Irrational Fears

by Spencer, William Browning

  The lights went on in the theater, washing out the screen, its shadowy horror and tense music score instantly relegated to the indifferent interest of two dimensions. Then the screen went blank, the music slumped to silence.

  A figure walked onto the stage, slowly, encumbered by the bulky yellow space suit.

  The figure stood in the middle of the stage, stared out at the audience. The sparkle of footlights gleamed in the glow of the space helmet.

  A voice, amplified through a microphone, came echoing out over the empty seats.

  “Uncle, are you there?” Silence. “Well, I know you are out there. I watched you come in on the monitor, you and your friends. It’s good to see you getting around, Uncle. You have always resisted exercise, and I have always felt it would do you a world of good. A little fresh air racing through the lungs can do wonders for depression.”

  Dorian Greenway put his hands behind his back and took several slow strides up the stage. “Well, we have had nothing but setbacks. I’m sorry, Uncle. I thought I might avenge you. I thought I might set us both free, you from your eternally dying Anita, and me from... well, from you, my damned Uncle Ezra.”

  His voice changed, grew higher, petulant. “It’s wonderful to have gifts, talents, but it has its downside, you know. I’ve tried to help you, tried to enhance your powers, and I’ve sensed that you have never really appreciated my efforts. Well... I’m sorry. What can I say?”

  Dorian eased his bulky body down into a sitting position on the edge of the stage. “I tried witchcraft, I tried spacecraft, I tried Lovecraft. No one can say I didn’t try. There’s one last chance. I intend to enter the event, to alter its causality, to shift the weight of its implication. You will be free to... well, to die, I’m afraid. I’m guessing that all that keeps you alive is the repetition of the event. When it comes to an end, so, alas, will you. Don’t worry about me. I know, in the past, that I have relied on your wild talents to fuel my own. But now I will control the new order.”

  Clumsily, Dorian stood back up and walked slowly to the side of the stage. He paused, one hand on a red lever jutting from the walk “Here we go,” he said. He pulled the lever down, a motor hummed, and the white movie screen rose toward the ceiling.

  Jack found himself staring at a white room that contained a white table, white chairs. Dorian flicked switches and overhead lights flared, lights so bright that the room burned in Jack’s brain, a fever of white boxes, rectangles and squares. Jack recognized that minimalist set design that generally heralded an experimental play, the sort that approached art by eluding the audience. Kerry, dressed again in Anita’s blue dress and wearing a wig, sat in a white chair at the table, facing the empty rows of chairs. Her eyes were blue and empty, her features as free of expression as a glass of springwater.

  “Here we go,” Dorian said, his amplified voice bright and echoing. “Welcome to the nineteen-thousand, four-hundred-and-seventh consecutive performance of Ezra’s Nightmare sponsored by Coldwell Guilt and Psychokinetic Enterprises. Glad you all could come.”

  Dorian stepped to the side, waited. Nothing happened. “Uncle,” Dorian shouted, “why resist? Let’s get rolling here.” Still nothing. Dorian, in his yellow space suit, poised like a child’s toy, arms outstretched, nodded his fishbowl head. “Okay. I guess you need the cue. Here goes.” Dorian shouted: “I’M NOT COMING BACK. THAT’S RIGHT, EZRA. I’M GOING FOR GOOD.”

  The whole room shivered, hologram figures blinking into life.

  When Ezra Coldwell stood up and began marching toward the stage where the drama of his wife’s living death (and his damnation) was playing, Jack and Tilman followed him. Later, Jack realized, there was nothing else he could have done. If this were a play, it was one with total audience involvement. From the minute the kitchen came into focus, it seemed to be the world, its detail and truth so absolute that all other places and things were shadows. Jack could even smell the onion and oregano in the air. Although his heart was held by the knife that slowly spun on the kitchen table (gathering, gathering speed), he saw everything else as though it had been his life’s work to catalogue the specifics of this room, these people, this moment.

  A much younger Hubert Henslow was standing in the room next to his two AA friends, the three of them seeming to own a single expression (uncomfortable, embarrassed, resolved to do the right thing). Anita Coldwell stood in the doorway, one hand touching the door frame, her blue eyes sad and unwavering as they studied her husband, who sat at the table, redfaced, hair in his eyes, sullenly drunk, muttering, “A man drinks a little in his own home...”

  The sound of the knife (clack, clack, clack) filled Jack’s head.

  “Ask me yourself,” Anita was saying.

  Dorian Greenway walked into this kitchen, as foreign to it as the moons surface had once been to men. He had removed the space helmet, and his head seemed small and cartoonish as he smiled over the swollen suit. He walked behind Kerry, placed his gloved hands on her shoulders, grinned.

  “Time for something different,” he said. He leaned forward and spoke in Kerry’s ear. “Miss Sobriety Queen 1998. What a triumph for one so young. How glorious, how tragic. Wouldn’t you like to hold this moment forever, keep it like a jewel in a box, a memory in every facet?”

  Kerry opened her mouth and said something.

  “What did you say?” Dorian asked. “I don’t think they can hear you. You’ll have to speak up.”

  “I love you,” Kerry said, speaking as though in a dream, addressing, perhaps, a dream lover.

  Dorian nodded. “That’s very important,” he said. “Love is the glue, love is the fuel. Don’t you think? Ezra could tell you...”

  The knife was rising in the air, spinning. Dorian turned, reached out, and deftly snatched it.

  “Here is where everything changes,” he said. “A new circle is drawn, and I am its center.”

  He brought the knife to Kerry’s throat. The rest of the room proceeded as though he was not there. Anita was saying, “That’s right, Ezra.”

  Ed Tilman, having reached the edge of the stage and climbed it, knelt and fired the gun, twice.

  Dorian blinked at the report. He smiled. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m afraid you missed by a mile, missed by a light-year.”

  Jack ran across the stage, anguish and loss howling in him. The pity he felt for Ezra Coldwell was palpable, mixed with his fear for Kerry’s life. The name on his lips, unconsciously there (a wound in the heat of battle that would go unremarked until later), was Sara.

  A wall of pain bounced him back, sent him rolling on the wooden floor. “Nope,” Dorian said. “You are not allowed in here. That goes for you too, Uncle.”

  Ezra Coldwell had laboriously climbed the stage and stumbled toward the center of his universe, the glowing kitchen. He pressed his face against some invisible barrier that distorted it. Jack saw the old man’s skull flickering through flesh.

  The mummified dwarf spoke, his mouth moving, but the words came from the air itself and did not match the shape of his mouth (as in a foreign film, imperfectly dubbed).

  “Nephew, you cannot keep me out. This is my room, my room!”

  “Go away!” Dorian said, his voice oddly petulant, the voice of a child sulking behind a door.

  “No. If there is one thing you cannot bar me from, it is this room. God knows; so does the Devil.”

  Ezra Coldwell leaned into the force that licked him with silver foam. Translucent bubbles broke away, spiraled upward, carrying bits of his flesh, beads of blood.

  And he was within, falling on the floor, swimming across linoleum tiles, clutching the table and hauling himself upright.

  “Well,” Dorian said. “I hope you are happy. You have secured a ringside seat. It changes nothing. Say good-bye, Kerry.”

  “Good-bye,” Kerry said, her voice a whisper that could pierce through decades. The knife blade moved.

  Ezra Coldwell did not leap forward. He was launched into the air, a puppet hurled by an angry master (animate
yourself). Dorian Greenway howled, fell back, and Ezra’s fist came down, again and again, striking at his nephew’s face and neck, and the room expanded, flooded outward as though poured, the kitchen becoming the whole theater—oh such a spacious kitchen!—and Jack felt the tiles under his hands and struggled to right himself. Vertigo seized him; he was too sick to move, filled with a nausea that might steal his reason forever.

  Ezra Coldwell stood up. He dropped the shard of mirror on the floor, looked around, lost. Jack saw the bloody mess of Dorian Greenway’s face, a red inkwell of blood where an eye had been, a tattered ear.

  Kerry had fallen back and lay on the floor next to Dorian. Neither of them moved. Jack could not see her face, her throat, could not see what damage Dorian had managed to inflict.

  The knife on the floor began to spin again, slowly, then faster, then... The ancient little man grabbed it—Jack saw it twist, saw the blade bite his forearm, urging more blood from the bleeding body—and Ezra Coldwell turned, nodded to Anita, and said, “Forgive me,” and turned again, caught the hair of his younger, drunken doppelganger. This younger Ezra seemed dazed, drugged with horror, perhaps, raising his hands ineffectually, too slow to stop the swift-moving blade. His fingers fluttered as though magically summoning the gush of blood. His chair pitched back and the room shivered again, the floor moving beneath Jack.

  Jack convulsed, felt something churn in his stomach, gagged, opened his mouth. He was coughing, choking, his chest like molten lead, his heart some poor, terrified sparrow trapped and shaken in a tin box.

  Never again, he thought. But what never was this, what morning after, what retribution for what debacle? He might promise to do the right thing, to march forthrightly into a new morning, a better person, a triumph of new resolve.

  Too late. He seemed to be fading, going under.

  Death? All right. Fine.

  Jack came to with Ed Tilman standing over him. “I’m going to go see if I can turn these machines off,” Tilman said.

  “Kerry,” Jack said, sick again, reading the worst in Tilman’s grim features. “She’s all right,” Tilman said. “We want to get her topside and in a hospital, hut she wasn’t cut. She’s out with the drugs. Our boy hit her with something heavy.”

  Tilman stood up, turned away. “Hang in there, this shouldn’t take long.”

  Jack didn’t care to study the sprawled bodies of Dorian and his uncle. He gave them a wide berth and knelt down beside Kerry. Her wig had fallen off; she lay on her back with her eyes closed. Tilman had pushed a folded curtain under her head, black velvet that made her flesh seem more pale and vulnerable, her shaved skull fragile, mysterious.

  She opened her eyes when he spoke her name.

  “Jack,” she said.

  “You are going to be all right.”

  She reached up and touched his cheek. “Jack?”

  “It’s okay. We are going to get you out of here.”

  “Jack?”

  “Yes.”

  She smiled. It altered her, this smile, as pouring milk in a glass alters the glass. “I love you,” she said.

  It lifted Jack’s heart, although he knew it was not true.

  At the AA meeting, Al and Monk got in an argument about who had precipitated their downhill slide. “I said, ‘Let’s go to the arcade,’ and you said, ‘I’m sick of that geek stuff, let’s take a bus downtown and go to a titty bar.’”

  “Yeah,” Monk said, “but we was already wrecked on your brother’s pot when I said that. You’re the one who...”

  “Enough,” Martin said. “Nobody gives a damn. Wait for me in the van; I want to talk to Jack.”

  Jack grinned. “Thanks for coming out to see me get my three-month chip.”

  “Sure. Leesburg’s not such a drive. I like to come out here now and again anyway. The residents like it too. A steady diet of Harken meetings can be kind of rich.”

  “How’s Hubert doing?”

  “Fine. Eunice has moved in with him; they are living in sin although she says she’s worked it out with Jesus. She’s nursing Hubert back to health—which, if you ask me, isn’t much of a feat. The doctor couldn’t even keep Hubert in the hospital overnight back when it happened.

  Shooting a guy like Hubert in the shoulder is like trying to kill an elephant with a BB gun.”

  “Looks like Wesley’s in trouble,” Jack said.

  Martin shook his head. “Seeing as how I meant to kill him, I’d say he’s doing all right. There’s a lot who sympathize with him.”

  They talked about Wesley Parks, the risks of any “addiction defense,” and AA’s take on personal responsibility.

  Martin said that Gates was back in D.C., living in a halfway house, going to meetings.

  “How’s he doing?” Jack asked.

  “He says AA ain’t what it used to be. He says it’s all hugging and sweetness, but he says he’s whupped, don’t want to drink, even if AA is nothing but sissies and perverts these days. Sounds like he’s doing good.” Jack asked about Tilman, but Martin had no news there. Jack was still at New Way when Tilman announced, in group, that he had decided he wasn’t ready for retirement. Everybody thought that statement was an expression of discontent, some vague resolve to look for a job when he left, but the next day a black limousine arrived and Tilman left in the company of three men in suits.

  “And Gretchen,” Jack said. “How’s Gretchen?”

  Martin looked worried. “I don’t know about mixing romance with work, you know? That’s risky. I mean, she’s a fine woman, but women tend to weary of me. I don’t have many sides, you know, just my work.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about it,” Jack said. “I think she’s smitten with you. Anyway, one day at a time, right?”

  Martin grinned. “This AA suits you. You have already learned slogan sagacity. Well, I’ve got to go before those alcoholics in the van get to thinking they’re living in a democracy.”

  Martin shook Jack’s hand, turned to go, turned back. “Speaking of smitten, you hear from young Kerry?”

  “Yes, I see her at meetings. I even run across her on campus sometimes; she’s taking a couple of courses.” Jack had begun teaching at the community college. The job had just fallen into his lap; a colleague of a colleague needed to fill a slot after the abrupt departure of one of the English teachers. Grammar and Composition wasn’t American Lit, and Jack didn’t think he’d be doing this a year from now, but... well, one day at a time.

  “She was head over heels for you,” Martin said. “I didn’t notice it those first weeks, but toward the end... right before you left, she was following you around like a puppy.”

  “Infatuation,” Jack said, feeling uneasy now.

  “She’s a beauty, that one,” Martin said, eyes going glassy.

  Now it looked like Martin would just stand there, dazzled stupid by a vision. Jack slipped past him. “It was good seeing you,” he hollered as he headed toward the parking lot.

  A short guy wearing a black T-shirt and suspenders was giving his test for alcoholism. Everyone, Jack thought, has a test.

  “Here’s the test,” the guy said. “If the thought of never taking a drink again for the rest of your life sends a chill wind blowing through your soul, then you’re an alcoholic.”

  Fair enough, Jack thought.

  The next person to talk was named Camille, but she was not of the delicate, sickly Camille school. She looked like she could eat that Camille for breakfast and maybe had.

  “You leave my girls alone,” she said, addressing the predatory men in the group. “They are vulnerable children trying to get sober, and they don’t need you men sliding up on them with promises of program talk when that’s not what’s on your minds at all. No he-ing and she-ing during the first year, I say. Just get some magazines and relieve yourself looking at the pictures. What does it take, five, ten minutes? My girls...”

  Camille had been sober thirteen years and she sponsored many new women. She was married, and Jack had met her husband at a part
y. He was a man devoid of personality, so colorless that he was impossible to focus on. If he stood next to a cat or a plant or a television (some commercial with the sound off), any of those things would exert a stronger pull, a greater gravity of fascination, than this man.

  Camille had, Jack assumed, sucked the soul from him years ago.

  AA meetings could be shrill. People who slipped would return to A A filled with remorse and a desire for self-flagellation. An ugly kind of cause-and-effect reasoning could rear its head. You drank because you did not do a rigorous enough Fourth and Fifth Step, you didn’t make every amend, you did not meditate, you did not believe in God (or you did not believe enough). Careful, careful, careful. Circumscribed by caution and blame, some men and women lived in a world of fear. I’m not good enough, they would say. I was born vile.

  Gates could have told them. That wasn’t no AA. That was superstition, and Mr. Bill Wilson and Mr. Doctor Bob had no use for it.

  “We need ground rules,” Camille said.

  So the trains can run on time, Jack thought, but he wasn’t really worried about Camille or her soulmates. AA was a benign anarchy, and like tended to gravitate to like. Grim deacons gathered grim flocks. Heretics harangued each other at late-night coffee shops (where the staff invariably hated them, these coffee-drinking, quarter-tipping, loud, long-staying meeting people).

  Jack had only been in AA four months, but he already knew the true object of fear, glimpsed in others when they stood just so in the light of his attention. The fearful thing was his own wayward heart and the darkness it kept for company.

  After the meeting, Kerry came up.

  “Hey Jack,” she said. “It doesn’t look good for Wesley, does it?”

  Their alcoholism counselor had been on the news again, as the jury deliberated over his fate.

  It was Wesley Parks who had shot Hubert. Martin had then shot Parks; and Jack had actually seen his alcoholism counselor drop through the air on that fateful night, although he had not, at that time, identified the would-be assassin.