Leave It to Me (25 page)

I am crying because the woman is crying. I can hear long, low sobs again, smell vomit again, press my face deep into Mommy’s lap again. Daddy shouts, Shut her up or I’ll do it myself. Mommy giggles. I want for us both to get back in the car again. I want for us to drive home. I don’t want to listen for the grass to absorb a body’s clumsy fall. This is not the first time I’ve buried my head in Mommy’s lap so I shan’t have to see or hear or know. Callused hands grip my throat. The world wraps itself in blackness.

Better that I had been the fetus Jess aborted. “Ham,” I murmured, “why didn’t you ask Jess to marry you?”

“The times, love. Marriage and commitment were for the bourgeois.” He tucked his shirt back into his pants.

“You should have married her.” I kicked Ham’s shoes and socks across the floor. The kick was harder than I’d intended. One shoe thudded against the base of the counter. A bowl of olives crashed to the floor. They were the big, green, deli kind, an almond jammed into each of them. I didn’t make a move to clean up.

“But then we’d never have met.” Ham ripped lengths of paper towel. The bowl was a fifties stoneware ugly, the kind that shows up in decor magazines. The chipped pieces and china flakes were easy to pick off wetted paper towel. The olives left a dull smear on the polished wood floor. He tossed the clunky, squishy garbage and raised his paper cup of wine. “To roads not taken!”

“You’d have spared me my … my violent propensities.”

“Propensities?” He laughed. “I like your violent propensities. Sounds like a designer perfume. Pro-pen-sity by Devi Dee! Propensity. Give me a break!” He ambled over to where the other running shoe had scudded to rest. “Anyway, what’s my old life with Jess got to do with you?”

“Everything.”

He was on his hands and knees, fumbling for socks, when we both heard the footsteps out on the deck. One pair of shoes with hard leather soles that slapped wood. Ham scrambled to his feet. Not Jess’s sandals, definitely not Jess’s power-walker stride. I couldn’t tell from his face if he was anxious or if he was relieved. “She couldn’t have been in a car crash, Dr. Watson,” he said. “That doesn’t sound like cop feet bringing bad news.”

Romeo cheetah-walked in on us. I don’t know what fabric his vanilla suit was made of. No stain, no crease, undermined its elegance. Only his eyes had a jailbird glower. He said, those eyes on Ham standing awkwardly with socks in his hands, “We had our chat, little Devi. Very satisfactory.”

“Ham Cohan.” He balled up a sock, dropped it, held out a hand. “Hey, man, where’s Jess?”

No match for Bio-Dad. Poor Ham, caught in one of fate’s sting operations. I wouldn’t let him end up expendable.

“In the car.” Romeo thrust out a hand. A sapphire cuff link winked in lamplight.

“She shouldn’t have trouble parking.” Ham gave the killer hand a quick, polite shake. “There were lots of
spaces when I came back from the store. Anyway, can I get you a drink?” He shuffled to the galley, stretched for a wineglass. A real one, not a plastic cup.

Romeo joined Ham, reached across the butcher-block counter of the galley and picked up the opened bottle.

I felt woozy at the coziness of it all. “What’s Jess doing in the car?”

“None of this sissy sweet stuff,” Romeo said. “I need a real drink.”

“What’s she doing?” I repeated.

“How about a beer?”

Romeo swiveled his torso a half dozen times. A workout freak warming up for action. “Practicing breathing, little Devi.” He laughed.

“What?” Ham stuck his face in Romeo’s. “Who the fuck are you?”

“Who do you want me to be, Mr. Movie Man?” Romeo batted Ham’s face away with his palm. “And she isn’t doing a very good job of the breathing thing, Movie Man.”

Ham grabbed the Merlot bottle and cracked Romeo but not a good one. The vanilla suit showed up pink streaks and blotches.

Romeo clicked his tongue. “Not much good at rough stuff, are we, Mr. Movie Man?”

Ham lunged for Romeo’s tie. Romeo was a man of quicker reflexes. He gripped Ham’s throat in those killer hands. “Big-stick bullies, you Americans,” he sneered.

Ham’s eyes bulged, his knees sagged, his voice box let out gaspy, growly sounds. When Romeo finally let go, the body thudded to the floor. I jumped.

“What was that?” Romeo grinned. “A quake?” He hauled Ham’s body by the feet inside the galley ell. “There was this warden I had a nice thing going with, hash for deutsche marks and pound sterling. The warden chap went down heavier than Mr. Movie Man, and he couldn’t have weighed more than sixty, sixty-five kilos.”

“What did Ham ever do to you?” I crawled as far from him as I dared. The cabin was cramped, but not with the kind of furniture you can crouch under.

“Nothing.” He lifted Ham’s limp body by Ham’s gray ponytail nearly off the floor. “Everything.” He slammed Ham’s head, facedown, on the butcher-block counter, and pinned it with an elbow. “How much blood does a dead wimp bleed, little Devi?”

I threw up on the scatter rug, splattering Ham’s running shoes.

Romeo laughed. “Don’t spoil the fun.” He snatched the Chinese meat cleaver off its galley wall peg. He whacked the blade on the base of Ham’s neck. Whack! Whack! The blade got stuck in Ham. “Shit! I’ve lost the wrist, the snap. No practice.” Romeo kept cursing as he worked to ease the blade out of bone.

I pressed my face into the rug; I smelled the sour smells of Ham’s shoes, my vomit. I heard a final swish! and crack! Then the thump of Ham’s severed head falling to the floor.

Romeo nudged me gently with his boot. Snakeskin rubbed my arm. When I squinted up, he was standing over me, cleaver in hand, and sucking on a miniature bottie
of whiskey, the kind Pappy saved from plane trips.
FREEZE TAPE
.

“Need a drink?” He pulled another bottle out of his pinkish suit pocket. This time it was vodka. “Take a sip, go on.” I thought of Aloysius Fong hitting the bottle in the wings, just before going onstage. Nerves, not guilt. “Hey, what was that?” He staggered.

I’d felt the wave too. “Never spent time on water?” I mocked.

“What do you keep in your waters? Jaws?” He stumbled again.

Violent propensities
. The sea has them, the Earth rocks with them. I claim my inheritance, kneeing Bio-Dad so hard as he tilts his head back to draw from the tiny bottle that it tumbles him.
TAPE ROLLING
. The cleaver fuses to my arm. It soars and plunges, soars and plunges. “Monster!” I scream. I keep screaming as I cradle Ham’s tormented face to my bosom. I am screaming as I dial 911.

Epilogue

Physicists and fantasists suspect that someday there will be one simple equation to express and explain all the problems of all the galaxies. My big toe, which got Ham all horny, is also the TOE: the Theory of Everything. The mysteries of our universe become more mysterious as they grow ever more accessible. The symmetry of asymmetry.

What was it that I’d read in Yanofsky’s
I Winked, the Stars Wobbled? The world you see isn’t the world you get Ninety percent of it lurks out of your sight Invisible matter is the cosmic glue holding reckless galaxies in place
.

I am that dark, ghost,
thing
.

The quarks and electrons that make up villains and heroes also make the coffins we’re laid to rest in, and the earth we molder in, and the maggots we fatten, and the stars that shine on us after our worlds vanish.

Destiny works itself out in bizarre loops. I made the 911 call. Domestic dispute, I told the dispatcher. Let them find out how bloody. I heard the urgent police sirens, I waited a long while for the waist chains, handcuffs, leg shackles. And just when I prayed for my misery to be over, the waves rocked wild and heaved
Last Chance
free of its moorings. The houseboat skimmed a molten gold sea carrying its cargo of dead and living towards a horizon on
flames, I heard mermaids sing and police sirens screech, but not for me, not that night the Big One hit, with fires rimming the Bay like some nighttime eruption, with the night sky pink, reflecting off the fog, the sparks flying down like fiery rain, sky hissing into sea.

A Conversation with Bharati Mukherjee

Q:   Where did the idea for
Leave It to
Me
come from?

BM: About twenty years ago, while I was spending a year in Delhi, India, the Delhi police made big news by arresting an Asian serial killer and three of his white, hippie, women accomplices. The man was said to have befriended, then robbed and killed—in very grisly ways—tourists from Europe, the United States, and Canada. The accomplices were vulnerable young backpackers who had succumbed to the serial killer’s physical attractiveness and charisma.

I attended the trial, which was held in a cramped, dusty courtroom in Delhi. The accused man had the reputation of being a flamboyant escape artist, so the security staff was on high alert, and the tension in the small courtroom was acute. The hearings were mesmerizing. The prisoner cut a compelling figure. He was a short, slight, muscular man with fiery eyes and an arrogant manner. In spite of his heavy shackles, he dominated the hearings. For the first and only time in my life, I felt that I was in the presence of evil in that courtroom. I was repelled, outraged, frightened, and, at the same time, fascinated.

Q:   Was it difficult to write about something so disturbing?

BM: It has taken me twenty years to transform that disturbing personal encounter with evil into a novel. Art works in mysterious ways to soothe our nightmares.

That wasn’t the only difficulty. The first draft of this novel was stolen in 1994. Burglars vandalized my Manhattan apartment and took every portable thing of value, including my laptop. I hadn’t made a back-up disk. I hadn’t even made a hard copy of that draft.

Q:   How did you start writing again?

BM: I was so traumatized that for two months I couldn’t face reconstructing that stolen draft. And then, on a hot July afternoon in Saratoga Springs, I experienced a miraculous emotional breakthrough. I
heard
Debby’s voice. She spoke the first page and a half of part one. After that, Debby took over, as had
Jasmine and Hannah in my two preceding novels. She surprised me. She became my alternate self, the “what if …?” self. The pace, the language, the events—all were dictated by Debby. I suppose that sounds a little crazy, but it’s the way I’ve always written fiction.

Q:   What made you think to investigate such a disturbing, personal encounter with evil through the lens of a Hindu myth?

BM: I wrote the story of Goddess Devi in the prologue to provide a template for reading the novel. I hoped the prologue would allow the reader to react to Debby/Devi’s actions. In the myth I use, Devi the goddess slays the Buffalo Demon because she is charged with that mission by the Cosmic Spirit. The Cosmic Spirit makes her its agent for ridding the world of evil on that occasion. I intended for all of Debby/Devi’s experiences to be interpreted by the reader as visitations from God. Characters like Wyatt, Frankie Fong, the blond in the Spider Veloce, and Ham operate in a larger than real way. They are guardian-corrupters; they are demigods, innocent as Greek gods, untouched by the suffering they cause. They operate outside normal laws. They don’t consider the consequences that their actions have on other people’s lives. Jess, Debby’s biological mother, is villainous on a pettier, more human scale. She is just a flower child gone nasty.

That story of the Goddess Devi—also known as Maha Devi or the Great Goddess—is also very much a part of my personal experience. It is recited with great feeling in Sanskrit during the most important Bengali Hindu religious festival. I can still hear my father, who was a scientist and the founder of a successful pharmaceutical company, chanting this musical passage about Goddess Devi slaying the Buffalo-Demon in his clear-toned, authoritative voice.