The Coming of Bright (5 page)

Paranoid schizophrenia with messianic delusions.

Better to move on to the next question, get this over with before Waxman ended up having to put that Taser to good use. Maybe the electricity would scramble the Gatekeeper’s brain circuitry back into place.

“Do you feel guilty Dorothy?”

“I need to see your feet, to know for sure. The palms
and
the soles must bear the mark of the slave. Show them to me.”

“Dorothy, if you’re not going to answer my . . .”

“NOW SLAVE!”

The insane urgency of the Gatekeeper’s voice rattled Zora at the centers of her cells; her eyes spontaneously filled with tears at the shock.

This time Waxman did not hesitate, jumped forward and shot the Taser darts into the Gatekeeper. These were high-powered darts, voltage-wise and velocity-wise, and the thin prison scrubs of the Drome did almost nothing to slow them down. They burrowed into the Gatekeeper’s skin, and Zora noticed to her horror that the trajectory of the darts took them deep into the Gatekeeper’s breasts.

Growing nipples of blood sprouted on the scrubs above the Gatekeeper’s areolas, a milk of crimson flowing into a field of evergreen. All the while the Gatekeeper maintained the same whitish-blue grin she had sported when Waxman whispered in her ear. Zora could see her teeth chattering involuntarily and tiny ripples moving along the skin of her face. She did not collapse and convulse; her eyes did not shift in their sockets.

Zora stood involuntarily. “I need to leave.”

“Sit down!”

This time it was Waxman, not the Gatekeeper, projecting her voice imperiously at Zora. She did not sit.

“I need to leave.”

Waxman relaxed the amps through the wires, yanked the impaling barbs from the Gatekeeper’s breasts. Blood flowed from them much more freely than milk ever could, than it ever would. Hastily she unshackled Dorothy from the chair, jerked her erect, no resistance from the Gatekeeper, the same surreal smile, skin not rippling any more, teeth not chattering, shoved her out of the room.

Over her shoulder: “Wait here.”

Not another word from 98-Sierra.

Alone in the room, erect, quivering, Zora glanced over at the table, at the drops of blood sitting there, already congealing, on the stainless steel. She closed her eyes and concentrated on the nausea, on balling it up back into her stomach.

For some reason all she could feel was her tongue, it seemed to grow inside her mouth, to balloon out of all proportion, fill the entire cavity of her mouth, ready to burst. She bit it hard, to make sure it was real, and felt the trickle of blood against her gums.

CHAPTER FIVE

The knocker on the door of Judge Ras’s townhouse, 232 Cherry Hill Lane, was ivory with arms of brass. A custom fitting of a Meiji-Taisho piece of antique ivory the Judge had bought anonymously at auction for well north of $20,000.

Zora’s eyes bulged, her tongue swelled, as she swung the object back and forth three times, eliciting an inhuman groan of an echo from inside the home.

The knocker was a human head, about three inches high, face forward, made entirely of entangled women’s bodies. Nude. The nose was a pair of protruding buttocks; the open lips, showing perfect teeth, formed by two sets of legs spread apart, feet meeting in the middle. Each bulbous eye was the enormous breast of a different body. It immediately occurred to Zora that this was the kind of thing that Giuseppe Arcimboldo would have made if, number one, he had had an ivory fetish, and number two, he had been possessed through time and space by the tormented soul of Robert Crumb.

Footfalls approached a matter of seconds after the fleshpot face had kissed the brass knocker plate for the third time. There was the Judge in houndstooth socks, white silk slacks and a light purple silk shirt, untucked, his few gray hairs glowing against disheveled black. Zora was wearing the same goldenrod pantsuit she’d been wearing earlier that day at the Drome. Luckily she had not gotten any of the Gatekeeper’s blood on it, at least any that noticeably blotched the hand-me-down polyester. The spittle she couldn’t see. The suit had belonged to her mother.

Judge Ras opened his mouth to speak; her voice crossed into it first, resonated against his tongue.

“It was a disaster, Judge. She’s satanic. Evil. I can’t do it, I just can’t do it.”

His eyes had a sheen of kindness without sacrificing any of their inner hardness. Wordlessly he turned, right hand on polyester shoulder, gentle pressure leading her inside. Threshold crossed, narrow doorway, polyester inevitably brushing silk, skin imagining skin beneath fabric, she heard him as she scented him, a mixture of cardamon and cedar with the odor of freshly washed pores.

“Calm down, Zora. Let’s talk about it in the living room.”

So now it would be Zora instead of Ms. Bright. Putting her in the same league of endearment as Dorothy. A dubious distinction to be sure.

The only name for him that seemed right on her lips, that played well against her palate, was Judge. As though that were his name instead of Victor. What would have to happen, what mysterious events would have to transpire, for her to call him Victor?

She crossed another threshold, into the living room, fabric still brushing fabric, skin still imagining skin, and entered a world of ivory. The Judge was a serious collector, morbidly serious, a connoisseur of tusk and tooth. Nor did he hide away his collection in some vault, where it would just as soon gather dust as value.

Like the gavel, like the callipygian head on the door, he filled his everyday life with his artifacts. Entwined his deeds with their movements, gave them life beyond the decorative. An ivory pipe here, a pair of ivory Kama Sutra figurines there. Actually he had a number of those, an entire auction’s worth of erotic Murshidabad ivory, from the time when Jafar Khan was the diwan of Bengal.

An ivory fountain pen resting on an end table. An ivory-handled ebony cane leaning beside the faux fireplace. And what was that sitting just beyond the room on the kitchen counter, Zora couldn’t help but ask. A totem stick with an eagle’s head made from the penis bone of an Alaskan walrus.

He used it occasionally he said as a meat tenderizer. He already had an ulu topped with an oosik handle, for cutting meat, and figured the two pieces should complement each other in the kitchen.

As they looked around the living room together, she standing in rapture, eyes wading through waves of ivory, he snatched from the coffee table an antique stethoscope with an ivory chestpiece. Held it to her chest, right between her breasts. The thing was rumored to have been owned by Benjamin Rush, but the provenance wasn’t ironclad.

“Just want to make sure your little encounter with Dorothy didn’t give you arrhythmia.”

She swatted his errant hand away: “Judge, be serious.”

He set the stethoscope down, gestured to a chair a few feet away, cater-corner to the table, an island in the room.

“Please Zora have a seat, we’ll have that champagne I promised you in a few minutes.”

The chair was no wood-veneer bourgeois luxury: it was a throne. It had been bartered by an important chieftain in the Congo, back in those heady days of colonial dismemberment of the continent. For a dubious right—the chief could control the flow and prices of ivory in his kingdom, so long as all of it ended up in the hands of King Leopold’s traders.

Needless to say, the white traders soon accused the chief of inflating prices, and siphoning off ivory for himself, not to mention the worst sin of all, conserving the herds. They turned his subjects into serfs of ivory under force of arms. The chief himself was murdered by Leopold’s mercenaries—killed on the pretext that he was fomenting rebellion against the liberators of his people. It
was
called Congo Free State, after all.

None of that bloody history lessened the majesty of that throne, which the Judge had bought at Sotheby’s at their African Heritage auction a few years back. It had all the trappings, all the official forms, of proper ownership, enough paperwork behind it to fill every orifice of the body.

Now Zora sat in it. Sank into it. Comfortable as fuck. Not a traditional African stool, not an imperial throne either, more like a sitting-room chair in the Palace of Versailles. It was made of bubinga wood, seat upholstered with leopard skin, preserved beautifully after all those years and all the distance it had been forced to travel.

And the panels of the back were inlaid with ivory, engraved with a variety of geometric patterns alternating with silhouettes of wildlife. A row across the panels of okapi—Zora mistook them for giraffes. A row of lionesses, seated.

Judge Ras sat on the couch, got comfortable, houndstooth onto the coffee table. The couch was an exception to the room’s law of ivory, sort of—it was covered entirely in ivory-colored sharkskin. The company that made it had told him it was the tanned belly hide of some type of Requiem shark, could not narrow down the species for him.

Zora momentarily neglected the Gatekeeper, was entranced by ivory.

“Jesus, how did you get all this?”

She had meant the question logistically, geographically. He reckoned it to be about money. He was not beholden to money as he was to ivory, as he was to Eros, the two primary catalysts of his passions, Eros more than ivory, the god dancing across his worldview. He had money in spades.

“Ever heard of Victor Judge?”

A wry grin, the smirk of a secret, flitted across to her.

Instantly Zora made the connection, she thought herself a fool for having missed it before. She had read his books, each and every one, counted herself an ardent fan. She had blogged about them for strangers passing in the night, in cyberspace, to hook them as she had been hooked.

New York Times
bestsellers, erotic murder mysteries. The wiles of Detective Becky Love. Becky Love was a
femme fatale
on the side of right, deadly to the deadly. The ideal blend of Eros and Thanatos. Freud himself would shudder if he met her, he’d beg to kiss her feet. Beg like a baby.

It made sense the Judge would use a pseudonym. The steaminess, the sordidness, simply would not do in the halls of academia, in the hallowed chambers of Law.

Shit, he’s richer than Stephen King
!

“Yeah, heard of him, some kind of author, right?”

She affected a nonchalant tone, cool with irony. She wouldn’t stoop to the level of an
otaku
, regardless of how she really felt.

“Something like that.”

His smirk continued to flit across the table, flirting with her, as cool and ironic as her question.

Beneath the irony, repression’s hold on Zora weakened. She had always fancied herself the alter ego of Becky Love. She lusted after Love’s ability to play with fate, shed inhibition, to mock the power of death over love, of love over death.

She longed to surrender in victory to Eros, toy with the god, bend his will to hers, use him to kill for her.

Zora herself was no fantasy in ivory, no Pygmalion slave, no virgin bride. She’d had a lover at Vanderbilt, Kyle Schuman, the sex was certainly nothing to write home about—although she had written home about loving him.

Kyle had met Alice and Jordan, had passed the parental test with flying colors. He ended up graduating summa with a degree in history, wrote his thesis on the English Interregnum, boring beyond belief. He was on track to graduate summa from Stanford Law in a couple years.

They’d broken up for the usual reason—the man fucked up. Why he had slept with his co-editor on the student paper
The
Hustler
she could not fathom. Who did he think ran the paper, Larry Fucking Flynt?

Zora was available, open, the laws of her body and her heart could be re-written, re-inscribed in a new language, and the eroticism of the Judge, the sensuality beneath the stone, was an ordeal too intense, too liberating, for repression to bear.

She did not fear him now, as she had not feared him in his office.

What of their difference in status, in power? Was she not in every molecule, every atom, a woman, as powerful in her own thoughts and feelings, the sanctity of her sexuality, as any woman—as much the empress of her own world as Becky Love was of hers?

And the Judge couldn’t hurt her if he wanted to, or for that matter favor her, in the classroom either. Grading was anonymous, numerical. Shit, law students slept with professors all the time, that species of sex was practically a pre-requisite for the bar exam in some states.

While her inhibitions percolated in reverse, the Judge steered back to business.

“Will you write the plea for Dorothy?”

“I don’t think so. She really offended me. Told me I had the mark of the slave. My mom’s ancestors were slaves. Her great-great-great-granddad was lynched by a mob, falsely accused of the murder of a white man. I don’t know how I can plead for the life of someone like that.”

“That’s the point, Zora. She’s sick. Her mind is not her own, she’s possessed. Dorothy’s perfect for the LORD Project. Don’t make this personal.”

“Well, I’ll think about it, how’s that. I need to recover from my arrhythmia first.”