Irrational Fears

by Spencer, William Browning

  Jack was staring at his reflection when the door behind his reflected self opened and Kerry walked in. Jack turned quickly on the stool. The barroom door was closed, and he did not see her. He blinked at the people at the center of the bar, didn’t see her there either. Perhaps she had turned around and walked out, or moved briskly into the hall where the telephone and rest rooms were located.

  “Jack.”

  He turned again, responding to the voice.

  He gripped the bar counter to keep from falling, as the room seemed to shift. His reflection was gone from the mirror and a woman in a dark blue dress (with tiny white dots) was sitting where his reflection should have been. Her hands, sheathed in white gloves, lay on the counter’s surface, a small black purse at her elbow. It was easy to see how he had mistaken her for Kerry. She was older, and her hair was short, clipped straight across her forehead, but her eyes, her mouth, the strangely exotic curve of her cheekbones, her compact youthful body, all conjured a teenager named Kerry Beckett (so powerfully that some part of Jack’s mind expected Kerry to snap into focus, shedding the last vestige of the stranger).

  “I’m Anita,” the woman said, her rueful expression the work of years. “Do I look like your young paramour? Dorian seems to think so too. I suppose I should be flattered.” Her voice was warm, assured.

  “Are you—”

  She held a gloved hand up. “You’ll need to ply me with alcohol if you intend to ply me with questions. A gin and tonic would be nice.”

  Jack might have, eventually, said something, but she continued. “It’s simple, really. You order a gin and tonic, and the bartender will bring me one too. Mirrors, you know, repeat things.” She waved her hand vaguely, as though directing his attention to the surrounding world and its ways.

  Jack was aware that the bartender was standing off to the left. Jack moved his eyes.

  The man wore a light blue shirt, a black vest and a string tie. His hair was short, blond, his teeth even.

  “A gin and tonic,” Jack said.

  “Cheers,” she said when it came, and they lifted their drinks in unison, properly mirrored.

  Slip, Jack thought. That’s what it was called in A A, this taking a drink after months of abstinence—as though you were walking on ice and had suddenly lost your balance.

  His body welcomed him home. Far from feeling guilt or a sense of violation, or the vertigo of falling, he felt warm, solid, centered again.

  Anita leaned forward, her eyes already bright. “I can’t stay long. Poor Ezra will be wanting to kill me again... oh, that’s not fair. He will be wanting to save me, actually. But that’s not what happened; I died. We go around and around, but it comes down to that, the sad, dirty fact.” She sighed. “It’s a great bore, though, being killed over and over again. You don’t suppose you could buy me another one of these, do you?”

  Jack bought her—and, incidentally, himself—another gin and tonic. Anita was serious now. “I need your help, Jack.”

  Jack waited. She continued, “I need you to stop it. Ezra thinks his nephew loves him, but I know better. Dorian is evil. Dorian cares nothing for Ezra. As far as Dorian is concerned, Ezra is just a battery, just a source of power. Dorian would torture a thousand Ezras if he could find a use for their screams. I know Dorian Greenway, I know him the way someone who has been sick for years knows her disease.”

  She finished the drink, rattled the ice, smiled. “I never drank when I was alive. Ezra drank enough for both of us, and I never understood the attraction. Now I do. In fact, I would like another one, if you don’t mind.” Jack didn’t mind. He bought her quite a few drinks that night.

  He couldn’t remember all she said. She talked about her childhood, about an aunt named Harriet whom she had loved. She talked about her parents, hard-working folks who had distrusted a rich man’s son like Ezra and had never been able to understand her sticking by him.

  Anita Coldwell sang a song she had learned as a schoolgirl (her singing voice was light and girlish), and she recited an Emily Dickinson poem.

  Jack thought that she might be rambling some, and that this might be the result of the alcohol, but the gin in his own system may have impaired his ability to follow her.

  Jack did remember asking her if she were a ghost.

  She had chuckled at that. “Worse than that. I’m the ghost of a ghost. And your little girlfriend has come crying and raging into this... this tomb... and she has invigorated us all, made us all just a little more lively. I see you have something of hers.”

  Jack looked down, saw Kerry’s desire chip on the bar in front of him. Jack touched it with a finger. It no longer vibrated, felt cold to the touch.

  “I’ll pass it along to her.”

  Anita opened her purse, picked the mirrored medallion up from where it lay next to her drink, and dropped it in her purse, snapping it closed.

  Fuzzy “headed, Jack blinked at the counter in front of him. Kerry’s desire chip was gone. Good trick.

  “You have to help us,” she said.

  “How?” The door opened behind her and someone entered, moving immediately to the left and out of the mirror’s frame.

  Anita was trying to stand up. “Need will collapse the universe. I need need neeeeeed you, they whine. This one wants that one wants this one wants that one wants this one wants that one.” Her words were slurred. Jack realized that she was drunk. She’d rubbed the back of her hand across her lips, smearing her lipstick, lipstick on the back of her glove. The lids of her eyes were drooping, her features numbed and sullen.

  When she stood, Jack stood too, as though trying to maintain their game of mirrored images.

  “Where is Kerry?” he shouted, hoping that a straightforward question would elicit a straightforward answer.

  The sound of glass shattering accompanied Anita’s scream and Jack watched, stunned, as she was propelled across the bar counter, slammed against her side of the mirror, as though it were a windowpane, her face pressed sideways, flat, a dime-sized splotch of blood at the corner of her mouth, her cheek and nose distorted and pale, her eye tightly shut. Her hands were pressed, palms flat and cotton-white, against the glass.

  Dorian Greenway, eyes glittering maniacally from a face painted white, clutched Anitas shoulders and pressed her against the glass. He grinned at Jack over the woman’s shoulder.

  “Hey Alcoholic,” he said. “You are some kind of lady’s man, aren’t you? You don’t let a fuck-ing-wo-man-go-by.” He thumped Anita against the glass (bottles jangling) in sync with each syllable.

  Jack watched as Dorian reached past Anita, out of the mirror’s frame, retrieved a long-necked beer, and slammed it against the counter. It broke, beer foam flecking the mirror. He held the shattered neck and shouted, “Discipline! We need discipline if we are ever going to rise above our circumstances. I don’t know why—”

  Jack leapt the counter and hurled himself, shoulder first, at the mirror. He heard Dorian laugh, a gleeful bark. The mirror held, bouncing Jack, his bones humming. Bottles toppled around him, like glass buildings in Godzilla’s wake. Jack clutched a gallon jug filled with amber firewater, and, turning his head away, swung it in a low, wide arc. He heard shouts—distraught, shocked. A scattered surf of glass danced like wind chimes in the air. Glass rain pummeled his neck and shoulders as he spun and crouched.

  He turned, prepared to do battle with his enemy, who would no longer be able to hide behind the safety of the glass.

  A bare wall greeted Jack, some last shards of mirrored glass still sticking in it. A larger piece of the mirror, a triangle perhaps eight inches long, swung lazily, suspended by a wire, and Jack saw the palm of a white-gloved hand slide down the upside-down vee, each finger drawing a fuzzy line through a pink mist of blood.

  Someone tackled Jack from behind, and he staggered forward and fell. Amazing, there were still some bottles standing, and these now joined him on the floor, hie turned, saw that the bartender, his features distorted with rage, muscles and veins writhing
with aerobic vigor, was raising a meaty fist.

  Jack could not be sure what happened next. Conjecture was required. They threw him out of Bob’s Beer Palace, obviously. He had no idea why they hadn’t called the cops; maybe Bob had an aversion to all authority figures. Or maybe... maybe Bob’s was something else, a place that wouldn’t bear investigation.

  Jack had not gone to jail. He would have remembered that. He remembered being in another bar. He remembered waking up on someone’s sofa. An old man was watching cartoons on television. It was morning. The old man was eating fried chicken out of a cardboard bucket.

  Jack remembered calling a cab. He could not say if that was the cab that had brought him to Clifton and his present motel. He felt that there were intervening motels, intervening bars, intervening conversations.

  Simply put: He had slipped at the edge of the great ocean of alcohol, and the tide had taken him out and he had washed up here, at the Blue Pines Motel.

  The next morning, Jack did not eat breakfast. Instead he drank several beers and watched a talk show about men who cheat on their wives. The point of the show was unclear, but a number of philandering husbands had agreed to come on the show and confess to any sort of perfidy as long as the television camera was pointed their way. The audience, largely stout housewives (some clutching infants as props), reviled the guests, who responded in kind, one man shouting, “If I was married to you, I’d cheat on you in a New York minute!”

  No one on the show was sexually attractive, although Jack realized that saying such a thing out loud in the company of women would have revealed his true brute-lout colors. A compassionate woman might shake her head sadly, say, “You have been duped by the media.”

  Jack had been to parties where every male libido in the room was lying low. Testosterone would be hissing like a live wire down in a rainstorm, while the men would be shaking their heads sadly at a world so tawdry and immature that a woman’s breasts might be used to sell a car or a music video.

  Some men had moved entirely into the women’s camp, in the hope of enlightenment. These men sought escape from the company of their own crude sex (and, peripherally, a chance to get laid if that were mutually agreeable to all involved and not simply an invasive, male-dominance display).

  The audience was howling at a man who was trying to explain that male promiscuity was written into the genetic structure. “Nature don’t care about marriage,” he said. “Nature’s like a used-car salesman, she just wants to close the deal. Here’s that sperm, here’s that egg. There you go.” The man, a thin man with glasses like safety goggles, slapped his hands in hearty explication.

  Jack did not, at first, hear the knock at the door. The audience was unhappy and loud, roaring for blood. And drinking beer seemed to deaden Jack’s sense of hearing, so that, with each beer, he’d cranked the volume up some (this same phenomenon had often frightened him during his drinking/driving days when, after a night of tooling around the highways in an inebriated condition while listening to the radio, he would climb into his car in the morning, turn the ignition switch, and have his heart battered by the ear-shattering body slam of bad rock as loud as ragged woofers could roar it).

  The knock at the door was eventually heard and identified for what it was. Jack realized that he was in his underwear. He found a pair of khaki slacks under the bed and pulled them on.

  No one knew he was here, did they? He hadn’t, foolishly, given his name out to some chance bar acquaintance, had he?

  Jack peered through the peephole but couldn’t see anything. He opened the door.

  “Mr. Lowry?” the man inquired. He was a tall man in a black suit. His long face was red, hound-jowled, a purple darkness under his red-rimmed eyes.

  Jack recognized him but couldn’t think from where. The man reeked of whiskey so it was probable Jack had met the man in a bar in the recent, murky past.

  The man, apparently sensing Jack’s confusion, said, “McPhee, sir. I am in the employ of Mr. Hubert Henslow. I was hoping I could enlist your aid.”

  Jack recognized the man now. Hubert’s tragic, drunken butler, the man Hubert resolutely refused to give up on.

  “Please, come in,” Jack said, opening the door wider.

  “I am sorry to impose,” McPhee said, entering the room with an air of deep sadness. “I took the liberty of locating you through my employer’s investigators. I was not, strictly speaking, authorized to do so, but, well...” He sat down on the edge of Jack’s bed, withdrew a flask from his pocket, unscrewed the top, offered the flask to Jack who declined, leaned his head back and drank deeply. Then, methodically, he rescrewed the cap and put the flask back in his pocket.

  “How were they able to find me?” Jack asked.

  “They didn’t say, sir. Perhaps they didn’t wish to reveal trade secrets.”

  Jack nodded. He went to the cooler, fished out a beer, noted that only two remained and yet, in the interests of hospitality, offered McPhee one. McPhee declined.

  Jack sat in the armchair, popping the beer. “What can I do for you?” he said, pleased with the sound of the sentence which suggested a speaker capable of powerful, decisive action.

  “I know you are conducting your own search for this Dorian Greenway and the poor kidnapped child,” McPhee said.

  Instantly, Jack was deflated, his grandiosity grounded. It was a lie he had told himself, that he was taking a few days to rally after his disastrous return to drinking and that, then, he would rise heroically to the task of finding and rescuing Kerry. In truth, he had been pursuing nothing but the impulse to drink, to flee, hoping that while he floundered in an alcoholic haze, sober, responsible souls would set the world to rights.

  Jack could not tell this grave, sorrowing man the truth. What had Hubert said, something about this mans great tragedy, the death of a wife, a child? Jack lifted the beer to his lips and drank, incapable of revealing his own empty, helpless, and morally deficient state.

  “I’m afraid Mr. Henslow is missing—along with Martin Pendleton. Mr. Henslow has not called me in the last forty-eight hours, and this cannot be an oversight. My employer is too meticulous a man to forget or ignore this arrangement. I must conclude that he is being prevented from making such a call. He may be dead.” McPhee closed his eyes, surprised and embarrassed by emotion. He stretched his neck, reflexively adjusted the knot in his tie. His voice was under control when he spoke again. “So I believe that my employer and your Martin Pendleton have discovered Dorian Greenway and, presumably, your young lady. It is, therefore, one location we both seek. I thought we could help each other in that search.”

  Jack spoke before caution could stop his tongue. “I think I already know where Dorian Greenway is,” he said. He hesitated, then said, “I’ve just been afraid, afraid to go back.”

  Often, it is a single sentence that is blocking the truth, the dead mouse in the drain which, when plucked out by its tail, empties the sink.

  Jack didn’t feel healed by this one cathartic sentence, but he felt a potential for healing, something like hope firing up within.

  Hope or an ulcer.

  Jack woke and could not move. He saw the straps running over the cotton blanket, an embrace that locked his arms to his sides. Something skittered across his cheek; he gasped.

  “Easy. You’re all right,” a voice said. Jack turned his head, saw a man sitting up in the next bed, a book on his lap.

  “It just takes a while to sort things out after the electroshock,” the man said. “It will all come back to you... well, most of it anyway.”

  “I know you,” Jack said.

  The man nodded. “See. That’s a good start. I’m McPhee, Mr. Henslow’s manservant.”

  “Ah,” Jack said. He sensed a whole sea of memories beneath him, as though he were a swimmer buoyed on the waves of some mile-deep ocean. If he ducked under, he would see it all, but the thought of doing so made him sweat, a rancid-butter film of fear.

  “Where are we?” Jack asked.

  McPhee
sighed. “A hospital. The wages of sin. An ambulance brought us here, I’m told. We went on an extended binge, it appears. I suspect that I have finally exhausted Mr. Henslow’s patience and am no longer in his employ.”

  Jack turned away, studied the pale green ceiling. His brain felt like overcooked rice. Jack calmed himself by visualizing white towels spinning in a laundromat’s dryer. He was just a child, sitting hypnotized, while his mother was all industry, folding sheets, the smell of heated linen and bleach enclosing them both.

  He slept.

  Later, when they released him from the straitjacket, when he was standing in the meds line, as patient as a potted plant, he thought, The unexamined life is just fine.

  His green paper slippers slicked down the corridor with a reassuring rhythm.

  He made an ashtray out of clay. A skinny kid next to him said, “That’s a pretty good ashtray. You could sell ashtrays like that.”

  Jack was pleased by the compliment but said nothing. He didn’t want to get too close to people who were crazy, didn’t want to encourage conversation.

  The skinny kid was definitely crazy, saying that he had jumped into a swimming pool full of monsters, been wrapped round with huge tentacles, chewed up by a silver beak, and spit out, landing in this hospital. “How about you?” he asked.

  “Alcoholism,” Jack said. He was frightened by the young man’s madness because (in a way that he didn’t even want to look at sideways in a dream) Jack believed the kid.

  There were no AA meetings in this hospital, and that was a relief. AA stirred too many thoughts. Happy the man whose self is unexamined. This was just a quiet nut ward with an occasional echoing scream traveling the corridors.