Baby Lisa was wearing the body of Anna Shockley, just as Dr. Parrish said. But Bobby would have known that this was Baby Lisa even if Dr. Parrish hadn’t warned him. Baby Lisa was smiling wickedly and she was dressed for sin, in tiny jean cutoffs and a tight t-shirt that showed her nipples clearly. Bobby remembered Anna Shockley from group, and that girl would never have dressed this evil way. This was Baby Lisa, looking to snare him any way she could, coming after him now with whore tricks.
Bobby stood up and walked out of the shadows. But the sun was so heavy that it stopped him immediately. He couldn’t move. He looked down at his hand and saw that he still held the scissors blade, and he returned it to his back pocket. He looked up again and watched Baby Lisa marching easily through the tall, yellow grass. She hadn’t seen him. Maybe he could sneak up on her.
But he knew he couldn’t. She would see him. Fire would leap from her eyes, and he would fall to the ground, nothing but bits of ashes that the wind would blow away. He saw the image so clearly that he knew it was true.
Then he remembered the pill. Dr. Parrish had told him to take the pill immediately after killing Baby Lisa so that Baby Lisa could not jump from the husk of Anna Shockley into his own body. Dr. Parrish had also said, “Don’t take the pill until you kill Baby Lisa. It is important that you take the pill right after you kill her. Not before. Is that clear?”
Bobby had said that he understood.
But it was all Bobby Starne could do to remain standing under the awesome weight of the sun. He felt his kneecaps swell with green pain, felt the bones in his spine scrape together, making a sound louder than the drone of the grasshoppers. With all his will, he fumbled in his pocket, drew out the piece of crumpled aluminum foil and shakily unwrapped it, revealing the plastic capsule, his one hope, his salvation. He popped it in his dry mouth and swallowed. It was tremendously large, but he got it down—and it worked. Immediately, strength returned to his limbs. The sun released him, and he was able to march forward.
He felt calm and protected now. He smiled. He felt like a hero. He had almost reached Baby Lisa, who was now sitting on an orange blanket and looking up toward the river. She turned, lifted a hand to her eyes, and squinted at him.
He smiled and waved his hand. He must be very smooth and cunning. He would trick her. He would let her think that he didn’t know who she was. “Hi, Anna,” he said.
“What are you doing here?” she asked. Already there was suspicion and anger or fear on her face. Her face was tight and Baby Lisa looked out of it without trying to hide. She had risen up a little on one knee and one of her hands was forward on the blanket, balancing her.
“Hi, Anna,” he said again, still walking closer. He would have said something else, but he thought too many thoughts, too fast, and he couldn’t slow one down to make it into words.
She stood up. “What do you want?” She was ready to run now, and fear was bobbing in her eyes. Bobby wanted to laugh, but he didn’t. She knew he was protected, powerful, and it made him want to laugh.
“I was driving around, and I parked up there, and then I saw you and I thought I would say hi,” he said, all in a rush. This was the pill speaking, cunning, giving him words he could not have caught on his own. He wanted to jump up in the air and roar for joy, because he knew that he was a hero.
“Go away,” she said. Her voice was quiet, and unless you listened with sharp ears, you might have been fooled and thought it was an angry voice. Really, it was a scared voice. Something moved beyond Anna’s image, and Bobby shifted focus and saw two kids—gangly, barefoot boys—across the river. They were too far away to save her now.
“No, Baby Lisa,” Bobby hissed. Then, suddenly a hot, crackling fire burst in his stomach, seared his ribs, took the breath from him. He screamed. The scream came out of him at a hundred miles an hour, a long, tortured whistle of sound that pulled chilly fear behind it.
Baby Lisa was killing him! Somehow his protection was gone. There was no time at all now.
“Go away,” Anna said. Jesus. Bobby Starne. When she had turned and seen him, looking crazier than ever, like he had just been beamed down from Mrs, her heart had immediately shifted into overdrive. He was so goddam big and so goddam crazy-looking and crazy-acting. She had been relieved when he had been taken out of her group, because he always seemed on the edge of exploding.
Now he was here, sweating waterfalls, birdie eyes goggling, monster-sized and wearing a white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up and wrinkled chinos.
He must have followed her. He hadn’t just accidentally found her here. The word rape entered her mind, and her heart went into a high-pitched whine.
He lumbered closer. He said something, but she couldn’t catch the words. Baby? Had he said “baby”?
Then he screamed and jerked forward, as though someone had drilled a fastball into his stomach. The scream was like nothing Anna had ever heard, inspiring both horror and pity.
The scream took her by surprise, kept her from running.
Bobby Starne stopped screaming and suddenly uncoiled. His huge bulk covered the remaining distance between them in seconds. He grabbed her arm, and she spun around, tried to run. Then she was falling, but he still held her arm, and she regained her balance. She looked back at him in time to see his other hand plummeting, the blade bright. Terror slowed everything, allowed her to form the slow thought, I’m going to die, as though the words were printed in some child’s primer, laboriously puzzled out by her soul.
The steel pierced her shoulder with a thudding kind of pain that released her from the dreadful, slow-motion panic. She stumbled backwards, already running before she was aware that she was free. She could feel her blood rushing from the throbbing shoulder.
She ran away from him, toward the river. There were two people across the river, and she shouted to them. They were jumping up and down, waving their arms, shouting back. They were just kids, and they were too far away. She would die while they watched.
A cold rush of anger—rage against her own helplessness, the stupidity of her approaching death—propelled her forward. She scrambled over the riverbank rocks. He was right behind her; she could hear his rasping breath, the sound of his feet. She knew, somehow, that turning to look would lose the race; he’d catch her.
So she didn’t look. She ran on into the river.
Instantly, the river knocked her sideways. She leaned into the violence of the current, felt the rocky, perilous bottom lash at her bare feet. The water was white ice and roaring. She was immediately wet to the bone. Water crashed against slick boulders and the silver skeletons of felled pines. She could see the opposite bank through a mist of shattered rapids. She was a fair swimmer, but certainly she would drown in the treacherous, frenzied current.
She would rather drown. She pushed forward.
She was surprised by the blow that slammed her face down into the water, then sick as the steel twisting in her back screamed her failure. She twisted underwater, miraculously found her feet and pushed up through the relentless, hurrying current to face her killer.
He stood in the boiling water, rocking back and forth. The knife was bloody—her blood!—and all human semblance had fled his eyes. His mouth was open and he was trying to say something. She could see his tongue working soundlessly, a writhing poisonous worm. She felt weak. The sky shifted, bloomed with new brightness. She couldn’t turn and run again, not with the knowledge of that descending blade. She watched as Bobby Starne mumbled silently and moved forward amid the crashing waters.
And then he stopped and stood utterly still as though listening. His alien, astonished eyes bulged and he said, “Ah,” and looked down at his chest and coughed once, sharply. He looked up with the same dazed, bewildered expression, and now his white shirt had a great garish bloodstain and blood flecked his lips, and he coughed another bloody cough and slowly began to sink.
Anna watched from the last outpost of her consciousness. She didn’t understand what was happening. The brute had f
allen to his knees, was sliding under water. There was a moment when just the top of his head showed, like a wet, mossy rock, and then that too was gone. Then there was nothing but the water, jumping, wilder perhaps. Anna stared at the water, expecting Bobby to leap up again, howling. He didn’t.
Anna started back to the shore. She pushed upstream first, away from where Bobby Starne had disappeared.
The nightmare was over. She could get to the shore. Richard. The thought of Richard gave her courage.
Then the sky canted, and she knew that it was too late. A coldness that had to be death—because it was so vastly and unutterably more chilling than the river—filled her. She was numb, paralyzed.
The rushing current tipped her over, and she spun away from the shore, from Richard, from all her desperate dreams.
She bounced against the river bottom, was hurled to the surface again by extravagant forces. She gulped air reflexively, was dragged down into deeper waters where the darkness embraced her. She was through fighting. She returned the embrace.
Part 3
David Livingston
September 1980
1
I knew his voice immediately, but I didn’t know who it was. I couldn’t make the connection. It had been a long time.
“Kalso,” he said. “Robert Kalso. Your old Svengali, remember?”
I had fallen asleep on the sofa watching the six o’clock news. The room was dark now except for an eerie blue light cast by Johnny Carson and Buddy Hackett. I stared out the window. I was living in a high-rise in Alexandria, Virginia, and the lights of the nation’s capital glittered balefully on my horizon. I felt sick to my stomach, vaguely frightened. I told Kalso it was great to hear from him, but it wasn’t. I hadn’t seen or talked to him in years, and the only thing between us now was the past, and I was no big fan of the past.
Kalso was calling from downtown. He was having a photo exhibit at a gallery in Georgetown, and he wanted me to come to the opening on Friday. I didn’t want to go. I told him I would certainly be there. I had no intention of going. I was too muddled for an immediate excuse, but I figured I could think one up later on.
“I think you’ll like it,” Kalso continued. “I’ve got a surprise for you which is guaranteed to bowl you over.” This cemented my desire to avoid the affair. I hate surprises.
I went. I got to feeling guilty, and guilt can always get me going where a nobler impulse would fail. I had dropped Kalso as an agent after I left Newburg. How many years ago was that? Thirteen? Jesus. We had parted amiably enough. I think he understood my wanting to get away from all those associations. And I hadn’t deprived him of a fortune, since my romance with the New York art entrepreneurs languished and died. I found it hard to stir up much enthusiasm for what I was doing. No one was happy with the stuff I was producing. I hasn’t happy with myself. And I painted less and less. It got harder to begin a painting. I drank a lot, and one day drinking was more important than painting, and I knew it. I took all the canvases, finished and unfinished, that filled up the apartment—I was living in Florida at the time; I got around a bit after Newburg but it isn’t a rousing travelogue—and I piled them in a heap and poured gasoline on them and set them on fire. I felt a sense of immense relief.
Friday came and I drove down to Georgetown, parked at the bottom of Wisconsin Avenue and walked up to the gallery. It was around seven in the evening, a chilly, wet day, and I was already having reservations about going. Georgetown isn’t my favorite place on a good day. There are a lot of people in Washington, D.C., with a lot of money—this is the country of the Mercedes Benz—and they come to Georgetown to buy tasteful things. These are successful citizens who appreciate Beauty and are willing to pay for the endorsed, genuine article. This lust for elegance is fierce and depressing.
I found the gallery, a narrow townhouse with a little gold-and-black sign about the size of a license plate. The place was already thick with people, cigarette smoke, noise.
I didn’t see Kalso so I started looking at the photographs. I was alone in this pursuit. The other people were drinking wine, laughing. I suppose they had already seen the exhibit or were so intimately connected with the photographer that they didn’t feel required to feign interest in his stuff. This wasn’t the gawking public; this was the inner circle, knowledgeable, slightly bored.
I started edging along the walls, studying Kalso’s photographs. My first impression was that his style hadn’t changed much, hadn’t flown off in some outrageous direction. Many of the photos were quite small, postcard size or smaller. They were in color, but the colors were muted, fading away. There were landscapes, rural stuff, a photo of some raggedy kids playing baseball on a country road. Evening is coming on, a blond head seems to glow, a baseball bat burns iconlike in the twilight.
I moved down the hall. There were pictures of a group of women in long dresses, holding hands, laughing beneath a blue sky. There was a picture of an old woman in a rocking chair, proudly holding a large box turtle on her lap. There were more landscapes.
There was a photo of Anna, looking directly into the camera with her odd, small smile and her bright eyes. She was wearing a high-collared blouse and a long blue skirt, and her hands were folded primly in her lap. He hair was pulled back from her forehead and she was sitting on a kitchen chair. I could see part of the kitchen sink, cupboards, a window through which white light streamed.
I had never seen this photo before, and I wondered why Kalso had saved it for this exhibit. I stared at it for a long time, skirting the pain, stricken, as always, by the beauty that Anna could radiate. Then I moved along.
There were two other photos of Anna. In one she was pushing hair out of her face, her hands wet with suds from the sink. Obviously this picture was another from the kitchen, same light, same old-fashioned blouse—with the sleeves rolled up now.
The third picture had been taken, apparently, with a self-timer, for Kalso himself appeared in the photo. He was standing next to Anna. Anna was barefoot in a t-shirt and jeans. Kalso was wearing a business suit. They were in the far left of the picture, which was dominated by a green, stagnant pond, a riot of weeds and willow trees. Anna and Kalso were waving enthusiastically at the camera, like tourists in front of the Grand Canyon.
This picture unsettled me more than the other two, and I didn’t know why, couldn’t figure it out. Anna was almost out of the picture, although it was unmistakably Anna. Kalso was also in shadow.
I went around the room again to see if I had missed any Anna photos. I hadn’t. I came back to that third picture and it still troubled me and I didn’t know why.
That’s when Robert Kalso came up behind me and tapped me on the shoulder. “David,” he said. “My dear David. What do you think of my surprise?”
“How is it being rich?” Kalso asked me. The party had moved from the gallery to a friend’s house, a brief, noisy march down tree-lined blocks of townhouses, and I was drinking a cup of coffee while Kalso poured himself a glass of wine.
“I’m not rich,” I said.
Kalso raised his eyebrows. “Perhaps I have you confused with another David Livingston, the one who wrote and illustrated The Fearless Egg, Eddie Albatross, and The Summer Troll.”
“That’s me,” I said. “Maybe I’m a little rich.”
Kalso laughed. “You deserve it. You beat the snobs. You didn’t even play their game. Now you have more critical respect—honestly earned—than all those frauds at Keely’s or Bard’s.”
“Luck,” I said.
Kalso smiled, raised a glass of wine to his lips, winked, and drank deep.
Well, none of it had been planned. When I gave up painting masterpieces in Florida, I figured I had better find some kind of work. I started doing illustrations for several local publications, and I learned a lot about commercial illustration, learned how to use an airbrush, gouache. Then the drinking put an end to that, and I did some other things in other states, and I got married and I got divorced, and I went into a hospital in
Austin, Texas, on a shaky, hallucinatory whim. In that hospital’s detoxification unit, I watched Father Martin movies about alcoholism, hung out in group therapy with a jittery bunch of fellow alcoholics, and got ferried to AA meetings in a big van. And I wrote and illustrated a children’s book called The Fearless Egg, a work of occupational therapy, as it were. I worked on it for another year after I left the rehab, worked on it while spending my daylight hours in chaste, clerk-typist disciplines. Then I sent it off and the third publisher liked it enough to publish it, and it did okay and the next book did better and The Summer Troll was presently on The New York Times best-seller list and had been there for an outrageous sixty-seven weeks.
“The whole business makes me nervous,” I told Kalso. “I’m not saying I don’t like it. I like it fine. But it does make me nervous. I guess good fortune has a way of emphasizing the arbitrary nature of things, more even than a series of tragic events. All this stuff happening so fast.… It has an accidental, flimsy feel to it. I don’t know.”
Kalso nodded. He had grown a mustache somewhere in the last thirteen years, and his features had lengthened somehow. He still conveyed the air of knowing more about what he was doing than most of us know (which wasn’t false advertising, I’m sure). He looked more than thirteen years older.
I was feeling pretty good, talking to Kalso, bringing him up to date, and I thought I could broach the subject of Anna without getting weird.
I told him I had enjoyed the exhibit and was indeed surprised by the photographs of Anna. I had figured out that they must have been taken up at the commune, the Divine Dancers or whatever they were called, but I had never seen them before, didn’t know they existed.
“That’s the surprise,” Kalso said, and I didn’t understand that, and he was leaning forward, clutching my arm. “They aren’t old photographs.”
I couldn’t make out what he was talking about, but I was staring at his features, wilder with age, red hair flying, mustache bristling, and I realized what had bothered me about the photo of Kalso and Anna. Kalso had had a mustache in that photo. The Kalso in that photo was the Kalso in front of me.
Maybe I'll Call Anna Page 15