Lullaby

  I say, nuclear weapons are bad enough. Chemical weapons. I say, certain people having magic is not going to make the world a better place.

  I tell Mona, if it comes to it, I’ll need her help.

  I say, we may need to kill Helen.

  And Mona shakes her head over the bloody ruins on the motel towel. She says, “So your answer for too much killing is more killing?”

  Just Helen, I say. And maybe Nash, if my theory about the dead fashion models is right. After we kill them, we can go back to normal.

  On television, the young man with the microphone, he’s saying how a three-alarm fire has most of the downtown area paralyzed. He says, the structure is fully involved. He says, it’s one of the city’s favorite institutions.

  “Oyster,” Mona says, “doesn’t like your idea of normal.”

  The burning institution, it’s the Book Barn. And behind him, Helen and Oyster are gone.

  Mona says, “In a detective story, do you wonder why we root for the detective to win?” She says, maybe it’s not just for revenge or to stop the killing. Maybe we really want to see the killer redeemed. The detective is the killer’s savior. Imagine if Jesus chased you around, trying to catch you and save your soul. Not just a patient passive God, but a hardworking, aggressive bloodhound. We want the criminal to confess during the trial. We want him to be exposed in the drawing room scene, surrounded by his peers. The detective is a shepherd, and we want the criminal back in the fold, returned to us. We love him. We miss him. We want to hug him.

  Mona says, “Maybe that’s why so many women marry killers in prison. To help heal them.”

  I tell her, there’s nobody who misses me.

  Mona shakes her head and says, “You know, you and Helen are so much like my parents.”

  Mona. Mulberry. My daughter.

  And flopping back on the bed, I ask, how’s that?

  And pulling a door frame out of my foot, Mona says, “Just this morning, Helen told me she might need to kill you.”

  My pager goes off. It’s a number I don’t know. The pager says it’s very important.

  And Mona digs a stained-glass window out of a bloody pit in my foot. She holds it up so the ceiling light comes through the colored bits, and looking at the tiny window, she says, “I’m more worried about Oyster. He doesn’t always tell the truth.”

  And the motel room door, right then it blows open. The sirens outside. The sirens on the television. The flash of red and blue lights strobing across the window curtains. Right then Helen and Oyster fall into the room, laughing and panting. Oyster slinging a bag of cosmetics. Helen holding her high heels in one hand. They both smell like Scotch whisky and smoke.

  Chapter 26

  Imagine a plague you catch through your ears. Oyster and his tree-hugging, eco-bullshit, his bio-invasive, apocryphal bullshit. The virus of his information. What used to be a beautiful deep green jungle to me, it’s now a tragedy of English ivy choking everything else to death. The lovely shining black flocks of starlings, with their creepy whistling songs, they rob the nests of a hundred different native birds.

  Imagine an idea that occupies your mind the way an army occupies a city.

  Outside the car now is America.

  Oh, beautiful starling-filled skies,

  Over amber waves of tansy ragwort.

  Oh, purple mountains of loosestrife,

  Above the bubonic-plagued plain.

  America.

  A siege of ideas. The whole power grab of life.

  After listening to Oyster, a glass of milk isn’t just a nice drink with chocolate chip cookies. It’s cows forced to stay pregnant and pumped with hormones. It’s the inevitable calves that live a few miserable months, squeezed in veal boxes. A pork chop means a pig, stabbed and bleeding, with a snare around one foot, being hung up to die screaming as it’s sectioned into chops and roasts and lard. Even a hard-boiled egg is a hen with her feet crippled from living in a battery cage only four inches wide, so narrow she can’t raise her wings, so maddening her beak is cut off so she won’t attack the hens trapped on each side of her. With her feathers rubbed off by the cage and her beak cut, she lays egg after egg until her bones are so depleted of calcium that they shatter at the slaughterhouse.

  This is the chicken in chicken noodle soup, the laying hens, the hens so bruised and scarred that they have to be shredded and cooked because nobody would ever buy them in a butcher’s case. This is the chicken in corn dogs. Chicken nuggets.

  This is all Oyster talks about. This is his plague of information. This is when I turn on the radio, to country and western music. To basketball. Anything, so long as it’s loud and constant and lets me pretend my breakfast sandwich is just a breakfast sandwich. That an animal is just that. An egg is just an egg. Cheese isn’t a tiny suffering veal. That eating this is my right as a human being.

  Here’s Big Brother singing and dancing so I don’t start thinking too much for my own good.

  In the local newspaper today, there’s another dead fashion model. There’s an ad that says:

  Attention Patrons of Falling Star Puppy Farm

  It says: “If your new dog spreads infectious rabies to any child in your household, you may be eligible to take part in a class-action lawsuit.”

  Driving through what used to be beautiful, natural country, while eating what used to be an egg sandwich, I ask why they couldn’t just buy the three books they were shopping for at the Book Barn. Oyster and Helen. Or just steal the pages and leave the rest of the books. I say, the reason we’re making this trip is so people won’t be burning books.

  “Relax,” Helen says, driving. “The store had three copies of the book. The problem was they didn’t know where.”

  And Oyster says, “They were all misshelved.” Mona’s head is asleep in his lap, and he’s peeling apart the strands of her hair into skeins of red and black. “It’s the only way she falls asleep,” he says. “She’d sleep forever if I kept doing this.”

  For whatever reason, my wife comes to mind, my wife and daughter.

  What with the sirens and fire engines, we were awake all night.

  “That Book Barn place was like a rat’s warren,” Helen says.

  Oyster is braiding the broken bits of civilization into Mona’s hair. The artifacts from my foot, the broken columns and stairways and lightning rods. He’s pulled apart her Navajo dream catcher and braids the I Ching coins and glass beads and cords into her hair. The Easter shades of blue and pink feathers.

  “We spent the entire evening searching,” Helen says. “We checked every book in the children’s section. We looked through Science. We checked Religion. We checked Philosophy. Poetry. Folk Stories. We checked Ethnic Literature. We checked all through Fiction.”

  And Oyster says, “The books were on their computer inventory but just lost in the store.”

  So they burned the whole place. For three books. They burned tens of thousands of books to make sure those three were destroyed.

  “It seemed our only realistic option,” Helen says. “You know what those books can do.”

  For whatever reason, Sodom and Gomorrah come to mind. How God would spare the city if there was even one good person still in it.

  Here’s just the opposite. Thousands killed in order to destroy a few.

  Imagine a new Dark Age. Imagine the books burning. And the tapes and films and files, the radios and televisions, will all go into the same bonfire.

  If we’re preventing that world or creating it, I don’t know.

  It said on the television how two security guards were found dead after the fire.

  “Actually,” Helen says, “they were dead long before the fire. We needed some time to spread the gasoline.”

  We’re killing people to save lives?

  We’re burning books to save books?

  I ask, what is this trip turning into?

  “What it’s always been,” Oyster says, threading some hair through an I Ching coin. “It’s a big power grab.
”

  He says, “You want to keep the world the way it is, Dad, with just you in charge.”

  Helen, he says, wants the same world, but with her in charge. Every generation wants to be the last. Every generation hates the next trend in music they can’t understand. We hate to give up those reins of our culture. To find our own music playing in elevators. The ballad for our revolution, turned into background music for a television commercial. To find our generation’s clothes and hair suddenly retro.

  “Me,” Oyster says, “I’m all for wiping the slate clean, of books and people, and starting over. I’m for nobody being in charge.”

  With him and Mona as the new Adam and Eve?

  “Nope,” he says, smoothing the hair back from Mona’s sleeping face. “We’d have to go, too.”

  I ask, does he hate people so much that he’d kill the woman he loves? I ask, why doesn’t he just kill himself?

  “No,” Oyster says, “I just love everything the same. Plants, animals, humans. I just don’t believe the big lie about how we can continue to be fruitful and multiply without destroying ourselves.”

  I say, he’s a traitor to his species.

  “I’m a fucking patriot,” Oyster says, and looks out his window. “This culling poem is a blessing. Why do you think it was created in the first place? It will save millions of people from the slow terrible death we’re headed for from disease, from famine, drought, from solar radiation, from war, from all the places we’re headed.”

  So he’s willing to kill himself and Mona? I ask, so what about his parents? Will he just kill them, too? What about all the little children who’ve had little or no life? What about all the good, hardworking people who live green and recycle? The vegans? Aren’t they innocent in his mind?

  “This isn’t about guilt or innocence,” he says. “The dinosaurs weren’t morally good or bad, but they’re all dead.”

  That kind of thinking makes him an Adolf Hitler. A Joseph Stalin. A serial killer. A mass murderer.

  And threading a stained-glass window into Mona’s hair, Oyster says, “I want to be what killed the dinosaurs.”

  And I say, it was an act of God that killed the dinosaurs.

  I say, I’m not going another mile with a wannabe mass murderer.

  And Oyster says, “What about Dr. Sara? Mom? Help me out. How many others has Dad here already killed?”

  And Helen says, “I’m sewing my fish.”

  At the sound of Oyster’s cigarette lighter, I turn and ask, does he have to smoke? I say, I’m trying to eat.

  But Oyster’s got Mona’s book about primitive crafts, Traditional Tribal Hobby-Krafts, and he’s holding it open above the lighter, fanning the pages in the little flame. With his window open a crack, he slips the book out, letting the flames explode in the wind before he drops it.

  Cheatgrass loves fire.

  He says, “Books can be so evil. Mulberry needs to invent her own kind of spirituality.”

  Helen’s phone rings. Oyster’s phone rings.

  Mona sighs and stretches her arms. With her eyes closed, Oyster’s hands still picking through her hair, his phone still ringing, Mona grinds her head into Oyster’s lap and says, “Maybe the grimoire will have a spell to stop overpopulation.”

  Helen opens the planner book to today’s date and writes a name. Into her phone, she says, “Don’t bother with an exorcism. We can put the house right back on the market.”

  Mona says, “You know, we need some kind of universal ‘gelding spell.’”

  And I ask, isn’t anybody here worried about going to hell?

  And Oyster takes his phone out of his medicine bag.

  His phone ringing and ringing.

  Helen puts her phone against her chest and says, “Don’t think for a second that the government’s not already working on some swell infectious ways to stop overpopulation.”

  And Oyster says, “In order to save the world, Jesus Christ suffered for about thirty-six hours on the cross.” His phone ringing and ringing, he says, “I’m willing to suffer an eternity in hell for the same cause.”

  His phone ringing and ringing.

  Into her phone, Helen says, “Really? Your bedroom smells like sulfur?”

  “You figure out who’s the better savior,” Oyster says, and flips his cell phone open. Into the phone, he says, “Dunbar, Dunaway and Doogan, Attorneys-at-Law . . .”

  Chapter 27

  I magine if the Chicago fire of 1871 had gone on for six months before anyone noticed. Imagine if the Johnstown flood in 1889 or the 1906 San Francisco earthquake had lasted six months, a year two years, before anyone paid attention to it.

  Building with wood, building on fault lines, building on flood-plains, each era creates its own “natural” disasters.

  Imagine a flood of dark green in the downtown of any major city, the office and condo towers submerged inch by inch.

  Now, here and now, I’m writing from Seattle. A day, a week, a month late. Who knows how far after the fact. The Sarge and me, we’re still witch-hunting

  Hederá helixseattle, botanists are calling this new variety of English ivy. One week, maybe the planters around the Olympic Professional Plaza, they looked a little overgrown. The ivy was crowding the pansies. Some vines had rooted into the side of the brick facade and were inching up. No one noticed. It had been raining a lot.

  No one noticed until the morning the residents of the Park Senior Living Center found their lobby doors sealed with ivy. That same day the south wall of the Fremont Theater, brick and concrete three feet thick, it buckled onto a sellout crowd. That same day, part of the underground bus mall caved in.

  No one can really say when Hedera helixseattle first took root, but you can make a good guess.

  Looking through back issues of the Seattle Times, there’s an ad in the May 5 Entertainment section. Three columns wide, it says:

  Attention Patrons of the Oracle Sushi Palace

  The ad says, “If you experience severe rectal itching caused by intestinal parasites, you may be eligible to take part in a class-action lawsuit.” Then it gives a phone number.

  Me, here with the Sarge, I call the number.

  A man’s voice says, “Denton, Daimler and Dick, Attorneys-at-Law.”

  And I say, “Oyster?”

  I say, “Where are you, you little fuck?”

  And the line goes dead.

  Here and now, writing this in Seattle, in a diner just outside of the Department of Public Works barricades, a waitress tells the Sarge and me, “They can’t kill the ivy now,” and she pours us more coffee. She looks out the window at the walls of green, veined with fat gray vines. She says, “It’s the only thing holding that part of town together”

  Inside the net of vines and leaves, the bricks are buckling and shifted. Cracks shatter the concrete. The windows are squeezed until the glass breaks. Door won’t open because the frames are so warped. Birds fly in and out of the straight-up green cliffs, eating the ivy seeds, shitting them everywhere. A block away, the streets are canyons of green, the asphalt and sidewalks buried in green.

  “The Green Menace,” the newspapers call it. The ivy equivalent of killer bees. The Ivy Inferno.

  Silent, unstoppable. The end of civilization in slow motion.

  The waitress, she says every time city crews prune the vines, or burn them with flamethrowers, or spray them with poison—even the time they herded in pygmy goats to eat it—the ivy roots spread. The roots collapsed tunnels. They severed underground cables and pipes.

  The Sarge dials the number from the sushi ad, again and again, but the line stays dead.

  The waitress looks at the fingers of ivy already coming across the street. In another week, she’ll be out of a job.

  “The National Guard promised us containment,” she says.

  She says, “I hear they’ve got the ivy in Portland now, too. And San Francisco.” She sighs and says, “We’re definitely losing this one.”

  Chapter 28

 
The man opens his front door, and here are Helen and I on his front porch, me carrying Helen’s cosmetic case, standing a half-step behind her as Helen points the long pink nail of her index finger and says, “Oh God.”

  She has her daily planner tucked under one arm and says, “My husband,” and she steps back. “My husband would like to witness to you about the promise of the Lord Jesus Christ.”

  Helen’s suit is yellow, but not a buttercup yellow. It’s more the yellow of a buttercup made of gold and pavé citrons by Carl Fabergé.

  The man’s holding a bottle of beer. He’s wearing gray sweat socks with no shoes. His bathrobe hangs open in the front, and inside, he’s wearing a white T-shirt and boxer shorts patterned with little race cars. With one hand, he sticks the beer in his mouth. His head tips back, and bubbles glub up inside the bottle. The little race cars have oval tires tilted forward. The man belches and says, “You guys for real?”

  He has black hair hanging down a wrinkled Frankenstein forehead. He has sad baggy hound-dog eyes.

  My hand out front to shake his, I say, Mr. Sierra? I say, we’re here to share the joy of God’s love.

  And the race car guy frowns and says, “How is it you know my name?” He squints at me and says, “Did Bonnie send you to talk to me?”

  And Helen leans around him, looking into the living room. She snaps open her purse and takes out a pair of white gloves and starts wiggling her fingers inside. She buttons a little button at the cuff of each glove and says, “May we come in?”

  It was supposed to be easier than this.

  Plan B, if we find a man at home, we bring out plan B.

  The race car guy puts the beer bottle in his mouth, and his stubbly cheeks suck in around it. His head tilts back and the rest of the beer bubbles away. He steps to one side and says, “Well. Sit down.” He looks at his empty bottle and says, “Can I get you a beer?”

  We step in, and he goes in the kitchen. There’s the hiss of him popping a bottle cap.