Brood

by Chase Novak

  “Shall we?” Ezra says, picking up vials three and four.

  “It’s a lot,” says Annabelle, suddenly cautious.

  “You can never tell if you’ve had enough until you find out what it feels like to have too much,” Ezra says. It is one of the great pluses of being with a younger woman—you get to be the sage! You are an ever-burbling fountain of goddamned wisdom, is you what you are.

  Ezra downs vial number two, and Annabelle does too.

  “Feel it yet?” Ezra asks.

  “Feel nauseous. Drinking some kid’s blood? Fuck me.”

  “I intend to.”

  “I’m serious, Ez. This is crazy.”

  “People do all kinds of things, my dear, to get to another level. Change things around, make things better. Crush up leaves and smoke them. Ferment grain and drink it. Swallow worms, right? Mescal? Eat mushrooms that grow out of cow shit?”

  “I really prefer a nice California chardonnay,” Annabelle says. “Now and again, maybe an ice-cold Pontchartrain Porter, if I’m having a crayfish boil.” She closes her eyes for a moment as a memory of home washes through her—how could she have hated the place so much and yet miss it even more?

  “When I met you,” Ezra says, “what were you? Nineteen?”

  “I was twenty-seven, Ezra.”

  He shrugs, as if she were splitting hairs. “You were wearing cutoffs so short your pussy was practically hanging out.”

  “Don’t be gross, Ezra. Please.”

  “I didn’t take the scissors to those old blue jeans, darling. That was your doing.”

  “I had beautiful legs. I was proud of them.”

  “You still do!”

  “No, no. Not like back then. I’m thickening. I’m congealing.”

  “You starting to feel something?”

  “It always takes a while.”

  “I don’t know, I figured we double the dose, we get there quicker.”

  “It’s sort of scary, don’t you think, Ez? It’s like you’re not quite human after you drink that stuff.”

  “I’ve been human long enough. I think I’ve earned a little holiday from human.”

  “I hope we’re not drinking Boy-Boy, that’s all I hope,” Annabelle says. She feels a stirring within, a little shift in the blood, like the body of a sound sleeper adjusting itself without waking. And then it is gone.

  “You just felt something, didn’t you. I saw it in your eyes.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.” She looks at the empty vials on the side of the tub, with the residue of blood clinging to the sides. “The first time we took this stuff was the best. The first time was lovely.”

  “Lovely? It was fantastic. My shvanz was like a leg of lamb, and you, my pet, were a vat of mint jelly.”

  “Ezra. Please. You say things that actually make me sick.”

  “I know, baby. I know.” He is grinning, as if by telling him he has a powerful effect on her, she has just paid him a compliment.

  Annabelle leans back in the tub, bends her legs so that her knees emerge from the water like pink islands. She stretches her arms; suds drip from her elbows. Strange. The hair on her forearm looks darker than usual. Very strange indeed.

  Ezra playfully scoots over on his rear, pries her legs apart so he can be right next to her.

  “I don’t feel right,” Annabelle says softly.

  “Oh, come on. Take off your Bible belt. We’re not doing anything wrong. We’re enjoying ourselves.”

  “I know.”

  “The things that happen in this town. There’s about fifty S-and-M bars. I had a guy who used to work with me—well, for me, actually, I was his boss—who paid hookers to crap on him. I’m serious.”

  “I don’t want to hear about it, Ezra. Anyhow, I think you already told me this.”

  “He used to lie naked under a glass-topped coffee table while they—I’ll say this delicately because I honor your feminine sensibilities, my princess—while the whores moved their bowels. But whose business was it but his own?”

  “I feel sorry for the women.”

  “Really? Do you? Or is that just something people say? Some idiot gets five hundred dollars for hopping onto a coffee table and taking a crap? I think there’s a lot worse things happening in the world.”

  “I don’t,” Annabelle says. She glances again at the hair on her arm—how could that silvery fuzz have darkened so? Is it a trick of the light? “I think that is exactly what’s wrong with this world.”

  “Hey, guess what,” Ezra says, touching the tip of her nose with his finger. “I’m totally fucking feeling it.” He grabs her breast. His so-called moves haven’t changed very much over time; he is as greedy and desperate as he was at his first sexual encounter, when he was a student at Syracuse, trying to get the deed done with his marketing professor’s doughy, slow-witted daughter before anyone attending the party upstairs became curious as to what the two of them were doing in the paneled basement, with its jettisoned barbells and medicine balls. The urgency he is feeling now is not far removed from the urgency he felt then. No drowning man groped for a lifeline with more desperation than he felt in moments of peak sexual arousal, and what Ezra is feeling now is the peak of the peak, the kind of crazed need for connection and release you feel when you are just starting out and lust does not so much cloud the mind as devour it in a few quick bites.

  “Put your heels on my shoulders,” Ezra says in a slur. He imagines his penis has just gotten impossibly hard, rock hard, blue-steel hard, consult-your-physician hard. Could it just be in his mind? He reaches under the bubbles and feels himself. Holy syndication! It doesn’t even feel like his. It’s a unicorn’s horn!

  “I guess I’m starting to feel it too,” Annabelle says without much enthusiasm. She places her heels on Ezra’s shoulders. For an old man, he has nice shoulders, smooth and rounded, with a smallpox vaccination scar high up on his right arm, a little starburst of shiny smooth skin about the size of the old-fashioned seal his lawyer put on the last page of their prenup.

  “Sex in tub,” Ezra says.

  “Uh…yes,” Annabelle says uncertainly, not because she doubts that is what is about to happen, and not because she isn’t ready for a little old-fashioned slap-me-Henry, but because suddenly Ezra sounds as if someone has dropped a brick on his head.

  His mouth is open. His fingers, webbed by soap bubbles, wave in the air, as if he were making certain he could move them. His eyelids are at half-mast—perhaps out of respect for his recently deceased brain. He lifts her up—his strength always takes her by surprise, but now it is more surprising than ever—and places her strategically on his lap. Bing: He’s inside of her. He is pulsating. She feels his member like a weird alien heart in her.

  “Be sweet, Ezra,” she says.

  “Moooooove.”

  “I am moving, baby. I am.” He tries to kiss her. “Oh, don’t,” she says. “Your breath.” She recoils. It’s like being kissed by a scab, but she doesn’t say this, she doesn’t want to hurt his feelings or make him angry. But it is. It’s as if someone had taken a cupful of blood, let it dry, and then molded it into two greasy, smelly lips.

  But her moving away incites and excites Ezra—just as a dog can be stock-still staring at a squirrel for a long minute and lunge the moment its prey moves an inch. His thrusts grow fiercer. He knocks her off balance and she starts to slide. She tastes the sour fizz of the soap bubbles, spits.

  “Wait,” she says, commandingly enough for him to actually listen to her.

  “You okay?” he manages to say.

  “I think we took too much, Ez.”

  “I want to pop,” he says.

  Annabelle closes her eyes. Pop is what he calls reaching orgasm; every time he says it, it makes her just a little bit sadder. She wants to go home. Home! Home! Oh, please, God: home.

  She places her hands on his hips and moves him out of her. It’s not as if she does not want to have sex; she just doesn’t want to have to look at him and smell his bloody breath
.

  She turns around, grips the edge of the tub, cranes her neck to keep her face as far from the suds as possible, and lifts her rump out of the water, inviting. She even waggles it back and forth. Hell, if they are going to do this, it might as well be fun…

  “Niiiiiiiiiice,” he says, hot little pebbles of beastliness rattling in his throat.

  This is good, Ezra thinks, or sort of thinks, when he sees her be-my-Valentine behind. He buries his face in her, hears her distant gasp. Flesh, soap, water, heat. Taste. What is he tasting? Something. The little wrinkled ring of her final resistance. So good.

  It hurts his knees to kneel. Instead, to enter her, he squats.

  “Careful,” she says, but the body says differently: she backs into him with a mighty thrust. Almost knocks him over.

  It delights him. As she thrusts backward, he thrusts forward, instinctively waiting a beat before his move so they can establish a rhythm. Boy. Girl. Boy, girl. Ba-boom, ba-boom. Rather close to baboon, but no: this is music. This is rock and roll, this is swing—hell this is even John Philip Sousa. This is all that matters. This is the point of everything. Every other thing is just extra, what you do before and after you do this.

  And, oh, by the way: Ezra wants to pop.

  He moves inside her with more urgency. He is lodged so securely in her. Feels as if he had been born here. He has one hand on her hip, the other on the small of her back. She is starting to sink. She is starting to thrash. He hesitates for a moment. Oh, well, these things happen.

  There is no way for him to stop. It is as if the fate of the universe hinges upon his reaching completion. Her legs are fluttering. Her muscles are contracting. Oh my, that feels so good. Water is sloshing out of the tub. The back of her head has completely disappeared. She is invisible to him now, but he surely can feel her.

  His face is burning. His ears ring. His blood, mixed ever so slightly with the blood he has consumed, courses through him like lava. His hamstrings tighten. His heart rages like a madman locked in a room.

  Only Annabelle’s fingertips touch the edge of the tub. And one by one, they lose their purchase on the marble border. Her legs make a last, furious flutter. A trail of bubbles flows out of her open mouth, and the bubbles are consumed by the larger, denser, perfumed bubbles into which they flow.

  At last, Ezra reaches his goal. His semen twists and jolts out of him, slightly painful, massively pleasurable, startling, exhausting, renewing. He thrusts again and again and again, not wanting the pleasure to end, and he is only now realizing that any resistance from Annabelle has ceased, and not only that, but there is no response at all. He slowly pulls out of her and sits back on his haunches, waiting for her to sit up again as well.

  He has been rendered so stupid by the blood and the sex that he waits for nearly a minute before common sense kicks in and he frantically pulls her out of the water, but by then it is too late.

  Chapter 9

  Peter White and Cynthia race up the block, going east to west, and once that desperate act is completed, they don’t really know what to do next, and so they quickly traverse the same block again, this time going west to east. White looks annoyed, but Cynthia is frantic. She grabs the therapist’s arm.

  “They could be anywhere,” she says.

  “I told you,” White says, making no attempt to disguise his displeasure. “They need medication.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” she says, turning away from him. “Not now.”

  Because right now in the world, there are more than seven billion people who are neither Adam nor Alice Kramer, and it seems to Cynthia, standing here on the sun-struck street in Manhattan, that a goodly number of that nameless multitude are streaming right past her. Tall and short, stocky and lanky, stumbling and nimble, old and young, stooped and straight, fragrant and rank, sane and insane, dressed to the nines and clad in castoffs, black, white, yellow, and brown, hirsute and smooth, hopeful and crushed, chatting on cell phones, gorging on street food—all these souls: none of them Alice, none of them Adam.

  They have made their way to Bethesda Fountain, to the spot where Alice, running for her life from her parents, first met Rodolfo. Back then it was night, and she was alone. Rodolfo was one of several wild boys practicing their clattering stunts on their skateboards. He had been friendly to her in his own slightly terrifying way. And as their friendship went on, he was friendlier and friendlier.

  “We’re going to get in trouble,” Adam says now.

  “Help me look,” says Alice.

  The fountain, presided over by a dark stone angel, gushes water that turns bright silver in the sunlight. The pool beneath it trembles. A low stone wall surrounds the pool, and people sit on the wall, some reading, others eating or meditating or talking on the phone. The brickwork around the fountain is pigeon pink, the same color as the feet of the busy birds who patrol the area hunting for scraps. Beyond the fountain and its trembling pool, one of the park’s lakes stretches, filled today with rowboats, plus the occasional toy under remote control.

  “You see anyone?” Adam asks.

  Alice shakes her head. There are plenty of skaters around, all ages, races, and genders, but no familiar faces. A hundred or so feet in front of them, the crowd suddenly parts. A boy is running, and behind him are two police officers, both young and fit.

  The boy is small, with long dark hair that fans out as he races. His build is slight; his eyes pools of bright blue madness. He wears jeans and a T-shirt and looks dirty, uncared-for. Yet he is uncommonly swift, and the distance between him and his pursuers gradually increases.

  A man with a graying crew cut wearing shorts and a tank top decides to come to the aid of the police and steps in front of the fleeing urchin. The boy throws the man to the ground in an easy motion, as if discarding a broken umbrella. The man’s head thuds on the pavement. Blood pours out of the man’s mouth. But it looks worse than it is—it’s only that he hit the pavement with such force that he bit off a chunk of his tongue.

  When the boy races past Alice and Adam, they don’t give it a moment’s thought; they start running alongside him.

  Chapter 10

  In the silence and solitude of the house on Sixty-Ninth Street, Cynthia can still smell the sweetness of the freshly painted walls—she had instructed the contractors to pour a little bottle of vanilla extract into every can of paint, so when she and the children moved in, the place smelled like a bakery. What a good idea it had seemed, but now the cheerful, friendly aroma mocks her senses.

  Her eyes ache from crying. She wonders if it’s possible to weep yourself blind.

  She had no alternative but to go to the police. In her fevered imagination, every cop in the precinct would know that the twins were her adopted children, and their disappearance would be used to prove her unfitness as a mother. But the reality was something quite different. The officer who took down her information—a young, somehow Turkish-looking fellow with dramatic eyebrows and an aggressive smile—showed no inclination to question her competency as a mother, nor did he show much interest in the report that two young children were missing. Apparently, not enough time had passed for the police to make looking for the twins a high priority. In fact, as Cynthia left the precinct, she doubted that searching for Adam and Alice was a priority for them at all.

  She continued to look for them, but now she is home, waiting for someone—the kids, the police—to call her. Or for the greater miracle of the children coming home.

  An hour passes. She sits in the parlor with her legs crossed and her folded hands in her lap. She must remind herself to breathe.

  Every so often, the waiting becomes intolerable and she springs from the sofa and races to one window or another, parts the curtain, and peers out at the street. She is coming to believe that at a certain level, hope and insanity cross paths. And she is at that level.

  Who can she call? There is no one in this city she knows except for Arthur, and she has already tried his numbers and her calls have gone unanswe
red. Who else? The people in the antiques world? You might as well call a Siamese cat to save you from drowning. Why, oh why, has she not bothered to establish herself with any AA meetings in New York? Did she really believe that she would somehow do better on her own?

  She drinks ready-made iced tea. Suddenly famished, she tears open a box of crackers and devours half of it. She turns on the TV in time for the local news. The anchors appear to be a former football player and a recently retired runway model.

  “The hottest summer in New York history continues to rack up record numbers, and another bonds trader comes forward in the Banco del Mondo scandal that continues to rock the financial world,” the runway model says with an expression that suggests a wry appreciation for a world careening out of control.

  “And police,” intones the retired athlete, “find the bodies of two young people in Central Park, apparently killed in broad daylight.” He glances at his co-anchor and shakes his head, as if to say, Why must it be up to me to report these most terrible things? “And also Earl with the weather, Lilani with sports, and a special treat later in our broadcast—celebrity chef Tangerine Dream will demonstrate five easy dishes that actually promote weight loss.”

  “Sounds intriguing,” the model says, patting her virtually nonexistent tummy.

  “Back right after these short announcements,” the athlete says.

  Cynthia is standing, her hands on top of her head, her mouth open. She must now wait through three long minutes of advertising for gold, denture cleaners, life insurance, and, most wicked of all, a pitch for a new drug for children who are judged not to be living up to their full potential in school—Excello, prescribed for a large scattering of childhood behavioral patterns, from forgetfulness to foot jiggling, and sold in this ad through a grandmother character, who looks as if she wandered off the set of Little House on the Prairie, reassuring her daughter, who looks hip (tattooed) but responsible and concerned (eyeglasses, a worried expression), that it is perfectly safe to give Sean (failing in school, alienated from his friends) Excello. “I wish it was around when you were a little girl driving everyone crazy,” the old woman says, to which the daughter says, “Mom!” and gives her a playful but totally respectful little shove.