, scientists would conduct a variety of tests to see how he was faring. Not well, in his own opinion).

  It was a meeting which, even by AA standards, contained an unnerving diversity. There were the astral travelers, the Elvis worshippers, the white witches, the satanists (Jack sensed a coolness between these two factions despite AAs militant live-and-let-live policy), the conspiracy advocates (Bill Wilson and Doctor Bob had been CIA operatives; Scott Peck was a zombie manipulated by Jesse Helms), and a large astrology contingent. Jack heard the names of strange deities and entities, including Azathoth and Nyarlathotep. He recognized these names from the Happy Roads AA Club.

  “So what did you think?” Hubert asked. The meeting was over, and Hubert was driving them back to New Way.

  “I don’t hold with all the psychological issues stuff,” Pendleton said. “I’m not saying I don’t believe in it, I’m just saying it doesn’t belong in AA. Take that fellow who was going on about what a wonderful human being he would have been if he had had better parents. I don’t know. Even with better parents, he might have been somebody you would wish to avoid. There’s no way to tell. It’s all hypothetical.”

  Eunice, still exalted by revelation, said that, although the crowd appeared to be hopelessly lost to heathen thinking, she would love them; she would be on them with love like a bull terrier on a rat, like a tornado on a lake. She would not let up until they were dizzy and sick to their stomachs with the power of her caring.

  Ed Tilman said, “There was some truth in that meeting. Lot of chaff, but some truth. Bill Wilson did do some covert work, but none of it
was for the CIA.”

  Jack said he’d heard the names of strange deities—and that he had heard these names before, at the Happy Roads Club.

  Hubert nodded. “They got a big dose of that horror writer Lovecraft there. Dorian Greenway had a Lovecraft period when he was going to Happy Roads, so they got the most of that. But he don’t stick with any one kind of craziness. One month it’s aliens, the next month it’s a government plot, the next month it’s alternate worlds, the next month it’s some kind of old Indian curse. During his Lovecraft period, he wrote a book, something about a pentagram, and that was all Lovecraft, outer-space stuff, but the point is, the thing I’ve come to believe over the years, is he doesn’t believe any of it. He’s just trolling the waters for crazy fish, and he doesn’t care what he uses for bait, as long as it hooks them. The main thing is, he hates AA. He gets that from his uncle— who wasn’t the first alcoholic to hate AA. I call it hating the messenger. People come to AA, sick and full of self-pity; they’ve been blaming things all their lives, and the next thing you know they are blaming AA. You’d think, to hear them talk, that they caught their alcoholism at a damn AA meeting.”

  Hubert shook his head. “Some people think we old-timers have grown surly, going off and hiding out in meetings with like-minded, sour old duffers, talking about how the message has been sullied with therapy and cosmic bullcrap. But the truth is, we’re just trying to survive. Dorian Greenway has—intentionally, maliciously—set out to tear AA apart, creating dissension with his Clear cult and infecting AA meetings with all manner of alcoholism theories.”

  Martin Pendleton said, “I could sure do with a soda,” prompted by the sight of the Glad Whiz convenience store coming up on their left.