The Imago Sequence

by Laird Barron

  Delaney gunned the engine and cruised down the driveway. He vanished around the bend as Charlie set aside his copy of Sports Illustrated to answer the phone. "Uh, yeah. Oh, mornin', Mr. Smith. Uh . . .Okay, sure. Right now? Yessir!" Charlie hung up with a worried expression. It was only his second week on the job. He walked briskly to the big house, opened the door and hurried inside.

  PARALLAX

  EXCERPTED FROM NEWS 6 COVERAGE OF JACK CARSON BRIEFING (by Ron Jones—6/6/99):

  JC: . . .and thank you to all the people involved in the search. The Olympia Police Department, the fire department, the Washington Highway Patrol, all the volunteers. The media. You've worked tirelessly to bring Miranda back to us safe and sound. Thank you.

  RJ: Is there anything you would care to add, Mr. Carson?

  JC: Yes. Miranda, honey. I love you. Please come home.

  I see Miranda in the endless chain of faces.

  After six years they're all starting to resemble her. Which is kind of funny since I often forget what she looks like until I spot her on a bus; in line at the bank; at a sidewalk café, scanning the Daily O, a Rottweiler at her feet, and wham. My heart knocks, my hands shake as if I quit the sauce only yesterday.

  Six years, already?

  Six years and I still can't touch Crown Royal, can't stomach the diesel taint. Six years and I hate the sound of ice slurring in a glass: makes me flinch and resurrects an image of icebergs in miniature on slate. I'm done with ice cubes, iceboxes, all of it. Sometimes I don't brave the kitchen for weeks.

  Six years as of Saturday. Saturday Marchland pays a visit. He barges into the house, drunk and alone. They kicked him off the force, I don't recall when. The brute has time to kill. Crosses my mind it's me he's come to kill after the pussyfooting around. That thought is a catalyst. It starts the cookie crumbling.

  What's he waiting for, for Christ's sake? That's easy. He's been waiting for the coroner's report to confirm his suspicions about the body they found near Yelm six months ago. It's not that the deadly dull pathologists have a flair for the dramatic as much as there's a logjam at the forensics lab. Government cutbacks are a real bitch.

  Six months, six years, six bullets in a .38 revolver. Marchland wants to be certain; of course he does. They confiscated his gun along with the badge, but that's not a problem; he got another piece at the pawn shop. He showed me once.

  I ask how his partner Fisher is doing. Nothing doing.

  Marchland lumbers to my liquor cabinet, grabs a dusty bottle of the best. He says to me, "Happy anniversary, Jack." Then he knocks back his whiskey and slops another. He trembles as he swallows, shudders like it's poison going down the hatch. His tics pronounce themselves most eloquently. His left eye is an agate. The right eye, the good eye, flickers like a shutter.

  He's a wild boar, a crocodile, a basilisk. He smacks his lips as if he wishes it were my blood in his mouth.

  Six years and Marchland won't quit. Good for him. I'm numb to his animal pathos. I've turned a stone ear to his dumb anguish. I'm tuned to the music of the stars, radio free Tau Ceti. No interest in act I of Hamlet. Let's jump to long knives and good-night speeches. Let's bring the curtain down already.

  I turn away and stare through the window at the field where the scotch broom creeps yellow as hell toward my doorstep. Six years and it has advanced from the hinterlands to the picket fence in the back yard. Six more years and it will have chewed this house to the foundation, braided my bones in its hair.

  I think nothing changes because thunderheads roll like wheels. I think of wheels in wheels, the threshing scythes in the hubs of clattering chariots, and I think hasn't this gone on long enough?

  But Marchland doesn't shoot me. He drains the tumbler, watches me watching the yellow field. When he leaves, he closes the door softly.

  EXCERPTED FROM THE MAKING OF ULTRAGOTHIC: BEHIND THE DOCUMENTARY. INTERVIEW OF JUDITH PEIRCE (by William Tucker—3/19/02):

  WT: What did you call your artist community—Penny Royal?

  JP: That's right.

  WT: Kind of a traveling show.

  JP: More of an artist support group that toured Europe. A networking project. We put on exhibitions.

  WT: Who was involved?

  JP: Oh, me and Jack. Freddy Snopes, Larry Torrence. Joe Adams—he went into computers, does fractal art. Miranda, of course. There were others; the group was pretty huge at times, but we were the core, the nucleus.

  WT: There have been a lot of rumors about Penny Royal. Is it true that members of Penny Royal indulged in heavy drug use, attended orgies and held Satanic rituals?

  JP: Satanic rituals?

  Judy is ready to rumble.

  It's the same argument—the only argument—we ever have.

  There are variations on the theme, but this is how it usually goes with Judy when she's drunk enough or stoned enough to grab the bull by the horns. Tonight she's both.

  "Why do you stay, Jack? Why, in God's name, do you stay in this house?" And believe me, she's shrill when she's in the mood. She's got the cast-iron lungs of a professional activist, a cactus for a liver.

  We've been friends since Cambridge. Since the magical, apocalyptic fairy-tale days of starving in exotic cities, sustained by youth, cheap grass and cheaper wine, the kindness of strangers. Suffering was beautiful then, as is any addiction at the threshold of the honeymoon bungalow. Judy was the den mother of our brood, a select confab of like-minded artistes. She was savagely glamorous in her impoverishment, fearless as a martyr. Attrition ground up and blew away our comrades; turned them into bankers and graphic designers, housewives with fruiting ovaries and dutiful husbands hanged by their own neckties. I would've gone down too, except she kept me treading water until Miranda and the Muses and Lady Luck carried me home.

  Judy's suffering doesn't seem so hip anymore. That youthful euphoria has evaporated. Her lean, bronze face sags with the effects of too much too fast, changes as if a lamp had briefly illuminated the planes and creases. Sad, she looks horribly sad. Looks like she's been guzzling kerosene.

  Thank God Judy is an old-school lesbian, else I'd be stuck on the notion she did away with Miranda to get with me. I almost ask her if she loved Miranda with the love that dare not speak its name. Almost, except that's the easy way out. And it's another question I probably don't want answered.

  "I like my house. I'm attached to it," I say.

  "Yeah, but, isn't it creepy?"

  "Creepy? No." It is, indeed. Am I going to admit that?

  She wags her head. "Hell yeah it's creepy. Only a psycho or a robot could sleep in this place knowing what you know. You act like a robot sometimes. Serious."

  "Gee, thanks."

  It's a really expensive house, a huge house with lots of artifacts cluttering the vaulted rooms, although none of the artifacts are mine. Correction, I kept one personal reminder of life with Miranda—a great ceramic bust of Achilles that I once hollowed in the throes of demonic possession or whatever it is the ancients took as the author of genius. This bust gapes from the window of my study. The old Greek's fractured skull is a palace for the silverfish, a repository of dust and dreams.

  The remainder of my stuff has been reduced to splinters, ashes, pulverized. It took me three weeks to accomplish the feat. The big items went fast. The small items were tedious. I organized piles in the driveway, sat cross-legged as a swami, sorting them with maniacal devotion. I'd collected so many more things than seemed possible! The project was worth the effort, though. My wife's treasures deserve ample negative space.

  I've converted my office into a gallery of Miranda's wax sculptures—the drowned woman; the cancer victim on the gurney we swiped from Saint Pete's; the seagull mobile; the Native American-style death masque in the window; a basket of petrified apples and pears oozing beneath a glaze of paraffin; a fruit fly graveyard in the embalming oils. These remnants of her portfolio, these fragments I have gathered to my breast, are a paean to her gothic sensibilities.

  Everything is heavy or
awkward or fragile. The notion of touching any of it makes me nauseous. I framed the article in Smithsonian, the one with the picture of her at the fabled museum accepting a pile of grant cash and a handshake from some fossil in a suit. I don't look at it much because it makes me nauseous too.

  Then there's the Norman Rockwell yard, and the Norman Rockwell field, and those trees could've been painted by him as well. Everything turns green and red this time of year. It's a postcard outside my window.

  I say, "Where am I supposed to go? Even psycho robots gotta sleep."

  "You're loaded; you could go anywhere. Buy an island, become dictator of a banana republic, whatever, man. The only decent thing to do is burn it to the ground, blow it to hell and gone. Donate it, turn it into a fawkin' museum and sell tickets, whatever. Your call, Jack."

  I sip my off-brand cola and force a smile. "I'm not loaded—you are."

  "Ha, ha."

  "But see, I can't leave."

  "Why can't you?"

  "What if she comes back?"

  "Here we go. Here we fawkin' go. I need some more booze. Fast."

  "What if she does?"

  "Jack."

  "What if the old girl strolls through the door one day with an explanation for everything?"

  "Jack—"

  "Hi, baby, sorry I'm late, I was abducted by the Greys'; or, 'holy shit, you wouldn't believe the line at Wal-Mart—'"

  "Jack. Jack, for Chrissake . . .She wouldn't shop at Wal-Mart and she isn't going to come back. You gotta sell this house and move on. Serious. You aren't well, buddy. Uh, uh."

  "I can't do that."

  "Jack—"

  "Judy, no."

  "Ja-ack." Her voice cracks to pieces at this point.

  I just sip my cola and wait for the storm to break.

  "Yes, you can. Jack, man. Why can't you?"

  I won't tell Judy the reason, the honest-to-Betsy reason. I won't tell her I wake up every other night with an iron band around my chest, bad dreams rattling in my attic. I wake up like a beast in the woods that's scented something it can't quite identify. I wake up with this premonition, as if any second now I'm going to receive the ultimate clue, that I'm finally going to find out what happened to my wife. Like the end of the cliffhanger serial is one commercial break away.

  Instead, I tell Judy to have another snort and wipe her nose, because she's bawling into her gin and tonic. We don't discuss the fact the cops might be watching me again, that the phone is probably tapped and God knows what's coming next.

  I change the subject to sports, the weather.

  EXCERPTED FROM THE ALAMOGORDO DAILY TELEGRAPH (6/9/87):

  HONEYMOON COUPLE FOUND SAFE—Jack and Miranda Carson, presumed missing since their rental car was reported abandoned on Highway 70 near the White Sands National Monument on June 6, were found Tuesday at the Diamond Inn Resort. The resort is located 150 miles west of White Sands.

  Mr. Carson, an acclaimed modern artist from Olympia, Washington, expressed surprise at being the subject of a missing persons report. "We're not missing, we're on our honeymoon!" Mr. Carson said. It was his opinion that the vehicle had been stolen and he had neglected to note its absence.

  Further confusion arose from the fact that the Carsons signed the Diamond Inn register on June 8, prompting the Otero County Sheriff's Office to question the couple's whereabouts during the preceding thirty-six to forty-two hours. Mr. Carson, known for his flamboyant promotional style, denied any involvement in a publicity hoax, saying, "Publicity? Why would I want publicity on my honeymoon? We've been in our room or at the bar since we got here."

  Patty Angstrom, spokesperson for the Sheriff's Office, declined comment pending further investigation.

  Sunday is a coma. Sunday's dreamscape is a long, pale sweep of desert.

  My dreams are cinematic and exaggerated as spaghetti westerns. A lopsided V of Search & Rescue choppers crawls along the horizon. Mountains are jagged teeth of a cannibal cowboy. The wind hums the hum of bees in bleached skull hives; a discordant harmonica tune.

  A plastic hand claws from the earth, the hand of a mannequin severed at the wrist. It's feminine, and the ring on its finger is the ring I gave Miranda, the one from the flea market in New Mexico, not far from some proving grounds we read about in a tacky brochure. The ring matches the one she gave me.

  Mesas and dunes blur, ruinous Luna gapes as the sun founders in her wake.

  Home again. Miranda on the living room sofa. She's wearing my ancient rugby sweater; her brown hair's a glorious mess. She's daubing her nails and humming that old Sinatra song we first danced to in the Cloud Room. The light collects on her shoulder. I kiss her and walk through the door to the kitchen, try not to stumble. I drag my black double like a wrecking ball.

  I'm fixing drinks; hair of the dog that bit us. I'm chopping at an ice block, trying not to botch the job, because my belly is queasy and the gong in my skull makes it tricky to concentrate.

  The ice pick falls from my hand, rocks in a semicircle on the counter. The ice becomes a white-gold lake. The numbers on the microwave flicker forward two minutes. White light pours into my eyes. My head erupts.

  No OFF button. I know this is only a movie, but I'm buckled to the theater seat. Once it starts, it won't stop; the hits keep on coming. The memory of the event is like a splash of indelible ink, a bloodstain.

  Cicadas chirr in the flowerbox. An unseasonably crisp breeze pushes the tall grass. Sparks gather in black-hearted clouds. The stink of fire. Then silence. Miranda isn't humming, isn't making any sound. The only noise is the soft gasp of air forced through a vent near my feet. And something else, something vast and running on a frequency that scrambles the neurons in my brain. My personal supernova.

  Then it's night. Gauzy, crystal-studded, immense.

  I'm behind the wheel of a speeding luxury car—leather interior, power everything. Miranda's riding shotgun, sipping Bacardi and trailing her arm out the window, laughing. Gods, what a sweet sound; it sends an electric spike through me, curls my toes. We're on the road to Vegas. Ricardo Montalbán's disembodied voice congratulates my excellent taste in driving machines and women. The car isn't moving, it's at full stop. There's a big exit hole in the windshield. Vacuum moans as it sucks away the atmosphere, pulls my smile into a stroke victim's grimace.

  The harmonica keens and Miranda's missing again.

  I float up from the abyss, regard her side of the bed. Her pillow is drenched crimson by radio-clock light. You'd think I'd wake screaming, except that's fiction. Shaking, sweating, blinded by rocketing blood pressure, yes. But no screaming.

  Why should I? It's utter phantasmagoria, anyway. I've never been in a car crash, never owned a car that plush, never had such a desire. A road trip to Vegas? New Mexico was desert enough for me.

  We got married in a historic trading post. Or in a cathedral by a priest named Dominic. Doves floating; Miranda's white train dragging in the good clean Catholic dust.

  Which was it?

  There was that ordained minister and his wife who stayed in the room across the way at the resort. We played golf once; backgammon, something. He'd offered to marry us in the chapel or the Cloud Room, hadn't he? Damn—I don't remember at the moment and the moment is slipping away.

  I stumble into the bathroom.

  Water circles in the toilet. The stars march circles in a wedge of pebbled glass. They never seem quite right anymore. They hang differently from when Miranda and I used to lay on a blanket and do the romantic thing where you count them. They don't seem very romantic now.

  I peer into the gloom of the yard, through the tall trees and taller shadows. A truck that resembles Marchland's flatbed Ford is parked at the end of the driveway. Like the Flying Dutchman, it materializes in that spot when I least expect. It's been there on and off for months, for ages. The dome light silhouettes Marchland's torso, his massive head.

  Perhaps I should offer him a nightcap, or a cup of tea. There's lots of Miranda's herbal tea leftover in the pantry
. Never been much of a tea man, myself.

  I drop the blinds, return to bed.

  On Monday I'm among my people.

  Judy has the studio unlocked and the lights burning when I arrive with Kern. Judy warns me that someone has left twenty-or so hang-ups on the machine over the weekend. The Seattle Post Intelligencer wants to do an interview. A friendly retrospective. There have been no anonymous death threats for going on a year; that's a record. Miranda's mom died of cancer a while back. Her dad got himself killed on a ski slope in Italy and maybe that explains the drought. Why the hell does a retiree need to take up skiing anyway? My largesse is the culprit—after I got famous we sent scads of cash to Miranda's parents. Getting rich late in life would do in just about anyone.

  If Judy is the long-suffering Kato to my Green Hornet, Kern is my evil apprentice who longs to usurp my title as art world wunderkind. He's a brilliant conniver, bound for glory. They love each other a few degrees shy of homicide.

  Kern met me at the China Clipper for breakfast and we talked about the Seattle exhibition upcoming next month. Kern did the talking. Can't say I heard much of it—hope I bobbed my head in the right places.

  The exhibition is of tremendous importance to Kern—it's his chance to hob-nob with future patrons. We've got well-heeled boys and girls from New York, San Francisco and Chicago on the guest list.

  I drift. The bulky pieces are done and packed up for shipment. My mind is free to spiral into its pit.

  Kern doesn't fathom my indifference to the minutia. Once, I was the king of flash. I paid for rock bands and fireworks, bought ad space in the New York Times, made a spectacle of myself on network television; choked smug journalists with my bare hands; whatever it took to spread the word. He can't grasp this fundamental shift. He's also my disciple and his disapproval remains oblique. Plus, I've loaned him three hundred dollars and my old Datsun. Kern's got a big mouth and a canary ass. This proved to be an unfortunate combination when he swaggered into the local watering hole one fateful Western Swing Night. The local bullyboys totaled Kern's Volkswagen and went to work on him. An overhand blow from an aluminum bat spoiled his designer-model looks just a tad, and he's been humble pie since.