A Dirge for the Temporal (15 page)

Clockwork

T
he clarity of the morning deteriorates to senselessness by noon, and then I cannot say it. Every word catches fire as it appears on the screen,
chronicling a thrashing self-infliction and mutilating my eyes. Until, rit
ually, my head implodes. In sleep, that hour or two, they put my skull back together, delicately removing the fragments and shards from my brain. The rifts in the pulp will not heal, but the morning brings clarity again, slightly less than yesterday’s and slightly more than tomorrow’s.

  It is twenty-nine minutes past ten now. Yesterday at this time it was twenty-eight minutes past ten.

The Glass Encrusted Nest

A
s the Colonel moved off the trail into the patch of young birches,
the glint intensified, its source catching the sun in fragments and slivers
. The trees were still skeletal after the stripping winter, and the object readily emerged from among the branches, revealing itself to be a large bird’s nest. It rested a little above eye level, affording the Colonel an easy view of the pieces of glass that had lured him off the trail. Some clear, some colored, the bird had woven the shards in among the twigs. The creation might have been that of a touched basket weaver. Accident?
Ornamentation? Defense? The Colonel had never seen its like.

  It was a natural for the Colonel’s collection of natural things, so he claimed it. Gently bending the branch down to assure himself that no eggs or nestlings occupied the strange basket, he pulled the nest free of the jointed woody fingers that clutched it. An edge cut him. A drop of blood rose, seeming to materialize on the glass that caused it. A sense of wonder bathed him. As part of his collection, this find would excel.

  He had walked not ten steps when he heard a terrible caw-screech. He searched the sky over the naked birches, the tops of the surrounding firs, but he could not locate the voice. Offering a silent apology to avian mothers and their sylvan domain in general, he proceeded to the trail. The voice remained silent as he followed his tracks back to the cabin, but he imagined an eye watching him cradle the nest lovingly in his hands.

  Inside his cabin, under the light, it was an amazing thing. The pieces of glass, having come mostly from broken bottles, were placed so that they curved into the circle, suggesting concentricity. Moreover, there seemed to be a pattern to their placement relative to each other. No two fragments of similar size or color were neighbors. The variety simultaneously astounded and enchanted. Modern sculpture take note.

  He walked over to the bookcase along the near wall. Before introducing the nest to its place of honor, he examined his collection of natural finds occupying the shelves. Seven years of living and hiking here in the Black Forest had produced a few interesting items. The fully intact marten skull, sharp fangs gleaming dryly, had been unearthed in a landslide. The sparkly
Edelstein
had been plucked from among the stones of a 2300-year-old Celtic ring-wall. The torn neon-blue wing of the mounted butterfly
had actually been in a lizard’s mouth when he happened upon it. The other shelves held similar oddities, all for his own enjoyment as few people ever came around.

  Somehow these things meant more to him than the carvings he sold out of
Der Kuckuck Haus
in the village. The Black Forest relinquished such treasures less readily than the wood the Colonel sawed and whittled to form. This nest he held so delicately in his hand was certainly the rarest treasure
Der Schwarzwald
had yielded to date.

  The nest worked well on the top shelf. The overhead bulb gave it added distinction, illuminating miracles in the shards, meaning and genius where none could logically apply. One thing lacked, however. A proper pedestal for this most unusual natural find. He went out to the woodshed to take care of the problem forthwith.

  He liked the band saw because every corner could be observed as the sawdust flew and the figure took shape. He thought to save himself the trouble and grab a sufficiently sized piece of wood out of the trash receptacle,
but the nest deserved more. He lay details to his eight-inch square pedestal that he never would have dreamed of adding to another piece—such that he was absorbed into the night, forgetting supper. It was some
time during those unknown hours, in that unknown zone, that the mother
struck.

  Three windows of his workshop faced three corners of the compass, while the door looked back towards the house. All of them were open, a ventilation system he could not have done without. The bird came through the north window, black and huge, shattering glass that was not there, shocking the Colonel out of his trance. It screamed as it landed on the pedestal in progress, tearing the chunk of wood free from the saw, causing the strip of flexible band to jump its pulley. Giant black wings slammed against everything the Colonel kept in his shed—tables, machines, him. He fought but it would not forgive.

  By sheer instinct he grabbed the lighter fluid off the shelf, squirted it in the direction of the bird, which was everywhere. The bird screamed and stabbed at him as he groped for the emergency kit, where he knew a pack of matches to be. Shielding his efforts with his elbows, he managed to set the pack aflame, tossing it blindly into the shed as he forced the door to with his body.

  He raced around the structure throwing the windows closed, but he’d no way of latching them from outside. No matter, the bird spent its furies upon the last window he held. Against its violence, he wedged a piece of rock, then ran.

  The shed burned from within, its windows warping rather than disintegrating. Outlets took the vapors away and in time the place was done. For two days the Colonel let the shed cool. He stayed inside the cabin mostly, admiring the nest, wondering over the fact that it was still in his possession. On the third day he had to see.

  The bird was there, its mighty wings fused into the like material of the windows, its tail spread in plumes of sharp glass, its shiny claws still clutching the cinder.

Dance Therapeutic

S
tepping into the doorway of the room was like coming home again. Events came surging out of the past, forcing him to grasp the doorjamb for support. Rarely a day went by that Domino didn’t visit those images,
but this brought it back all at once, with tremendous force. He had chosen
his career field for personal therapy; this was beyond therapy. This was beyond bizarre. This was his most penetrating nightmare.

  Hanging from the ceiling by what looked like fishing line were individual human organs: heart, liver, lung, kidney, spleen, stomach, etc. In each instance the line had been threaded through a hole, possibly made
by an awl or large needle, and attached to the ceiling with industrial staples
. The organs hung some twelve to fifteen inches from the ceiling, variously positioned over the queen-size bed. On the bed lay the naked dead body of a male in his mid-thirties, eye sockets empty and black, their contents among the internal parts suspended from the ceiling. Whatever mess had been made in the removal of the victim’s eyes, it had been thoroughly cleaned up. Beneath the still fresh corpse the sheets were a pristine, virginal white. The body itself, at least the visible side,
was marked in no other way. The eyes appeared to be the man’s only con
tribution to the frozen dance of human parts.

  Domino was here because of the nature of the scene, but it wasn’t his trained professional eye which saw through the apparent lack of order in the locations of the separate organs. It was a little boy’s eye—a little boy who had committed to unfading memory the unspeakable things he had seen.

  A voice from the present saved him from falling into the pit opening before him. It came from behind, its owner looking over his shoulder into the room. “I don’t fucking know with the crazies, Domino. Is this the weirdest thing you’ve seen to date?”

  How to answer that in a grown-up’s voice. “It’s weird, Branton. It’s weird.”

  He lingered there for five minutes, never venturing beyond where he stood framed in the doorway. When he turned away, he found Branton still standing behind him, viewing the tableau for his own reasons. Brushing past, Domino mumbled that the investigation team could have it now; he’d seen all he needed to see.

  “There’s something else,” Branton said after him, causing him to stop in his tracks. “Something that was removed from the scene.”

  Domino turned. “Yes?”

  “The body had candles in its eye sockets. They were burning. Instead of just pinching out the flames, Livac removed them. Both candles were black, if that says anything.”

  “Thanks, Bran,” Domino said as he pushed his way through the uniforms, desperately seeking air.

~

  An hour later he was home, standing in the kitchen with the phone in his hand, remembering the slow, fumbling rotary types of the past.

  Daddy, Daddy, where are you? Answer the phone, Daddy.

  Daddy had not answered the phone. Daddy wasn’t at his office. Daddy had never gone to his office. Daddy wasn’t Daddy anymore.

  The now intruded on him again. “Dawn House,” the cheerful voice spoke into his ear.

   “Miss Fry? Excuse me,
Kay
, this is Michael Domino. I’m looking for my father.”

  “Hi Michael. Your father started his job today. Have you tried him there?”

  “Kay, something’s—no, actually, Kay, I had forgotten that was today. My apologies.”

  “Of course, Michael. We’re so proud of him. He is doing so w—”

  “Yes, thank you. Goodbye.”

  Oh Christ.

  The phone rang the moment he put it back in its cradle.

  “Yes?” said Domino.

  “Heya, Domino. Nelson. What are you doing there? Branton said you disappeared from the scene.”

  “Yeah. Sorry.” Daddy, Daddy, where are you?

  “We need you at the station. Why the hell are you there?”

  “How did you know to call here?” Domino said.

  “Bran said you looked spooked. I figured I’d try your house. Seems it wasn’t such a long shot. Are you? Spooked?”

  “Never me, boss,” he lied. “I’ll be down in a bit.”

  Oh Christ.

~

  His earliest memories of being his father’s son were from age three, when whole words surrounded him in his bed. Yet he thought he remembered a three-year-old having memories of alphabet blocks in the playpen. He couldn’t be sure though. Various psychologists had chased the use of these learning tools back to his crib, where the process of becoming the prodigy had begun in earnest.

  He remembered being told by the magnificent IQ that was his father that he would accomplish great things. Make great discoveries. He remembered his mother’s soft complement to the educator’s voice. “Your father’s right, Michael. You have so much potential, being your father’s son. The universe is out there, waiting.”

  Daddy had despised the complement, Michael remembered as well. The various psychologists had traced that back to a young man of exceeding
mental stature luring a young woman of exceptional good looks into his fascinating intellectual sphere, then becoming bored of her with age. They made it all seem so simple. Perhaps on some level Michael had become the psychologist to convince himself that it was cut and dry. Certainly he’d had identifiable reasons for going specifically into the criminal branch of the science.

  He had been dissected so many times, by others and by himself, that there was little left to analyze. His father, on the other hand, was so densely layered as to be impossible to analyze completely. Which is why they should never have permitted the elder Domino to roam the earth a free man again. Michael himself had stated it most succinctly in one of his communications with his father through the Plexiglas barrier.

  “Daddy, you need to realize that you are here for the duration. They
haven’t any real understanding, much less a panacea for the psychology of a man who kills his wife and leaves her body to bleed through the ceiling
of their son’s bedroom.”

  His father had looked back at him with eyes fogging in recollection, corners of his mouth tending dangerously towards a smile. And there was that reason, too: his father lacked any semblance of remorse or regret, though he seemed capable of revisiting the day on impulse.

  But what haunted Michael the most was not the occasional crooked smile behind a synthetic barrier but rather the image of his room that afternoon when he returned from tutors. That is where the falseness of youth was unveiled; where magic and fantasy ended. The incomprehensible expressions of the lunatic in his sterile kingdom were after-tremors.

~

  It had been a Friday, the best day of the week, the one evening he got to stay up late and watch TV. Exercises didn’t start again till Sunday morning, a genius father’s substitute for church. Of course he still had anatomy to study before dinner. The cardboard organs had only been up a week, having replaced the solar system, which had replaced the multiplication
tables, which had replaced…Boy, being six sure tough.

  “Hi Mom!” said the young Michael as he came through the front door. As on every Friday afternoon after returning home from “tutors” with Ms. Cocker, he was in a great mood. His tutor lived three doors down and had done something great for the world before arthritis set in.

  When his mom didn’t answer, Michael thought nothing of it; she was around somewhere. His dad would still be at the university. He poured a bowl of cereal, ate it while he read from
Robin Hood
, wincing a little as Robin caught the blade of the assassin’s sword in his hand. When he was finished with his snack, he folded the corner of the page and ventured down the hallway to his bedroom. Opening the door, he was greeted by its familiar odor. He fell onto his bed, looking up at the lesson in human anatomy hanging from the ceiling. Body organs weren’t nearly as fun as planets, but he knew it wasn’t really about fun; it was about learning. Funtime was Friday evening with TV, and sometimes Saturday at the library.

  The heart, he noticed, was moving slightly, as if there were a light draft. He wondered if it was his breath drifting around the room with nowhere else to go. As the angle of the cardboard cutout grew more obtuse, he noticed something behind it running along the ceiling back to the light fixture. Curious, he sat up, peering between the cutouts, finding a similar line—a dark red line, he observed—running between the fixture
and the lung organ. He stood on the bed to better inspect this invader in his room. To his fascination, the line was fluid, and the fluid had run down the strings on which the organs hung and over the profiles themselves
, beading at the bottom, poised to drop like tears.

  He extended a hand, came away with one of the drops on his fingertip, smelled it.

  “Mom!” he called, more out of an urge to introduce her to this oddity
than anything else. He had concluded that the substance was blood, and that it had a source in the room above, but he did not associate it with human blood. People bled in smears mostly, as his knees and elbows had proven a time or two—not like this. A bucket had been tipped over, something
his dad was working on, something like that. The room above was after all in the attic, where little boys were not allowed to go.

  “Mah-uhhhm!” he called again on his way out into the hall.

  Where was she? Once, when she didn’t show for a half hour or so after he got back from his lessons, he had followed the footpath down to the neighborhood pond, where he found her sitting on a bench watching the ducks and weeping for all she had. It was her favorite place, she had told him once. The farthest extent of her world.

  He headed that way now, thinking about blood wandering its own paths. When he reached the pond, he found only the boy from next door skipping stones. Brett, who was two years his better in age, looked at him as he always did, as if Michael were a freak because he didn’t go to school like all the other kids. When Michael asked him if he had seen his mom,
Brett’s eyes grew sadistically bright and Michael knew the teases were coming.

  “I thought you were s’posed to be so smart. Aren’t you the boy genius? Can’t even find your own mommy.”

  Michael retreated up the hill, tears stinging his eyes.

  Inside, he called again, to no answer. He walked down the hall as though to his execution. He ascended the stairs as though to some afterlife beyond the clouds of numbers and letters and planets and human organs that had drifted over his head all his days. The door didn’t want to give beneath his little hands, but finally did, swinging to the left, opening up the attic and its mysteries to him. He had never been here alone. A few small steps showed him that he still wasn’t. His mom waited with open arms, involuntarily pouring herself out to him.

  He fell as he rushed down the stairs, struck his nose, producing further
evidence that blood did run so profusely. The phone in his hand turned red. He managed to dial his dad’s office. Daddy, Daddy, where are you? Answer the phone, Daddy. But Daddy wasn’t there.

  The hand on his head, as familiar a gesture as it was, made him scream. And scream.

~

  Domino went to the station and sat with Nelson and the detectives assigned to the case in the lieutenant’s closed office. Branton and Lundy occupied the chairs along the wall, while Domino and Nelson were separated
by the big desk strewn with job litter.

  Nelson regarded Domino for a moment, as if to satisfy himself that his psychologist hadn’t lost his grip, then got right to it. “The body you
saw belonged to one Brett Frier, CPA, unmarried, lived alone. Approximate time of death…Bran? Right, ten a.m. As for evidence, to this point they haven’t found shit. All we can do for now is focus on the character
of this creep. This is going to be a motherfucker if you ask me. To go to such detail to make your goddamn point—we got a real crazy on our hands.”

  That was Domino’s cue. He only partially surprised himself when he skipped type, profile, and expert insight to offer this: “They let my dad out two weeks ago, Jack.”

  Nelson frowned, casting a glance at the detectives. “I heard,” he said. “Have you been in touch?”

  “Yeah. He wanted to see me, but I declined. He’s been at a sort of halfway house. I wonder what the other residents think about having a psycho killer around.”

  “It’s been, what, thirty years? That’s a long time, Domino.”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s gotta be tough on you,” Nelson said. “Look, best therapy is putting
your mind on something else. Bury yourself in the current case. When I lost Vonda, that was how I got through. It shouldn’t be too hard to do that on this one. Like I said, this creep’s gonna be a challenge.”

  Domino thought about telling him to get his head out of his ass and listen, but instead merely nodded.

  “Okay,” Nelson said. “Let’s start with the candles. What do you make of burning black candles? Satanist props?”

  If only it were that simple, Domino thought.

~

  Daddy wasn’t Daddy anymore, that much was clear to the young Michael. The features behind the flickering light of the candles were familiar enough, but their expression was strange. And the voice…it might as well have been a stranger’s voice speaking to Michael over the coffee table. He kept his eyes on the backs of his hands, which danced with reflections from the candles. His left hand was stained with blood from his nose.

  “The flames are your mother’s ghost in your eyes,” said his father, delicately touching one of the columns of wax. “What truth those young eyes of yours have witnessed tonight. Do you understand about your mom?”

  “I think so,” Michael murmured.

  “Where is she now, do you think?”

  He didn’t know. When his mom had spoken of heaven, his father had scoffed. He remembered hearing her once, through the bathroom wall, shouting at his father about that very topic.
What am I to teach him then?
That he’s going to the Great Equation when he dies?

  “I don’t know,” he confessed to the face. “Where?”

  “She’s in your memories, Michael. Remember that. That’s where they go when they have nothing else to offer us. Into our memories.”

  He thought about it, amid the candle flickers. But one question was not answered so easily.