Lullaby

  My pants and her skirt flutter down into the heap, the fallen crystals, our shoes, all on the floor with the grimoire.

  Chapter 38

  At the offices of Helen Boyle Realty, the doors are locked, and when I knock, Mona shouts through the glass, “We’re not open.”

  And I shout, I’m not a customer.

  Inside, she’s sitting at her computer, keyboarding something. Every couple keystrokes, Mona looks back and forth between the keys and the screen. On the screen, at the top in big letters, it says, “Resume.”

  The police scanner says a code nine-twelve.

  Still keyboarding, Mona says, “I don’t know why I shouldn’t charge you with assault.”

  Maybe because she cares about me and Helen, I say.

  And Mona says, “No, that’s not it.”

  Maybe she won’t blow the whistle because she still wants the grimoire.

  And Mona doesn’t say anything. She turns in her chair and pulls up the side of her peasant blouse. The skin on her ribs, under her arms, is white with purple blotches.

  Tough love.

  Through the door into Helen’s office, Helen yells, “What’s another word for ‘tormented’?” Her desk is covered with open books. Under her desk, she’s wearing one pink shoe and one yellow shoe.

  The pink silk sofa, Mona’s carved Louis XIV desk, the lion-legged sofa table, it’s all frosted with dust. The flower arrangements are withered and brown, standing in black, stinking water.

  The police scanner says a code three-eleven.

  I say, I’m sorry. Grabbing her wasn’t right. I pinch the crease in my pant legs and pull them up to show her the purple bruises on my shins.

  “That’s different,” Mona says. “I was defending myself.”

  I stamp my foot a couple times and say my infection’s a lot better. I say, thank you.

  And Helen yells, “Mona? What’s another way of saying ‘butchered’?”

  Mona says, “On your way out, we need to have a little talk.”

  In the inner office, Helen’s facedown in an open book. It’s a Hebrew dictionary. Next to it is a guide to classical Latin. Under that is a book about Aramaic. Next to that is an unfolded copy of the culling spell. The trash can next to the desk is filled with paper coffee cups.

  I say, hey.

  And Helen looks up. There’s a coffee stain on her green lapel. The grimoire is open next to the Hebrew dictionary. And Helen blinks once, twice, three times and says, “Mr. Streator.”

  I ask if she’d like to get some lunch. I still need to go up against John Nash, to confront him. I was hoping she might give me something for an edge. An invisibility spell, maybe. Or a mind-control spell. Maybe something so I won’t have to kill him. I come around to see what she’s translating.

  And Helen slides a sheet of paper on top of the grimoire, saying, “I’m a little occupied today.” With a pen in one hand, she waits. With the other hand, she shuts the dictionary. She says, “Shouldn’t you be hiding from the police?”

  And I say, how about a movie?

  And she says, “Not this weekend.”

  I say, how about I get us tickets to the symphony?

  And Helen waves a hand between us and says, “Do what you want.”

  And I say, great. Then it’s a date.

  Helen puts her pen in the pink hair behind her ear. She opens another book and lays it on top of the Hebrew book. With one finger holding her place in a dictionary, Helen looks up and says, “It’s not that I don’t like you. It’s just that I’m very, very busy right now.”

  In the open grimoire, sticking out from one edge of it is a name. Written in the margin of a page is today’s name, today’s assassination target. It says, Carl Streator.

  Helen closes the grimoire and says, “You understand.”

  The police scanner says a code seven-two.

  I ask if she’s coming to see me, tonight, in the Gartoller house. Standing in the doorway to her office, I say I can’t wait to be with her again. I need her.

  And Helen smiles and says, “That’s the idea.”

  In the outer office, Mona catches me around the wrist. She picks up her purse and loops the strap over her shoulder, yelling, “Helen, I’m going out for lunch.” To me, she says, “We need to talk, but outside.” She unlocks the door to let us out.

  In the parking lot, standing next to my car, Mona shakes her head, saying, “You have no idea what’s happening, do you?”

  I’m in love. So kill me.

  “With Helen?” she says. She snaps her fingers in my face and says, “You’re not in love.” She sighs and says, “You ever hear of a love spell?”

  For whatever reason, Nash screwing dead women comes to mind.

  “Helen’s found a spell to trap you,” Mona says. “You’re in her power. You don’t really love her.”

  I don’t?

  Mona stares into my eyes and says, “When was the last time you thought about burning the grimoire?” She points at the ground and says, “This? What you call love? It’s just her way of dominating you.”

  A car drives up and parks, and inside is Oyster. He just shakes the hair back off his eyes, and sits behind the steering wheel, watching us. The shattered blond hair exploded in every direction. Two deep parallel lines, slash scars, run across each cheek. Dark red war paint.

  His cell phone rings, and Oyster answers it, “Doland, Dimms and Dorn, Attorneys-at-Law.”

  The big power grab.

  But I love Helen.

  “No,” Mona says. She glances at Oyster. “You just think you do. She’s tricked you.”

  But it’s love.

  “I’ve known Helen a lot longer than you have,” Mona says. She folds her arms and looks at her wristwatch. “It’s not love. It’s a beautiful, sweet spell, but she’s making you into her slave.”

  Chapter 39

  Experts in ancient Greek culture say that people back then didn’t see their thoughts as belonging to them. When they had a thought, it occurred to them as a god or goddess giving them an order. Apollo was telling them to be brave.

  Athena was telling them to fall in love.

  Now people hear a commercial for sour cream potato chips and rush out to buy.

  Between television and radio and Helen Hoover Boyle’s magic spells, I don’t know what I really want anymore. If I even believe myself, I don’t know.

  That night, Helen drives us to the antique store, the big warehouse where she’s mutilated so much furniture. It’s dark and closed, but she presses her hand over a lock and says a quick poem, and the door swings open. No burglar alarms sound. Nothing. We’re wandering deep into the maze of furniture, the dark disconnected chandeliers hanging above us. Moonlight glows in through the skylights.

  “See how easy,” Helen says. “We can do anything.”

  No, I say, she can do anything.

  Helen says, “You still love me?”

  If she wants me to. I don’t know. If she says so.

  Helen looks up at the looming chandeliers, the hanging cages of gilt and crystal, and she says, “Got time for a quickie?”

  And I say, it’s not like I have a choice.

  I don’t know the difference between what I want and what I’m trained to want.

  I can’t tell what I really want and what I’ve been tricked into wanting.

  What I’m talking about is free will. Do we have it, or does God dictate and script everything we do and say and want? Do we have free will, or do the mass media and our culture control us, our desires and actions, from the moment we’re born? Do I have it, or is my mind under the control of Helen’s spell?

  Standing in front of a Regency armoire of burled walnut with a huge mirror of beveled glass in the door, Helen strokes the carved scrolls and garlands and says, “Become immortal with me.”

  Like this furniture, traveling through life after life, watching everyone who loves us die. Parasites. These armoires. Helen and I, the cockroaches of our culture.

  Scar
red across the mirrored door is an old gouged slash from her diamond ring. From back when she hated this immortal junk.

  Imagine immortality, where even a marriage of fifty years would feel like a one-night stand. Imagine seeing trends and fashions blur past you. Imagine the world more crowded and desperate every century. Imagine changing religions, homes, diets, careers, until none of them have any real value. Imagine traveling the world until you’re bored with every square inch. Imagine your emotions, your loves and hates and rivalries and victories, played out again and again until life is nothing more than a melodramatic soap opera. Until you regard the birth and death of other people with no more emotion than the wilted cut flowers you throw away.

  I tell Helen, I think we’re immortal already.

  She says, “I have the power.” She snaps open her purse and fishes out a sheet of folded paper, she shakes the paper open and says, “Do you know about ‘scrying’?”

  I don’t know what I know. I don’t know what’s true. I doubt I really know anything. I say, tell me.

  Helen slips a silk scarf from around her neck and wipes the dust off the huge mirrored door of the armoire. The Regency armoire with inlaid olive-wood carvings and Second Empire fire-gilded hardware, according to the index card taped to it. She says, “Witches spread oil on a mirror, then they say a spell, and they can read the future in the mirror.”

  The future, I say, great. Cheatgrass. Kudzu. The Nile perch.

  Right now, I’m not even sure I can read the present.

  Helen holds up the paper and reads. In the dull, counting voice she used for the flying spell, she reads a few quick lines. She lowers the paper and says, “Mirror, mirror, tell us what our future will be if we love each other and use our new power.”

  Her new power.

  “I made up the ‘mirror, mirror’ part,” Helen says. She slips her hand around mine and squeezes, but I don’t squeeze back. She says, “I tried this at the office with the mirror in my compact, and it was like watching television through a microscope.”

  In the mirror, our reflections blur, the shapes swim together, the reflection mixes into an even gray.

  “Tell us,” Helen says, “show us our future together.”

  And shapes appear in the gray. Light and shadows swim together.

  “See,” she says. “There we are. We’re young again. I can do that. You look like you did in the newspaper. The wedding photo.”

  Everything’s so unfocused. I don’t know what I see.

  “And look,” Helen says. She tosses her chin toward the mirror. “We’re ruling the world. We’re founding a dynasty.”

  But what’s enough? I can hear Oyster say, him and his overpopulation talk.

  Power, money, food, sex, love. Can we ever get enough, or will getting some make us crave even more?

  Inside the shifting mess of the future, I can’t recognize anything. I can’t see anything except just more of the past. More problems, more people. Less biodiversity. More suffering.

  “I see us together forever,” she says.

  I say, if that’s what she wants.

  And Helen says, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Just whatever she wants it to mean, I say. She’s the one pulling the strings here. She’s the one planting her little seeds. Colonizing me. Occupying me. The mass media, the culture, everything laying its eggs under my skin. Big Brother filling me with need.

  Do I really want a big house, a fast car, a thousand beautiful sex partners? Do I really want these things? Or am I trained to want them?

  Are these things really better than the things I already have? Or am I just trained to be dissatisfied with what I have now? Am I just under a spell that says nothing is ever good enough?

  The gray in the mirror is mixing, swirling, it could be anything. No matter what the future holds, ultimately it will be a disappointment.

  And Helen takes my other hand. Holding both my hands in hers, she pulls me around, saying, “Look at me.” She says, “Did Mona say something to you?”

  I say, you love you. I just don’t want to be used anymore.

  Above us are the chandeliers, glowing silver in the moonlight.

  “What did Mona say?” Helen says.

  And I’m counting 1, counting 2, counting 3 . . .

  “Don’t do this,” Helen says. “I love you.” Squeezing my hands, she says, “Do not shut me out.”

  I’m counting 4, counting 5, counting 6 . . .

  “You’re being just like my husband,” she says. “I just want you to be happy.”

  That’s easy, I say, just put a “happy” spell on me.

  And Helen says, “There’s no such spell.” She says, “They have drugs for that.”

  I don’t want to keep making the world worse. I want to try and clean up this mess we’ve made. The population. The environment. The culling spell. The same magic that ruins my life is supposed to fix it.

  “But we can do that,” Helen says. “With more spells.”

  Spells to fix spells to fix spells to fix spells, and life just gets more miserable in ways we never imagined. That’s the future I see in the mirror.

  Mr. Eugene Schieffelin and his starlings, Spencer Baird and his carp, history is filled with brilliant people who wanted to fix things and just made them worse.

  I want to burn the grimoire.

  I tell her about what Mona told me. About how she’s put a spell on me to make me her immortal love slave for all of eternity.

  “Mona’s lying,” Helen says.

  But how do I know that? Whom do I believe?

  The gray in the mirror, the future, maybe it’s not clear to me because now nothing’s clear to me.

  And Helen drops my hands. She waves her hands at the Regency armoires, the Federalist desks and Italian Renaissance coat racks, and says, “So if reality is all a spell, and you don’t really want what you think you want. . .” She pushes her face in my face and says, “If you have no free will. You don’t really know what you know. You don’t really love who you only think you love. What do you have left to live for?”

  Nothing.

  This is just us standing here with all the furniture watching.

  Think of deep outer space, the incredible cold and quiet where your wife and kid wait.

  And I say, please. I tell her to give me her cell phone.

  The gray still shifting and liquid in the mirror, Helen snaps open her purse and hands me the phone.

  I flip it open and dial 911.

  And a woman’s voice says, “Police, fire, or medical?”

  And I say, medical.

  “Your location?” the voice says.

  And I tell her the address of the bar on Third where Nash and I meet, the bar near the hospital.

  “And the nature of your medical emergency?”

  Forty professional cheerleaders overcome with heat exhaustion. A women’s volleyball team needing mouth-to-mouth. A crew of fashion models wanting breast examinations. I tell her, if they’ve got an emergency med tech named John Nash, he’s the one to send. I tell her, if they can’t find Nash, not to bother.

  Helen takes the phone back. She looks at me, blinking once, twice, three times, slow, and says, “What are you up to?”

  What I have left, maybe the only way to find freedom, is by doing the things I don’t want to. Stop Nash. Confess to the police. Accept my punishment.

  I need to rebel against myself.

  It’s the opposite of following your bliss. I need to do what I most fear.

  Chapter 40

  Nash is eating a bowl of chili. He’s at a back table in the bar on Third Avenue. The bartender is slumped forward on the bar, his arms still swinging above the barstools. Two men and two women are facedown at a booth table. Their cigarettes still burn in an ashtray, only half burned down. Another man is laid out in the doorway to the bathrooms. Another man is dead, stretched out on the pool table, the cue still clutched in his hands. Behind the bar, there’s a radio blaring static in
the kitchen. Somebody in a greasy apron is facedown on the grill among the hamburgers, the grill popping and smoking and the sweet, greasy smoke from the guy’s face rolling out along the ceiling.

  The candle on Nash’s table is the only light in the place.

  And Nash looks up, chili red around his mouth, and says, “I thought you’d like a little privacy for this.”

  He’s wearing his white uniform. A dead body nearby is wearing the same uniform. “My partner,” Nash says, nodding at the body. As he nods, his ponytail, the little black palm tree, flops around on top of his head. Red chili stains run down the front of his uniform. Nash says, “Me culling him was long overdue.”

  Behind me, the street door opens and a man steps in. He stands there, looking around. He waves a hand through the smoke and looks around, saying, “What the fuck?” The street door shuts behind him.

  And Nash tucks his chin and fishes two fingers inside his chest pocket. He brings out a white index card smeared with red and yellow food and he reads the culling song, his words flat and steady as someone counting out loud. As Helen.

  The man in the doorway, his eyes roll up white. His knees buckle and he slumps to one side.

  I just stand here.

  Nash tucks the index card back in his pocket and says, “Now, where were we?”

  So, I say, where did he find the poem?

  And Nash says, “Guess.” He says, “I got it the only place where you can’t destroy it.”

  He picks up a bottle of beer and points the long neck at me, saying, “Think.” He says, “Think hard.”

  The book, Poems and Rhymes from Around the World, will always be out there for people to find. Hiding in plain sight. Just in this one place, he says. No way can it ever be rooted out.

  For whatever reason, cheatgrass comes to mind. And zebra mussels. And Oyster.

  Nash drinks some beer and sets it down and says, “Think hard.”

  I say, the fashion models, the killings. I say, what he’s doing is wrong.

  And Nash says, “You give up?”

  He has to see that having sex with dead women is wrong.

  Nash picks up his spoon and says, “The good old Library of Congress. Your tax dollars at work.”