Savage Love (8 page)

While Nedlinger perused his old work, now in its thirty-seventh printing with multiple translations and worldwide distribution — not to mention the feature film starring Nick Nolte as the Neutral chief (name translated as Sun, Sun Lord, Sunshine, Ray Of Sunlight, Cloudless Day, Naked In The Sun) and Jennifer Lopez as Morning Rain That Comes After The Night Of Clouds From The Day Before In The West (I myself wrote a small paper on Neutral meteorology as evidenced in their naming customs; the winds in southwestern Ontario generally come from a westerly direction) — his wife was doing the herky-jerky above their marital bed before a live video camera, gasping, gurgling, wondering irritably where Nedlinger was as her violent twitchings intensified. At the obligatory coroner's inquest (Canada's answer to reality
TV
), there had been some question as to the couple's sexual inclinations, but since there was ample evidence in Melusina's diaries that Nedlinger had no sexual inclinations (see tractor accident
supra
), this line of questioning proved fruitless.

Among other unpleasant and hitherto-unsuspected (by the eternally unsuspecting Canadian public) discoveries, the coroner's inquest revealed Nedlinger's festering, nearly psychotic hatred of modern life and all things Canadian (how it disgusted him that
UNESCO
routinely listed the country as one of the top places in the world to live), how he increasingly dwelt in the distant past, the past of the Sun Lord, the Arthurian ruler of the enigmatic Neutral Empire, how he gradually came to identify with the Sun Lord (played, as I say, by Nick Nolte in the movie), whose epic doomed love affair with his sister (see long name above) spawned court intrigues, divisions and rebellions that fatally weakened the nation, leaving it vulnerable to foreign invasion, heterodox religious proselytizers and disease.

It seems that in his cups or in moments of psychic breakdown due to the stress of maintaining his position as a world figure and notable forensic archaeologist, Nedlinger actually believed himself to be in touch by
ESP
or some other alchemical emanation with the Sun Lord; worse, he sometimes believed he was the Sun Lord reincarnated as a so-called forensic archaeologist, and this is how he knew that the dead baby my father had discovered in expanding the milking shed was not just any Neutral child but the very offspring of that mythic, aberrant union between the ancient Sage King of the Neutrals and his sister, the trembling, voluptuous, savage beauty known to us as Morning Rain That Comes After The Night Of Clouds From The Day Before In The West.

The inquest also brought to light the embarrassing fact that Melusina and I had conducted a brief, tempestuous affair while we were undergraduates at the University of Toronto and Nedlinger was at Berkeley pursuing his earlier, less famous work on exhumation and reburial practices among the prehistoric Ontario Iroquois, a betrayal for which Nedlinger instantly forgave me at the time of the coroner's inquest, well knowing, I assume, Melusina's fatal charms, her insatiable lust, and the documented Canadian penchant for secretive, hypocritical, adulterous,
compulsively polymorphous sex congress (one of the main reasons, Nedlinger thought, that the country never really got ahead of its puritanical neighbour to the south despite having all the geographical and historical advantages).

This affair, as I say, was brief, amounting to practically nothing on the scale of such things. To be perfectly honest, I did once throw her over the hood of a silver Lexus
IS
in the Bedford Road Municipal Parking Lot down the block from the Royal Ontario Museum, tore the crotch out of her panties and rogered her like a Holstein-Friesian bull, tears of happiness pouring from my eyes, her orgasmic shrieks filling my ears; in her frenzy she ripped the windshield wipers off the car and employed them to belabour my innocent shoulders. I do not know if my lust was driven by fondness or the universal human desire to hammer the lover of a more successful friend. I do not know if she used me or I used her or whether or not there was ever a glimmer of love between us. At the time I had no idea what love was, believing only that Nedlinger knew, and I envied him for it, envied him with a blind hatred that expressed itself as lust for his inamorata, the fair Melusina.

As I say, this affair was trivial in nature, barely worth mentioning, a minor blot on Melusina'
s prismatically loyal adoration of the famous one, although, as was admitted at the coroner's inquest, she and I did relapse once or twice, a handful of times at most, not, as Nedlinger's regrettable lawyer insisted, “obscenely fucking nearly continuously in front of my client's nose for the last twenty years” but, yes, as in being compulsively if not to say violently drawn to one another in a wallow of resentment, hatred, lust, rage and envy such that to this day I think all those emotions are love, are beneficent, are, in fact, the only species of grace the Lord can vouchsafe the losers of the world. At the end our lovemaking degenerated into a perverse parody of passion: I would fondle her webbed toes then ejaculate, dribbling my thin sperm onto those fishy fans of translucent flesh while she watched, touching herself, squirming in an ecstasy of humiliation, self-disgust and hatred. (Both Melusina and I joined Sex Addicts Anonymous at various times;
for me, it was a good place to meet new women.)

I tell you this in the spirit of full disclosure, as they say these days, a phrase of hypocritical cant that discounts the existential impossibility of full disclosure, of knowing the true dimensions of the human heart, its capacity for pain, corruption, obsession, and deception. I tell you this so that you can understand my motive in going to visit Nedlinger some months after Melusina's death, after fortifying myself with several shots of Alberta vodka. I wanted, yes, purely human things such as closure, intimacy, unconditional love and revenge. I wanted Nedlinger's forgiveness and I wanted to torment him, favour him with lurid descriptions of the lustful spasms I shared with his wife (albeit in a compulsive nexus of bitterness, despair and jealousy), spasms that he himself had never been able to enjoy, wounded as he was (that tractor incident) and lost in the mysterious and ethereal world of his own researches at the very limits of forensic archaeology.

He had been like a god to us, distant, incomprehensible and untouchable. In truth
, the fame and money had never meant much to him, and that made his success all the more aggravating. Now events had brought him low, his trajectory declining into a more human orbit where disappointment, lost love and death shamble among the survivors. It was in the twin spirits of
schadenfreude
and
ressentiment
(the patron spirits of our desperate, dystopian age) that I ventured tipsily across the fields dotted with scaffoldings, mounds of earth and half-filled trenches — old diggings, long abandoned — to visit my friend Nedlinger. (And I thought, staggering past those gaping wounds, how in Nedlinger
's desire to uncover secret depths he had forever missed the surface of things.)

As usual, when I found him, he did not notice me at first, the eternal afterthought, the toady, the hanger-on, which only enraged me even more. (I was never a man of large spirit, I admit; I am the son of my parents, a shallow, envious, unachieved southwestern Ontario farm boy incidentally touched by greatness, an experience from which I have yet to recover.) I ripped Nedlinger's headphones off with a sweep of my hand. His eyes blinked open in surprise, then clouded with confusion and disappointment. I tried to speak, but words failed me as they always had. I began to weep. He placed his paternal hand on my forehead, a kind of benediction, and said, “Lennart —” (My name is Lennart Wolven, not that you need to remember it.) He said, “Lennart, I have terrible news for you
” — words that made no sense since, prior to coming to visit Nedlinger, I had spent hours and days priming myself to deliver terrible news to him, confessional revelations of illicit sex congress with his now-dead but revered Melusina, and yet here he was consoling me for some hitherto-unlooked-for apocalypse.

He gazed at me sympathetically and, swinging his legs off the bed, sat upright so that our knees touched, took my wrists in his hands, made a curious
tsk, tsk
sound with his tongue, and said, “I was wrong, Lennart. All along I was wrong. Here —,” he said, handing me a crumpled printout. “Read it yourself.”

His resemblance to the actor Nick Nolte in this moment was extraordinary, and of course he knew I would be unable to read the statistical gobbledygook, the drone work, albeit the very foundation of forensic archaeology that had always escaped me — genomic sequencing, radiocarbon dating, counting the rat bones in a garbage dump. Even now this was his way of putting me in my place.

“It's the
DNA
analysis for the Royal Child,” Nedlinger said. “It's finally come through. It took years because the samples were infinitely small and, after the first results, deemed corrupt. But we ran the tests again and again, always with the same outcome,
until, over time, we came to believe them.” He sighed, his chest heaving convulsively. “Besides, the procedures have improved. Read it. It was not the Sun Lord's —” He broke off, clearly in the throes of some deep inner struggle, the truth, it seemed, being too much for him to speak aloud. “It was much more recent, not prehistoric, not even Native.
”

“Jesus,” I said, gasping. Ever the master of dramatic situations, he had me in thrall. The implications were obvious: the whole of Nedlinger's research, his fame, his personal fortune, had been founded in error. This was far more important than Melusina's sorry demise; I felt a white-hot nub of triumph in my gut, the heat slicked through my veins like a drug.
“I'm sorry,” I said, meaning not a word.

But Nedlinger continued, gripping my wrists in his huge, spatulate hands. “There can't be any doubt now,” he said. “
It was your mother's child, a fetus, born near term, abandoned and buried in a field. Your brother, perhaps. It happened to be buried at the edge of the ossuary, bits and pieces of artifact got mixed up in the grave. I should have recognized this, but I was blind with ambition. You know how it is, I think.”

I don't know what I looked like, a staring wreck, in trousers forever too short and a cardigan sweater stained with coffee, a bow tie askew at my throat. I heard the words with uncanny clarity and thought, Of course, he's right. I thought, I knew it all along. I grew up in the House of Atreus, where children were consumed like canapé
s. I had a brother, but my envious mother slaughtered him, an epic act of negation to blight my life. No happiness for little Lennart, that was the rule. Betrayal, meanness and horror everywhere. My triumph evaporated. I had toppled Armand Nedlinger's world, shattered his version of reality, and now he had returned the favour. I was tranquil in the cosmic justice of it all.

But then I wasn't tranquil. It should have been me, I thought, dead in the furrows, forever innocent and pure, while, in life, I had done everything wrong, followed a dark star, fallen in love with the wrong woman, failed, failed, failed. What kind of story was this? I asked myself. Some malign, entropic, broken-mirror version of the Round Table knights, Lancelot and Guinevere, Lennart and Melusina, destined to ruin everything they touched and foul the dreams of greater men. Or was it just a piece of sordid Canadian Gothic, dead babies under the hedgerows, shadowy adulterous unions in cornfields, thin-lipped murderous mothers forever drinking their Alberta vodka
tea
and kneeling in the front pew at the Iona Station United Church, whispering “Amen”
and quivering in ecstasies of puny triumph?

“My father —” I began.

“I don't think he knew, Lennart,” said Nedlinger. “His archaeological enthusiasm, though amateurish, was never faked. He always thought it was an Indian child.
”

“He brought it into the house,” I said. “She never said a word. Her own dead child on the dining room table all those years,” I said, “until she couldn't stand it any longer.” The horror seeped into my heart gradually, drop by drop, like acid, like truth. And then I thought, This explains everything: my childhood pleasure in torturing small furry animals, my homoerotic yearnings, my masturbatory fantasies about the Jesuit martyrs, my inability to form friendships, play team sports and date nice girls from Sunday school. I felt a grim satisfaction
— I was sure things couldn't get worse.

But then Nedlinger said, “There's more.” He said, “That's not all I have to tell you, Lennart.”

His words came in gentle whispers, words scarcely breathed into the silence that stretched between us. I barely heard him, and what I heard found no lodging in my brain, though a chill went through me.

“What did you say?” I asked, blinking back the tears, ripping the stifling bow tie from my neck and throwing it amongst the tools and potsherds strewn on the floor. I thought, No, no, not worse, not more —

“There's more,” he gasped, his face working inhumanly, as if there were tiny animals, rodents, scurrying beneath the skin. His lips curled malignantly.

“
More?” I breathed hoarsely. The air in the room seemed to scorch my lungs, the walls bulged inwards, my ears screamed with the pressure.

“Melusina —,” whispered Nedlinger, the word barely audible. “My wife was pregnant when she died. I kept it out of the inquest. It cost money. But all these Ontario coroners are corrupt. I've never met one who wasn't
—”