Lullaby

  In the whole living room, there’s just a recliner chair. There’s a little portable television sitting on a milk crate. Out through sliding glass doors, you can see a patio. Lined up along the far edge of the patio are green florist vases, brimful of rain, rotted black flowers bent and falling out of them. Rotted brown roses on black sticks fuzzy with gray mold. Tied around one arrangement is a wide black satin ribbon.

  In the living room shag carpet, there’s the ghost outlines left by a sofa. There’s the outlines left by a china cabinet, the little dents left by the feet of chairs and tables. There’s a big flat square where the carpet is all crushed the same. It looks so familiar.

  The race car guy waves me at the recliner and says, “Sit down.” He drinks some beer and says, “Sit, and we’ll talk about what God’s really like.”

  The big flat square in the carpet, it was left by a playpen.

  I ask if my wife can use his bathroom.

  And he tilts his head to one side, looking at Helen. With his free hand, he scratches the back of his neck, saying, “Sure. It’s at the end of the hall,” and he waves with his beer bottle.

  Helen looks at the beer sloshed out on the carpet and says, “Thank you.” She takes her daily planner from under her arm and hands it to me, saying, “In case you need it, here’s a Bible.”

  Her book full of political targets and real estate closings. Great.

  It’s still warm from her armpit.

  She disappears down the hallway. The sound of a bathroom fan comes on. A door shuts somewhere.

  “Sit,” the race car guy says.

  And I sit.

  He stands over me so close I’m afraid to open the daily planner, afraid he’ll see it’s not a real Bible. He smells like beer and sweat. The little race cars are eye level with me. The oval tires are tilted so they look like they’re going fast. The guy takes another drink and says, “Tell me all about God.”

  The recliner chair smells like him. It’s gold velvet, darker brown on the arms from dirt. It’s warm. And I say God’s a noble, hard-line moralist who refuses to accept anything but steadfast righteous conduct. He’s a bastion of upright standards, a lamp that shines its light to reveal the evil of this world. God will always be in our hearts and souls because His own soul is so strong and so un——

  “Bullshit,” says the guy. He turns away and goes to look out the patio doors. His face is reflected in the glass, just his eyes, with his dark stubbly jaw lost in shadow.

  In my best radio preacher voice, I say how God is the moral yardstick against which millions of people must measure their own lives. He’s the flaming sword, sent down to route the misdeeds and evildoers from the temple of——

  “Bullshit!” the guy shouts at his reflection in the glass door. Beer spray runs down his reflected face.

  Helen is standing in the doorway to the hall, one hand at her mouth, chewing her knuckle. She looks at me and shrugs. She disappears back down the hallway.

  From the gold velvet recliner, I say how God is an angel of unparalleled power and impact, a conscience for the world around Him, a world of sin and cruel intent, a world of hidd——

  In almost a whisper, the guy says, “Bullshit.” The fog of his breath has erased his reflection. He turns to look at me, pointing at me with his beer hand, saying, “Read to me where it says in your Bible something that will fix things.”

  Helen’s daily organizer bound in red leather, I open it a crack and peek inside.

  “Tell me how to prove to the police I didn’t kill anybody,” the guy says.

  In the organizer is the name Renny O’Toole and the date June 2. Whoever he is, he’s dead. On September 10, Samara Umpirsi is entered. On August 17, Helen closed a deal for a house on Gardner Hill Road. That, and she killed the tyrant king of the Tongle Republic.

  “Read!” the race car guy shouts. The beer in his hand foams over his fingers and drips on the carpet. He says, “Read to me where it says I can lose everything in one night and people are going to say it’s my fault.”

  I peek in the book, and it’s more names of dead people.

  “Read,” the guy says, and drinks his beer. “You read where it says a wife can accuse her husband of killing their kid and everybody is supposed to believe her.”

  Early in the book, the writing is faded and hard to read. The pages are stiff and flyspecked. Before that, someone’s started tearing out the oldest pages.

  “I asked God,” the guy says. He shakes his beer at me and says, “I asked Him to give me a family. I went to church.”

  I say how maybe God didn’t start out by attacking and berating everybody who prayed. I say, maybe it was after years and years of getting the same prayers about unwanted pregnancies, about divorces, about family squabbles. Maybe it was because God’s audience grew and more people were making demands. Maybe it was the more praise He got. Maybe power corrupts, but He wasn’t always a bastard.

  And the race car guy says, “Listen.” He says, “I go to court in two days to decide if I’m accused of murder.” He says, “You tell me how God is going to save me.”

  His breath nothing but beer, he says, “You tell me.”

  Mona would have me tell the truth. To save this guy. To save myself and Helen. To reunite us with humanity. Maybe this guy and his wife would reunite, but then the poem would be out. Millions would die. The rest would live in that world of silence, hearing only what they think is safe. Plugging their ears and burning books, movies, music.

  Somewhere a toilet flushes. A bathroom fan shuts off. A door opens.

  The guy puts the beer in his mouth and bubbles glug up inside the bottle.

  Helen appears in the doorway to the hall.

  My foot aches, and I ask, has he considered taking up a hobby?

  Maybe something he could do in prison.

  Constructive destruction. I’m sure Helen would approve of the sacrifice. Condemning one innocent man so millions don’t die.

  Here’s every lab animal who dies to save a dozen cancer patients.

  And the race car guy says, “I think you’d better leave.”

  Walking out to the car, I hand Helen the daily planner and tell her, here’s your Bible. My pager goes off, and it’s some number I don’t know.

  Her white gloves are black with dust, and she says she tore up the culling song page and dropped it out the nursery window. It’s raining. The paper will rot.

  I say, that’s not good enough. Some kid could find it. Just the fact that it’s tore up will make someone want to put it back together. Some detective investigating the death of a child, maybe.

  And Helen says, “That bathroom was a nightmare.”

  We drive around the block and park. Mona’s scribbling in the backseat. Oyster’s on his phone. Then Helen waits while I crouch down and walk back to the house. I duck around the back, the wet lawn sucking at my shoes, until I’m under the window Helen says is the nursery. The window’s still open, the curtains hanging out a little at the bottom. Pink curtains.

  The torn bits of page are scattered in the mud, and I start to pick them all up.

  Behind the curtains, in the empty room, you can hear the door open. The outline of somebody comes in from the hallway, and I crouch in the mud under the window. A man’s hand comes down on the windowsill so I pull back flat against the house. From somewhere above me where I can’t see, a man starts crying.

  It starts to rain harder.

  The man stands in the window, leaning both hands on the open sill. He sobs louder. You can smell the beer inside him.

  Me, I can’t run. I can’t stand up. With my hands clamped over my nose and mouth, I crouch inches away, squeezed tight against the foundation, hidden. And hitting me as fast as a chill, me breathing between my fingers, I start to cry, too. Sobs as hard as vomiting. My belly cramps. My teeth biting into my palm, the snot sprays into my hands.

  The man sniffs, hard and bubbling. It’s raining harder, and water seeps into my shoes through the laces.

&n
bsp; The torn bits of the poem in my hand, I hold the power of life and death. I just can’t do anything. Not yet.

  And maybe you don’t go to hell for the things you do. Maybe you go to hell for the things you don’t do.

  My shoes full of cold water, my foot stops hurting. My hand slick with snot and tears, I reach down and turn off my pager.

  When we find the grimoire, if there is some way to raise the dead, maybe we won’t burn it. Not right away.

  Chapter 29

  The police report doesn’t say how warm my wife, Gina, felt when I woke up that morning. How soft and warm she felt under the covers. How when I turned next to her, she rolled onto her back, her hair fanned out on her pillow. Her head was tipped a little toward one shoulder. Her morning skin smelled warm, the way sunlight looks bouncing up off a white tablecloth in a nice restaurant near the beach on your honeymoon.

  Sun came through the blue curtains, making her skin blue. Her lips blue. Her eyelashes were lying across each cheek. Her mouth was a loose smile.

  Still half asleep, I cupped my hand behind her neck and tilted her face back and kissed her.

  Her neck and shoulder were so easy and relaxed.

  Still kissing her warm, relaxed mouth, I pulled her nightgown up around her waist.

  Her legs seemed to roll apart, and my hand found her loose and wet inside.

  Under the covers, my eyes closed, I worked my tongue inside. With my wet fingers, I peeled back the smooth pink edges of her and licked deeper. The tide of air going in and out of me. At the top of each breath, I drove my mouth up into her.

  For once, Katrin had slept the whole night and wasn’t crying.

  My mouth climbed to Gina’s belly button. It climbed to her breasts. With one wet finger in her mouth, my other fingers flick across her nipples. My mouth cups over her other breast and my tongue touches the nipple inside.

  Gina’s head rolled to one side, and I licked the back of her ear. My hips pressing her legs apart, I put myself inside.

  The loose smile on her face, the way her mouth came open at the last moment and her head sunk deep into the pillow, she was so quiet. It was the best it had been since before Katrin was born.

  A minute later, I slipped out of bed and took a shower. I tiptoed into my clothes and eased the bedroom door shut behind me. In the nursery, I kissed Katrin on the side of her head. I felt her diaper. The sun came through her yellow curtains. Her toys and books. She looked so perfect.

  I felt so blessed.

  No one in the world was as lucky as me that morning.

  Here, driving Helen’s car with her asleep in the front seat beside me. Tonight, we’re in Ohio or Iowa or Idaho, with Mona asleep in the back. Helen’s pink hair pillowed against my shoulder. Mona sprawled in the rearview mirror, sprawled in her colored pens and books. Oyster asleep. This is the life I have now. For better or for worse. For richer, for poorer.

  That was my last really good day. It wasn’t until I came home from work that I knew the truth.

  Gina was still lying in the same position.

  The police report would call it postmortem sexual intercourse.

  Nash comes to mind.

  Katrin was still quiet. The underside of her head had turned dark red.

  Livor mortis. Oxygenated hemoglobin.

  It wasn’t until I came home that I knew what I’d done.

  Here, parked in the leather smell of Helen’s big Realtor car, the sun is just above the horizon. It’s the same moment now as it was then. We’re parked under a tree, on a treelined street in a neighborhood of little houses. It’s some kind of flowering tree, and all night, pink flower petals have fallen on the car, sticking to the dew. Helen’s car is pink as a parade float, covered in flowers, and I’m spying out through just a hole where the petals don’t cover the windshield.

  The morning light shining in through the layer of petals is pink.

  Rose-colored. On Helen and Mona and Oyster, asleep.

  Down the block, an old couple is working in the flower beds along their foundation. The old man fills a watering can at a spigot. The old woman kneels, pulling weeds.

  I turn my pager back on, and it starts beeping right away.

  Helen jerks awake.

  The phone number on my pager, I don’t recognize it.

  Helen sits up, blinking, looking at me. She looks at the tiny sparkling watch on her wrist. On one side of her face are deep red pockmarks where she slept on her dangling emerald earrings. She looks at the layer of pink covering all the windows. She plunges the pink fingernails of both hands into her hair and fluffs it, saying, “Where are we now?”

  Some people still think knowledge is power.

  I tell her, I have no idea.

  Chapter 30

  Mona stands at my elbow. She holds a glossy brochure open, pushing it in my face, saying, “Can we go here? Please? Just for a couple hours? Please?”

  Photographs in the brochure show people screaming with their hands in the air, riding a roller coaster. Photos show people driving go-carts around a track outlined in old tires. More people are eating cotton candy and riding plastic horses on a merry-go-round. Other people are locked into seats on a Ferris wheel. Along the top of the brochure in big scrolling letters it says: LaughLand, The Family Place.

  Except in place of the a’s are four laughing clown faces. A mother, a father, a son, a daughter.

  We have another eighty-four books to disarm. That’s dozens more libraries in cities all over the country. Then there’s the grimoire to find. There’s people to bring back from the dead. Or just castrate. Or there’s all of humanity to kill, depending on whom you ask.

  There’s so much we need to get fixed. To get back to God, as Mona would say. Just to break even.

  Karl Marx would say we’ve made every plant and animal our enemy to justify killing it.

  In the newspaper today, it says the husband of one of the fashion models is being held under suspicion of murder.

  I’m standing at a public phone outside some small-town library while Helen’s inside trashing another book with Oyster.

  A man’s voice on the phone says, “Homicide Division.”

  Into the phone, I ask, who is this?

  And the voice says, “Detective Ben Danton, Homicide Division.” He says, “Who is this?”

  A police detective. Mona would call him my savior, sent to wrangle me back into the fold with the rest of humanity. This is the number that’s been appearing on my pager for the past couple days.

  Mona turns the brochure over and says, “Just look.” Braided in her hair are broken windmills and train trestles and radio towers.

  Photos show smiling children getting hugged by clowns. It shows parents strolling hand in hand and riding little skiffs through a Tunnel of Love.

  She says, “This trip doesn’t have to be all work.”

  Helen comes out of the library doors and starts down the front steps, and Mona turns and rushes at her, saying, “Helen, Mr. Streator said it was okay.”

  And I put the pay phone receiver to my chest and say, I did not.

  Oyster is hanging back, a step behind Helen’s elbow.

  Mona holds the brochure in Helen’s face, saying, “Look how much fun.”

  On the phone, Detective Danton says, “Who is this?”

  It was okay to sacrifice the poor guy in his race car boxer shorts. It’s okay to sacrifice the young woman in the apron printed with little chickens. To not tell them the truth, to let them suffer. And to sacrifice the widower of some fashion model. But sacrificing me to save the millions is another thing altogether.

  Into the phone, I say my name, Streator, and that he paged me.

  “Mr. Streator,” he says, “we’d like you to come in for questioning.”

  I ask, about what?

  “Why don’t we talk about that in person?” he says.

  I ask if this is about a death.

  “When can you make it in?” he says.

  I ask if this is about t
he series of deaths with no apparent cause.

  “Sooner would be better than later,” he says.

  I ask if this is because one victim was my upstairs neighbor and three were my editors.

  And Danton says, “You don’t say?”

  I ask if this is because I passed three more victims in the street the moment before they each died.

  And Danton says, “That’s news to me.”

  I ask if this is because I stood within spitting distance of the young sideburns guy who died in the bar on Third Avenue.

  “Uh-huh,” he says. “You’d mean Marty Latanzi.”

  I ask if this is because all the dead fashion models show signs of postmortem sex, the same way my wife did twenty years ago. And no doubt they have security camera film of me talking to a librarian named Symon at the moment he dropped dead.

  You can hear a pencil somewhere scratching fast notes on paper.

  Away from the phone, I hear someone else say, “Keep him on the line.”

  I ask if this is really a ploy to arrest me for suspicion of murder.

  And Detective Danton says, “Don’t make us issue a bench warrant.”

  The more people die, the more things stay the same.

  Officer Danton, I say. I ask, can he tell me where to find him at this exact moment?

  Sticks and stones may break your bones, but here we go again. Fast as a scream, the culling song spins through my head, and the phone line goes dead.

  I’ve killed my savior. Detective Ben Danton. I’m that much further from the rest of humanity.

  Constructive destruction.

  Oyster shakes his plastic cigarette lighter, slapping it against the palm of one hand. Then he gives it to Helen and watches while she takes a folded page out of her purse. She lights and holds it over the gutter.

  While Mona’s reading the brochure, Helen holds the burning page near the edge of it. The photos of happy, smiling families puff into flame, and Mona shrieks and drops them. Still holding the burning page, Helen kicks the burning families into the gutter. The fire in her hand gets bigger and bigger, stuttering and smoking in the breeze.

  And for whatever reason, I think of Nash and his burning fuse.