THE SUB A Study In Witchcraft

by Thomas M. Disch

  “Tell my mother to call for an ambulance,” she shouted back. “There’s been an accident. Someone was up on the roof, and it looks like he fell off. He’s just lying there.”

  “That Johnson boy?”

  “I suppose so. I’ll see if there’s anything I can do.”

  But when she got to him at last and could see that he was alive—his breath was visible in the winter air—what could be done that she could do? She was not a nurse, and the only rule she knew in such a situation was that the injured should not be moved. In any case, she hadn’t the strength to carry him across the snow and into the house.

  In her very helplessness she felt a kind of calm and comfort. She could do nothing and was free simply to look on, and what she found herself looking at was the blood that speckled the snow. In making ceramics it was just that effect she’d tried to get, little spots sprinkled irregularly, like freckles on pale skin, like the petals of anemones.

  But where had the blood come from? There was no visible wound on his head, which was bare and shorn close to the scalp, except across the pate. He had blond hair, lighter than her own, which was mousy. Whatever wound had decorated the snow so becomingly must have been on the side of his head that now lay upon the snow. She wondered if she should try to lift him just enough to turn his head, but no, that was the reason for the rule. His neck might be broken. Let the paramedics, or whoever came with the ambulance, make those decisions. If she touched him, she might become liable.

  She began to be able to look at his face, and she found it, in its own way, as strangely affecting as the bloodstains on the snow. Not beautiful, as the blood on the snow was beautiful. His features were too coarse for ordinary beauty. Conscious and on his feet, she wouldn’t have given him a second glance. A clod, a yahoo, an average resident of the area, like her own brother-in-law. But in these exceptional circumstances, poised (for all she knew) on the brink of death, he possessed a vulnerability she could not resist. Even an ugly man, when he is asleep, has a kind of beauty, a childlikeness that could speak to her. There had been men she’d wished she’d never met whom, nevertheless, when she’d seen them in the morning beside her in bed, she had, for that moment, loved with a love she’d never understood. For it vanished the moment their eyes opened and they became their familiar, boorish selves.

  This one—what had Louise called him? the Johnson boy? how archetypal!—was like those others. But he was not simply asleep—he was unconscious, perhaps on the verge of the great abyss, and so, on that account, more beautiful. If helplessness—her own and his—is an element of beauty. It is in children. And men, when they are helpless, become children again. And this one was neither man nor boy, but poised somewhere between.

  Then, as the poignancy of blood-speckled snow and the plumes of the boy’s breath bore in on her, she remembered something Brenda had said, not at her last tarot reading, but the one just before—that she was to meet a man, neither dark nor fair, a younger man than she had ever known in a carnal way, whose name began with J, and he would profoundly alter her own destiny.

  This boy, whose name was Johnson, who was neither dark nor fair, and who might be dying even now, must be the man foretold.

  He opened his eyes. They were gray, only tinged with blue, like her own.

  He smiled and said, “ ‘You will be showered by attention.’”

  At once the spell was broken. “Beg pardon?” Diana said.

  “ ‘You will be showered by attention.’ That was my last Winner’qus fortune. And the one before that was ‘A new friendship will cast a spell of enchantment.’ Holy shit.”

  “You fell off the roof,” Diana said by way of trying to restore a sense of order to what was happening.

  “I guess I did. My name is Alan Cottonwood. Or maybe it’s not. Probably not. I’m not dead? I thought maybe I was dead.”

  “You don’t seem to be dead.” Diana smiled. The boy was almost as charming alive as he had been when she thought he was dying. “Are you in pain?”

  “You better believe it. But it’s like—” He took a breath, and another breath, but she waited, knowing he’d continue. “It’s like there are two of me. One feels the pain, the other’s talking to you. I fell off the roof.”

  “I know. I had someone call for an ambulance.”

  “ ‘The concern of others will make your trip a delight.’ That’s another one. I thought the chimney was going to fall on top of me, but I guess it didn’t. I’m lucky.”

  “I’d say so.”

  “ ‘New experiences and new friends will enrich your life.’ It’s weird—it’s like I can remember all of them. I never thought they made a speck of difference. It’s like believing in fucking fortune cookies.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t really know what you’re talking about.”

  “How could you,” he said, and then he blacked out again.

  She envied him. She would have liked then and there to do just the same. Oblivion, and the same smile accompanying it. It was against all reason for this to be happening. He was probably still a teenager. She must be twice his age.

  Nevertheless, she was in love.

  Louise appeared around the corner of the house. “Is he all right?” she asked.

  “I think so. We talked awhile, but he was delirious.”

  “Dr. Karbenkian is on his way here.”

  “Dr. Karbenkian?” He was the doctor who treated the old ladies in Navaho House. Diana had no more confidence in him than in a veterinarian. “I said to call an ambulance.”

  “I know. But Mrs. Turney wanted him. She said she didn’t think it was that serious.”

  “She didn’t think—! She’s worried about her liability, that’s what she’s thinking!”

  “Probably,” said Louise dryly. “Anyhow, with luck, the boy’ll be all right. You said he was talking to you?”

  “Yes, you heard what I said!”

  Louise just stood there, looking put upon. Then she said, “Anything you want me to do? A blanket or something?”

  Diana looked down at the boy lying in the snow, then at the blood freckling the snow. “No,” she said. “He’ll be all right till the doctor gets here.”

  “Okay if I get the rest of the groceries out of the car?”

  “Sure, go ahead. I’ll stay here.”

  Louise didn’t move. “Your mother said she’d like to talk to you.”

  “Then she can come out here.”

  Louise emitted a scornful huff. She knew, as Diana did, that nothing short of a fire would get Mrs. Turney out of the house in this weather. She was probably already back in front of the TV with the rest of the old ladies.

  “Then I’ll go get the groceries. Or they’ll freeze right there in the car.”

  “You do that, Louise.”

  Louise went away.

  Diana removed her glove and touched the boy’s forehead. It was icy cold. His cheek the same.

  “Are you awake?” she asked, tilting his chin toward her.

  Nothing. He might have been dead.

  She bent forward. Hesitated. And then, with a snowflake’s gentleness, she kissed his unresponsive lips.

  16

  From his birth—no, even before, from his conception—the boy had been a thorn in his side. A wound that would not heal. And now the wound was festering. That was a problem for which Matthew—chapter 5, verse 30—offered the best solution: If thy right hand offend thee, cut if off, and cast it from thee. Jesus was no milktoast liberal. He did not believe in half measures, he didn’t say on the one hand this but on the other that, no sir. Jesus hated the lukewarm. What Jesus said was, I say unto you that except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter the kingdom of heaven.

  On that particular count the Reverend Martin Johnson and Jesus were in close agreement. In the matter of loving enemies and turning the other cheek, they were sometimes at variance. Jesus Himself often seemed to be of two minds in such matters. The Gospel di
dn’t say what was to be done with a boy who would not accept correction, unless the parable of the prodigal son was to be understood in that light. But even there the sense of the parable seemed to be that the prodigal was to be allowed to go his own way until he’d learned his lesson. Wasting his substance with riotous living, in the words of Luke.

  Reverend Johnson had hinted to Alan of such possibilities. Not riotous living, of course. Just the Marine Corps. Alan had been approaching high school graduation at the time. His grades had not suggested he was college material, and he had formed no other noticeable ambition. When he wasn’t watching TV, he played games endlessly on his computer. You could hear him at it in his bedroom: a steady succession of muffled pings and blips. This was a way of wasting one’s substance that Luke had never foreseen. So, Reverend Johnson had put it to his grandson at their Sunday dinner: had he ever considered a military career?

  It had been a poorly chosen moment. He should have known better than to bring up the matter in front of Judy. His daughter, who ordinarily didn’t have that much to say at the dinner table, became shrill and abusive. She had thrown out hints and made veiled threats, and finally Reverend Johnson had been obliged to order the boy to leave the table and finish eating his dinner in the kitchen. Which he had done, obediently, but not before shoveling another helping of potatoes and gravy onto his already overloaded plate. That had always been the boy’s way. He didn’t sass back. He did nothing that could be construed as open rebellion. He just glowered and went his own way, like a Negro in the old days. What was the word for it? Passive resistance.

  And all the while, it now turned out, the boy had been scheming against him with diabolical cunning. Once again he’d got in contact with the authorities at New Ravensburg, and this time, because he was eighteen, he’d been allowed to meet with the prisoner James Cottonwood. That would have been bad enough in itself, but it seemed that Alan was in cahoots with the prisoner’s attorney to prove that Cottonwood was not his biological father and, therefore, that his conviction for rape should be reversed and he should be set loose. Reverend Johnson had no way of confirming these things with the new warden, who knew nothing of the background of the case (and who was a Democrat), but Reverend Johnson’s informant, Avo Kubelik, who was on the state board of corrections and a fellow board member of the Minnesota chapter of the Christian Coalition for Family Values, had counseled him that his grandson’s bizarre initiative could conceivably bear fruit. “But only,” Avo had added, “if the DNA tests support his case.”

  Reverend Johnson knew very little about DNA tests, but he distrusted them on principle, as he distrusted other alphabetical ploys of the radical left: AIDS, MTV, the ACLU, the NEA, UNESCO. There was no end of them. Anytime someone had a liberal agenda he wanted to disguise, he turned it into a set of initials. The whole point of DNA testing seemed to be to help convicted criminals get out of prison, so obviously it was just one more bowl of the liberals’ alphabet soup. Avo had agreed but then added a caution. Once the machinery was set in motion, there was no arguing with the results. You had to nip a situation like this in the bud.

  Reverend Johnson did not want James Cottonwood released from prison. The man posed a danger—to Judy, primarily, but also to Alan and, possibly, to himself. When he spoke to his daughter, Judy agreed that Alan must, on no account, be allowed to proceed with his effort to help James Cottonwood get out of New Ravensburg. Without any prompting on his part, Judy’s immediate concern was for her own safety. “You know what he’d do, first thing,” she’d said with conviction. “He’d come after me.”

  “Probably,” Reverend Johnson agreed.

  “Alan can’t do this,” she said. “I won’t let him.”

  “Maybe you can control him, Judy. He doesn’t listen to me.”

  “He’ll listen to me, all right!” Judy declared with one of her clench-jawed smiles that always reminded Reverend Johnson of her mother, Emma, dead these many years. It was not a smile he liked to remember, but it was potent. He would let Judy take charge of the situation and handle it her own way.

  The boy had driven off somewhere early in the morning without saying where. Judy made a couple of phone calls trying to track him down, and when that failed, she began to empty all the clothes in his closet into suitcases, which she lugged down the stairs and deposited on top of the snowbanks on either side of the front stoop of the rectory.

  “Judy,” he counseled, “do you think this is wise? Shouldn’t we try to talk to him first?”

  “He’ll get the message. He can’t do this. It’s crazy.”

  “Yes, that may be so. But—”

  “Fuck but!” Judy said. She stormed upstairs again and began filling cardboard boxes with the rest of Alan’s private effects.

  When she was in that sort of temper there was no contradicting her. At moments like this, when she became unusually energetic, Judy became beautiful again. In her teenage years she had been extraordinary, but even then, hers had not been the deceiving, thin-lipped beauty of conventional high school girls who starve themselves thin until they are married and then become sows. Judy was a true Johnson—large-limbed, broad-shouldered, a body framed for chill winters and hard work. Northern stock. You had to be of kindred stock to recognize the beauty in such women. They were not to be seen in Hollywood movies or on the covers of supermarket magazines. They more nearly resembled the statues that the pagan idolaters of Greece and Rome carved in marble and erected in their temples. A few such statues had found their way to the Minneapolis Institute of Art, where, twenty years earlier, as part of a tour group, Reverend Johnson had confronted them and been made to marvel.

  “This is Venus,” the tour leader had explained with a prim smirk, “the goddess of love. And behind her is another Venus, and there to the left, with some clothes on, is Hera or Juno, the goddess of home and marriage.” The tour leader had hastened to the next gallery, but Reverend Johnson had lingered among the pagan statues quite as though they were, indeed, gods and goddesses and he had fallen into their punishing power. It seemed to him that the headless, one-armed torso of the larger Venus was his own Judy—not in its exact dimensions but in some deeper way. In the tilt of the hip and thrust of the bosom, in the shamelessness and boldness of the bare flesh (it was hard to think of it as stone), in the smooth curves that seemed to insist on the touch they forbade. Seeing this fragment of the pagan past, Reverend Johnson was overcome with a sense that St. Paul might have seen this same statue himself—that, indeed, he must have. These were the very idols Paul had denounced before the people of Athens and of Ephesus. Not golden calves or metal serpents, as Reverend Johnson had once imagined, but these beautiful abominations, these hymns to lust, which were still being adored in the temples of the Secular Humanists—their museums and institutes and universities.

  He’d known it was sinful to linger among the idols, that simply to look upon them was a kind of worship, but he could not tear himself away. Better to marry than to burn, even Paul had advised. Meaning that some tribute must be made to the flesh. Not worship, as the pagans had worshiped. More a kind of tithe, a rendering unto Caesar, an admission that the flesh is weak. While Emma had been alive, these matters had not been a source of distress, for Emma had never denied him his conjugal rights. But when Emma had died… Knowing it was unwise to dwell upon such things, Reverend Johnson had exited the Minneapolis Institute and waited in the chartered bus for the tour group to reassemble.

  For an hour, for two hours, Alan’s belongings stood on the mounds of shoveled snow to either side of the front door—two canvas suitcases (his high school graduation present from Reverend Johnson, packed now for the first time) and two cardboard cartons brimming with junk emptied from drawers and bookshelves. Lunchtime went by without any sight of him, and then, just before two, a white Camry pulled up in front of the house, and Alan was in the passenger seat. He stayed in the seat while the driver, a woman in a knee-length sheepskin coat, went round to open his door and help him out of the car.


  “Would you look at that,” said Judy, who was standing beside Reverend Johnson at the parlor window. “He’s got his arm in a sling. And his head’s bandaged. Well, that isn’t going to change a thing.”

  “Who is the woman with him?” Reverend Johnson wanted to know.

  “Never seen her before,” said Judy, but then, squinching one eye closed: “No, wait. That’s Janet Kellog’s sister, the one who went away and became a teacher.”

  “What’s she doing with Alan?” Reverend Johnson insisted.

  Judy gave him a look. “You’ll have to ask him that one.”

  “I don’t want to engage in a family quarrel in front of strangers,” Reverend Johnson declared.

  “His stuffs out there in the snow, and he’s probably already seen it. It’s too late now to avoid an argument.”

  Alan started up the narrow snow canyon to the front door with the woman following close behind. They stopped beside the cardboard boxes, where Alan got down on his knees and began picking through the contents with his good arm.

  It couldn’t be helped or put off. Reverend Johnson squared his shoulders and went to the front door. He took a scarf from the coatrack and wrapped it round his neck, but he didn’t take the time to get into his overcoat, though he was usually careful not to take a chill. He went outside and stood upon the stoop, his arms folded across his chest. Judy was right behind him.

  “Grandpa?” the boy said.

  “I think you know why your things are where they are, young man. You can just take them away with you. You’re not coming into this house.”

  “Reverend Johnson,” the woman who’d come home with Alan began in a placating tone.

  He scowled. “This has nothing to do with you, young woman. I would appreciate it if you would just return to your car—and drive off.”

  “I’m afraid you don’t understand the situation, sir,” she persisted. “Your grandson has just sustained a serious injury. He shouldn’t even be on his feet. Whatever this quarrel may be about, this is surely the wrong—”