Here & There (54 page)

A dalliance mired in ennui
, the toaster would echo.

The scientist would nod and crunch down on a corner of the bread.
But a visiting professor, there’s something alluring about that, something elegant about him.

Something very French about that
, the toaster would comment.
You’re thinking about Spencer?

The scientist would nod, his mouth full of toast and jam.

What made you suspicious?
the toaster would push.

Something the ceiling fan told me the other day
, the scientist would remark.
That and all the recent hang-ups. Almost every time the phone rings, it’s either a hang-up or a click like someone’s listening in on the extension.

Yes, the ceiling fan was spreading rumors about her.

I haunted that empty house for three days.
*
It wasn’t until the last day that I remembered another random clip of Reidier, sitting in his lab, wearing an eye-patch over his right eye.

*
How nice for you, Hilary. I dwelled in the pit of Hell’s Kitchen for over three months. And now here I am, chasing down your clues written in sand.

Providence, Day 5
: The Sci-Li’s still there but no Reidier. Not a trace. It’s like the whole thing never happened. Just another confabulation in one of Eve’s nonexistent, hypothetical stories. It looks like this whole goddamn pilgrimage has been a wild goose chase, tracking down a red herring through the water at night.

I have gleaned almost nothing from my alma mater, save for an overdue balance of $368.72 owed for reserving a research shelf in the library that I apparently never closed after finishing my thesis.

Every night we drive from Providence back to Newport. Lorelei tries to keep my spirits up. Still I can see the shine from our Gould Island adventure fading, and her doubts creeping back into her tone. It’s starting to feel less like she’s helping me track down Hilary and more like she’s just trying to help me keep track of myself.

Maybe she’s right. Maybe I am losing bits of me along the way, dissolving breadcrumb by breadcrumb as I trot deeper and deeper into the dark, imaginary forest. How else could you explain my reaction to her hand on my thigh in the car?

One hand on the wheel, the other patting my leg reassuringly as her eyes shift back and forth between the road and the furrows in my forehead.

I should have been ecstatic. Pity was getting me further with Lorelei than bravado ever had. Instead of taking that touch, that connection, that opening and placing my hand on hers, finally holding hands with my dear, sweet, luminous Lorelei, all I wanted to do was take the pen from behind my ear and stab it right through the meat, right between the knuckles, pierce all the way through and stake that patronizing palm to my flesh.

There. That’s our connection. There’s our shared experience.

Of course I don’t do it. I don’t want to hurt her. I just want to be understood.

My mother’s suicide note is three phone books thick. You can get lost in it, and I have. There comes a point when too much is nothing at all. Infinity and zero, twin extremes.

How do you parse infinity?

How do you divide by zero?

“Did I tell you what I discovered down at The Athenaeum?” Lorelei had taken a walk down to the old nineteenth-century library on Benefit Street while I banged my head against the wall at the Sci-Li. It’s a quirky old building built like a Greek temple up on plinth.

I shook my head no as I glared down at her hand on my thigh. My right elbow rested on the door against the window, my head leaning against my hand, surreptitiously fingering the pen still stuck behind my ear.

“Oh my God, I can’t believe I forgot. Well, they had this big H. P. Lovecraft exhibit there. The Weird Tales guy.”

“Yeah, I know who he is. Providence’s sci-fi/fantasy pulp darling.”

“I had no idea how influential he was. He was like, practically the father of modern horror.”

“But a horrible writer. Like a dumbed-down version of Faulkner with twice the verbosity.”

“Ok, so great thinker, meh writer. Still, do you know where he was born?”

“Providence?”

“Yes, but where in Providence?”

“Hospital?”

“Nope, at his family home on 194 Angell Street.”

My fingers wrapped around my pen and plucked it from its perch behind my ear.

Lorelei went on, “That was its number then. Today it would be at 454 Angell.”

Lorelei raised her eyebrows at me as if to exclaim,
Can you believe that?!

I couldn’t.

“That’s a pretty big coincidence, don’t you think?”

I shrugged, staring out the window. “Only if you’re implying that a rift in the earth opened up in 454’s basement and swallowed Hilary up.”

“I mean maybe metaphorically. I don’t know, I just thought it was interesting at the very least. And kind of apt. In a number of his works, Lovecraft refers to the Necronomicon, this fictional grimoire that contains an account of the Old Ones and a way to summon them. Some people think the book actually exists, that Lovecraft read it and stole some ideas, but in reading the book, he opened up a portal, drew the ire of interdimensional demons that not only drove him crazy, but went back in time and infected his father with insanity. That it was actually that, not syphilis, that killed his father.”

She had more faith in the macabre fantasies of a bipolar author than in my mother’s report. That’s what she was saying. The Necronomicon, Hilary’s PsychoNarrative—they held about the same weight. Fictions within fictions.

“Kind of sad, really. Lovecraft’s father and mother went crazy and died in Butler Hospital just a few miles from his home. Years apart. His dad died when he was like three, and his mom had a nervous breakdown right before he was thirty. Both were committed to Butler. Lovecraft modeled Arkham Asylum on the hospital.”

Maybe Lorelei was onto something. Maybe I’d have better luck hunting for Hilary in Arkham, trying to save her from getting raped by some evil doctor in a psych ward. I could feel my stomach hardening. Like a cancer took seed there and was starting to digest me from the inside out. “My mother’s not crazy.”

Lorelei finally took her hand off my leg. “I wasn’t saying she was. I wasn’t saying that at all.”

“No?” I asked. The digestive acids from the hungry tumor singed my tone.

“No. I just thought it was interesting. A cool little coincidence. Sometimes random disparate facts, while not necessarily clues, jog something loose. Get us to look at things differently. You know?”

I nodded. “Yeah. Maybe Lovecraft can shake something loose. I mean Christ, it’s not like we haven’t both been thinking that Ecco’s a goddamn demon.”

Lorelei didn’t say anything else. Neither did I. We drove the rest of the way back to Newport in silence. Her hands at ten and two on the steering wheel, while mine rested on my knees strangling my pen.

We pulled into the compound and parked in front of the barn/garage.

“You know the two things that Waco, Texas, is famous for?” I asked.

Lorelei wrinkled her nose at my random question. “Well, I assume one of them is David Koresh.”

“Yep.”

“What’s the other?”

“Its pageant play.”

“Pageant, like beauty pageant?”

“Pageant play. Mystery play. York Cycle.”

“Like the Nativity play?”

“The Nativity play is definitely the most popular one. Especially for Christmas. Waco had one of those, but it was part of something bigger. Waco had developed a ten-year cycle that started with the birth-of-Jesus pageant and every year covered a different part of Jesus’s life, culminating on the tenth year with his crucifixion. Come the thirty-year anniversary, it was a spectacle. Waco went all out. They even brought in professionals from the Dallas Theater to set up a special light board, lighting grid, a whole fly system for sets and everything. All still done with local talent, ‘cause this was Waco’s baby, but set up with imported talent. It was really not to be missed. Especially for a sophomore at Brown, who had spent his entire life east of the Mississippi. Not to mention the added perk of getting to avoid his mother for the holidays, as well as an opportunity to prove some serious commitment to his beyond-cute, Star of Texas girlfriend to reconsider her no-sex-before-marriage policy. Especially, if said girl was playing the starring role of the Virgin Mary (type casting), since her father was on the pageant board and one of the biggest donors.”

“How hot a girl are we talking?” Lorelei asked.

“Her name was Summer Moore.”

“That’s pretty hot.
And
she was a virgin to boot! You’d grab the Roman’s hammer and nails yourself for a taste of that.”

“Or at least agree to pitch in and help out with the pageant when things went wrong.”

“You didn’t?”

“Like I said, it was a big tadoo, and they needed a lot of help. Just to put their production value into perspective, if they had been doing the Noah story, there would’ve been elephants. The opera
Carmen
don’t got shit on Waco.”

Lorelei nodded. “Sounds impressive.”

“It was. You had the trial with Pontius Pilate rattling down at the masses from the church rafters, washing his hands of them; you had the Stations of the Cross spread out through the church’s massive aisles; you had a Foley artist in the wings ripping heads of lettuce apart against a microphone as a solemn Jesus was nailed to the cross, dozens of onlookers moaning, dozens of ancient priests mocking. Finally, the tribal Jewish leaders, concerned about this execution continuing into the Sabbath, ask the Romans to hasten their deaths. The actors/soldiers break the
legs of the crucified slaves that flank Jesus while the Foley artist snaps stalks of celery in half. Then one centurion comes to Jesus, looks up at the drooping body and claims, ‘He is dead already.’”

I waited a moment. Until Lorelei grew impatient.

“And . . . !” she said.

“And he said it again, ‘He is dead already.’ Nothing. The actor/centurion looked offstage to the assistant stage manager whose eyes widened with panic. She then sprinted around backstage to find the missing centurion who was supposed to be stabbing Jesus in the side, but instead was out back smoking a joint with a buddy, and was so stoned that when the stage manager did find him, he could barely stand, let alone walk, which was a problem since he also happened to be the Virgin Mary’s brother and the son of one of the biggest pageant donors. So the buddy had to grab the centurion’s helmet and breastplate, sprint inside, grab his spear, and rush onstage, not realizing he hadn’t grabbed the trick spear necessary for this scene. And for the third time the first centurion/actor announces, ‘He is already dead.’ At which point the disheveled stand-in centurion runs up and thrusts his very real prop spear into Jesus’s side.

“Jesus screams, his eyes snap open, he looks down and shouts, ‘Jesus Christ, you stabbed me!’”

“No!?” Lorelei exclaimed half in disbelief, half in hysterics.

I nodded and kept going. “So they bring down the curtain. The centurions take Jesus down off the cross, load him into a Honda Civic, and rush him to the hospital.”

Lorelei could barely breathe as she jumped forward. “So a Honda pulls up to an emergency room and three Roman soldiers jump out and carry in a bleeding Jesus, yelling, help he’s been stabbed?”

“But back at the theater, the show has to go on because, even though the show was at the climax, it wasn’t over. They still needed Jesus to ascend to heaven for the thousands in the audience. So they get the understudy, they get him up on the cross, and get the curtain back up for the big moment.

“The Foley artist is shaking sheets of metal for thunder, the dry ice machines are pumping out smoke, and the high school kid who works the fly pulleys uncleats the rope that holds the counterweight to the cross so that a crucified Jesus can rise up into Heaven. Only no one has accounted for the understudy being seventy pounds lighter than the original Jesus. So instead of floating up into the rafters, the new Jesus rockets up like a bat out of hell, slams into the rafters, and smacks his head on a light baton, knocking himself unconscious. The poor high school kid panics, ties off the fly, and runs out.

“It’s not until the curtain call that they realize Jesus is dangling completely unconscious over fifty feet up. So they keep the curtain down, send what remains of the cast out in front to bow, while they struggle to pull coldcocked Christ down, drag him from the cross, and find out he’s bleeding from the head. So immediately, Pontius Pilate and two centurions load him into the back of a Ford pickup, and drive
him
to the emergency room.”

Lorelei is literally crossing her legs at this point, shaking her head no, hyperventilating about the nurses who watched yet another wounded Jesus get carried into the ER by Romans.

With a considered absentmindedness I rubbed the scar below my ribs through my shirt.