Deviant Behavior

by Mike Sager

  Steinschmidt opened a cupboard, retrieved a pack of Oreo cookies, offered it to Hatfield, who declined. He hadn’t eaten refined sugar in over two years. “Remember high school biology?” the pastor continued. “A healthy, well-adapted organism tends to increase in population. If that’s true, then you have to say that the human race is flourishing. What are we up to now, about six billion?”

  “Give or take a junkie mom or two,” Hatfield said morosely. And then he added, “As I recall from high school, once the population of an organism gets over a certain level, doesn’t society descend into chaos?”

  The pastor helped himself to another Oreo, dunked it into his coffee. “Maybe this is just the way it’s supposed to be,” he said. “Maybe this is just our way, the human way. It ain’t pretty, but we survive.” He popped the soggy cookie into his mouth.

  “Despite ourselves, we muddle through.”

  Hatfield drained his cup, crunched it in his meaty fist. “It’s a muddle, alright.” He replaced his hat on his head. “Where do you keep your recycling bin around here?”

  Steinschmidt reached out and relieved the cop of his trash. “We wouldn’t want to choke any dolphins downstream, now, would we?”

  39

  “And then she, like, looks up at me,” Sojii said breathlessly.

  “Ohmigod! I knew it was her.”

  “It was only a dream,” said Jonathan Seede, comforting his beautiful young houseguest, trying to sound fatherly. “You’re here now. You’re safe. Everything will be okay—I’m sure of it.”

  The living room of Seede’s house was dark and narrow. Amber rays from the streetlamp filtered through the slatted shutters, casting shadows against the wall. The television glowed snow, a video interrupted. Flames crackled in the fireplace, over which hung a blue glass art deco mirror. Despite the fire, the room remained chilly. With its plaster walls, high ceilings, and original, lead-counterweighted window frames—warped and leaky, they’d rattle theatrically in a storm—it was a difficult house to heat.

  “But it wasn’t a dream,” Sojii insisted. “It was more like … this.” She raised her hands, palms up, indicating the here and now. “It seemed normal, you know? Like I was definitely there, in this boutique. And so was she.”

  He settled back into the lumpy cleavage of the convertible futon sofa. It was Thursday night. His wife and son had been gone since Monday—what time, exactly, he wasn’t sure. He’d awoken in the afternoon to an empty house, a note in the bathroom: “We’ll call.” The We, of course, meant Dulcy and Jake. Seeing it there, written on the page like that, We with a capital W, had made him feel very … something. Kind of liberated. Kind of alone. He wasn’t sure exactly which. Over the course of his marriage, he’d never really embraced the notion that being someone’s husband or father, being part of a family unit, could be nearly as important or fulfilling as the monumental task of becoming one’s self—in his case, Jonathan Seede, celebrated writer. But seeing the note there on the counter, her toothbrush gone from the glass, the wicker basket on her side of the sink emptied of its usual payload of brushes and sponges and other pricey feminine grooming paraphernalia … Well, it definitely gave him pause. Their whereabouts was still unknown.

  “You’re sure it was your mother?” Seede asked.

  “She looked just like her picture.”

  “When was the last time you saw her in person?”

  “I was six months old. She left me with my dad and went backpacking around Europe. That’s the story, anyway, the one my dad tells—” She corrected herself: “Told.” At this last bit, Seede became aware for the first time of the sadness she was carrying. Up until now, he’d taken this girl at face value: mature for her age and seemingly self-sufficient, she acted as if being orphaned and on the run was no big deal to her, something she was handling just fine. The fact was, Seede knew very little about teenagers, about kids of any sort, eighteen months of reluctant fatherhood notwithstanding. Such was not the case, of course, with Dulcy. That old saw about kids not coming with manuals? Not true anymore. Scattered about the Seede household were dozens of child-rearing books, each one proffering a slightly or radically different view, a dissonant chorus of contradictory opinions that served only to make each new parenting decision a monumental task: When to switch from nipple to formula.

  When to add solid foods. Comfort him or let him cry? Pacifier or thumb? Family bed or marital bed? Nanny or daycare? Volumes dedicated to training your child to sleep through the night occupied an entire shelf of their own: the popular authors were Sears, Ferber, and someone who called herself the Baby Whisperer; Dulcy’s guru of choice was the clownishly named T. Berry Brazelton, a one-man pediatric whirlwind whose distinguished credits included his appointment as the very first spokesman for Pampers.

  Seede reached to the end table next to him for a Flintstones jelly glass, filled halfway with twenty-year-old Sandeman port. “When you saw your mom, were you actually looking into the skull?”

  “That’s how it starts. It’s called scrying. First you’re looking at this, like, 3-D movie. And then all of a sudden, you’re, like, in it.”

  Seede buried his face in his hands, took a deep and audible breath. He needed a hit. His stash was almost gone. On some level, it never failed to shock him: what started out looking like an incredibly large pile of drugs always dwindled to nothing. It was time again to ask the crucial question: go to sleep or buy more drugs?

  The trick was stopping. If he could take a couple of Xanax or Valium, and then manage to fight off the insistent, yammering voice (One more hit, Oh baby one more hit) long enough for the downers to take effect—twenty to thirty minutes at most—the current binge could be ended. Among all the drugs he’d done or studied, crack addiction was unique: you were addicted to crack (or powder coke) for only as long as you were actually doing it. Once you managed to stop and go to sleep, your pleasure center was able to reset itself—the slate could be wiped clean. You could skip a day or a week if you were so inclined. You could never again do it in your life. There were no physical withdrawal symptoms, no sickness or pain or tremors, though the first couple of days after a binge tended to be characterized by much eating and sleeping, accompanied by an overarching feeling of sadness and regret. The mental challenge of quitting was more difficult. While asleep, you would dream the next hit. While awake, you would fantasize it elaborately. The voice in the back of your head would plead. (This time quoting Spike Lee from She’s Gotta Have It: Please, baby, please, baby, baby baby, please.) One hit and you were back on the ride.

  Sojii took Seede’s distraction for disbelief. “You heard it yourself last night,” she said, exasperated. “Or maybe you still think that screech was some huge mutant alley cat behind the house.”

  “Look,” he said, “I’m trying to believe you. I’m trying to wrap my mind around all this stuff. One thing you can be sure of: I am on your side. I’m out on a limb just having you here. You understand that, right? Harboring beautiful teenage runaways is not one of the privileges granted to journalists by the first amendment.”

  Embarrassed by the overt compliment from this older man—eyes were one thing, words another—Sojii angled her head down and away, letting her long chestnut hair come between them like a curtain of silken strands. From the near arm of the futon frame, Sojii availed herself of a small quilt, one of Dulcy’s family heirlooms.

  “So you’re in the boutique with your mother,” Seede said, picking up the thread. “What happened next.”

  Sojii unfolded the quilt, draped it over her legs. She wasn’t sure what she thought about this guy. He seemed on the level. He worked at the Herald; she’d read some of his stories—pretty good. He knew Waylon and the Pope; he’d gone to great effort to get her out of the church; he seemed genuine about making her feel at home, about keeping her safe until they figured out what was going on with the skull and the Pope’s arrest. But he was also kind of twitchy—speedy and clumsy and grandiose.

  She’d been around the Stri
p long enough to know when somebody was on drugs.

  At the same time, a lot of what Seede said made good sense. Some really weird stuff had been happening to her, especially since she’d come into contact with the Pope’s skull. She needed someone to talk to. As depressing as it sounded, the truth was this: she had no one else but this stranger.

  “So I’m in the boutique and I see her,” she began again. “And I’m like, Ohmigod! My mouth dropped open.” She buried her face in her hands. “I probably looked like a total ugg.”

  “I doubt that’s possible,” he said. “What did she do?”

  “She gave me this, I don’t know—this kind of dorky smile.”

  “Dorky how?”

  “You know. The way grown-ups do. When they think they know something you don’t.”

  “How did the conversation go?”

  “She was like—” and here Sojii played the character of her mother, using a breathy voice, evoking a hippie chick from the sixties: “‘The last time you saw me, you also knew me right away.’”

  “And I said—” playing herself: “‘The last time I saw you, I was six months old. You left me with my dad and took off.’

  “And she’s like, ‘No, the last time I saw you, you were four years old. You met me at the National Zoo. You ran right up to me in a crowd.’” Sojii switched back to her own voice: “It was weird. She had this, like, attitude.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She tucked the quilt beneath her thighs, and then she set about smoothing the wrinkles with her palm, a painstaking process, like a worker skimming the surface of freshly poured concrete with a wooden float. “I don’t know,” she said at last, her voice filled with uncertainty. “Just an attitude and stuff. Like I’d done something to her.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I told her to fuck off and go to hell.”

  “Really?”

  She shook her head sheepishly, no.

  “That’s what you wanted to say?”

  Nodding affirmative.

  “What did you really say?”

  “I don’t know.” She studied her nails, the remnants of black polish, commenced picking at one thumbnail with the other. “I think I said, like, ‘This isn’t even real.’”

  “But you said it felt like it was real.”

  “It did.”

  He paused a moment, a bit lost. “So what did she say?”

  “She was like”—the voice of the hippie chick again—“‘It’s real enough, isn’t it? Here we are. We’re together.’

  “And I’m like: ‘In a boutique?’

  “And she’s like: ‘Maybe this is somewhere a mother and daughter are supposed to be together.’”

  Seede reached to the end table again and opened a carved wooden box, retrieved a cigarette-size tube fashioned from a variety of household products: a ten-inch slice of Safeway brand aluminum foil, a wad of a Chore Boy copper scrubber, and a short length of half-inch plasticized electrical tape from Ace Hardware—this last bit functioning as a mouthpiece, a recent invention, the mother of which had been the painful blistering of his lips and gums. Still unsolved was the problem of his index finger, the flank of which had developed an ugly callus from exposure to flame: crusty and blackened and fissured, it looked more like the finger of a homeless man or an auto mechanic than that of a guy who typed for a living. A reciprocal callus, likewise blackened and fissured, had developed on the pad of the opposing digit. Kwan and his homeboys knew the condition as “Bic thumb.”

  “Did she say anything else?” Seede asked.

  “We talked a while longer and stuff, I guess.”

  Weary of pulling teeth: “Anything specific?”

  Relenting: “She said, like, how she left me with my dad because she thought it was best for me. And how it was a different era, you know, and how she was in a bad space and had low self-esteem. She was like”—doing her mother again—“‘My therapist told me I had to commit to loving myself before I could properly love anyone else.’”

  He opened his mouth and inserted his index finger partway, pretended to gag. “Sounds to me like a victim of psychobabble.”

  “That was her main thing.” Sojii said, sitting forward, becoming animated. “How she was the victim. How she didn’t know how to be a good mother because her mother had given her up.”

  “So she gives you up?”

  Sojii raised her arms and gathered her hair into a ponytail, twisted it around itself in a deliberate fashion, like a magician doing a trick with scarves. The recalcitrant strands floated to rest around her face, which itself was configured into a diffident expression, as if to say, Who the fuck cares?

  Seede stared. Not to belabor the point, but besides being underage and unsupervised, she was unbelievably lovely, truly a wonder of creation, her genes gathered serendipitously from the four corners of the globe. His heart fluttered, an involuntary ventricular contraction.

  “I guess parents, you know, they don’t, well …” He struggled to put together a string of words that would comfort her. “They don’t always realize the kind of effect their selfishness has on their children. Sometimes, maybe, they’re not even aware of it themselves. It’s almost like …”

  He felt another flutter—recognition.

  And promptly changed the subject.

  “In a way,” he postulated, “it seems that this experience with the skull was good for you.”

  Defensively: “Good for me? What do you mean?”

  “In a therapeutic sense. Perhaps this dream you had under the influence of the skull—”

  “It wasn’t a dream.”

  “This experience,” he corrected himself. “This encounter, what have you—maybe the skull is intended to be some kind of … I don’t know, I’m taking a guess here, but maybe it’s designed to help people work out their”—he used his fingers like quotation marks—“personal issues.”

  A blank stare.

  “Think about it like this,” he said. “Look how fucked-up the world is. Maybe one big reason is people have too many personal demons that affect their dealings with everyone else. Taken on a massive scale, think of the damage. Have you ever heard the Pope talk about this? It’s one of his little pearls. I think it goes: All hate is just fear. All fear is insecurity. When he said that, I don’t know, it rang so true, made perfect sense. People’s personal problems bleed over into every human interaction. It taints everything, the entire course of human events.”

  “You mean, like, the fact that Hitler only had one ball or whatever?”

  “Something like that.”

  “What does that have to do with me?”

  “Each of us has our own little sob story. Our own defining issue. I have one. You have one. We all do. Depending upon the person, it can be really bad—child abuse, death of a parent, abandonment. Or it can be pretty benign—Mommy always loved you best. But no matter where your trauma rates on the scale of real-life relativity, to you, it’s always going to register a ten, because it’s yours. What happened to you is the most important thing in your universe. It’s what forms you, your own personal big bang. Take me for instance. I had parents who acted like I was more special than I really was; now I need the whole world to think so too—that’s my sad story. Sounds like nothing, right? Believe me, something like that can take you pretty deep.

  “You were abandoned by your mother. Not so benign. You have deep feelings of rejection. You can’t trust anyone, including yourself. You’ve probably spent your entire life wondering what it would be like to finally lay eyes on her. Let me ask you this: How many times have you daydreamed that scene, a chance meeting somewhere with your long lost mom? How many times have you wondered what it would be like to finally talk to her, to be able to tell her a few things, get a few things off your chest, ask a few questions? With the skull, by whatever means, you kind of got the chance to do that. You got the chance to play out the scene. It’s the unsaid stuff that haunts us, the stuff undone. That’s what prevents us from
moving on. Do you understand what I’m trying to say?”

  She nodded yes, though noncommittally.

  “Think of it like this,” he said, becoming more sure as he went along, the logic of it seeming to crystallize as he talked it through. “Because of the skull, you’ve had a chance at”—using his fingers again as quotation marks—“closure. I know, it’s a stupid, overused word, but it is an important concept. Because nothing is over until it’s over. You haven’t seen your mother since you were six months old. Don’t you think you would have met her by now if you were going to? Thanks to the skull, at least you’ve had a simulated chance. You said yourself how real it felt.”

  Her eyes welled with tears.

  He felt bad for upsetting her—he was only trying to help. He held his pipe before his mouth like a cigar and waggled his eyebrows up and down, a corny attempt at Groucho Marx. “Think of it this way, schweetheart” he said with Groucho’s aplomb, “you’ve probably saved yourself a fortune on therapy.”

  She wiped her eyes the way women do, using a knuckle to squeegee the light spillage, carefully avoiding the mascara, even though she wasn’t wearing any. From her own end table she picked up a mug of sweet milky tea, the front emblazoned with a likeness of former President Reagan.

  Seede reached over to his box, which was made of redwood and lined with green felt, and picked up his last rock, round and white and crystalline, about the size of a baby’s tooth. By now, the heroin had pretty much worn off. The empty feeling inside him was deepening into a chasm. It needed to be filled with smoke. It needed to be done now. He placed the rock in the pipe, picked up his butane lighter. A metallic click, the familiar hiss, a sound like a tiny jet engine. He trained the flame on the charred end of the pipe, moved it nimbly back and forth along the surface of the rock, like a dessert chef caramelizing a crème brûlée.

  Sojii watched him intently. “That’s crack, right?”