The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 1 (23 page)

The cords of Leather's neck thickened as he strained for ever more oxygen.

“Obediah! Consider what is in front of you! See how he feels no pain? He is, by every medical standard, clinically dead and yet—”

“Would you like me to list every disorder that can block the perceptivity of pain? You are a poor physician, sir. My first piece of medical advice to you—after resigning from the profession at once!—would be to remove that damned fork from your patient's arm!”

Leather yanked the fork from my flesh and brandished it.

“See? The boy does not bleed! Still disbelieve? Then I shall stab him again! Name the location!”

“Mr. Dixon!” Mary snapped for the butler. “Remove the course immediately. Do not forget the cutlery.”

Dixon reacted as if doused with ice water. His long arms reached out but he was halted by a gesture from Cockshut. With shocking disregard for conduct, the man used his bare hands to rip a hunk of meat from the ham and fling it upon a plate. He then tossed the plate across the table where it landed before me, breaking into four pieces.

“Eat that, Mr. Finch, if you please.”

“He cannot eat,” said Leather.

“He can eat,” snarled Cockshut, “and he will.”

“I tell you, he cannot!”

“Your invited guest insists that he do! He shall eat as does a mortal man and you—my poor, misguided Dr. Leather—will, with any luck, extract yourself from this delusional web in which you are caught.”

“Have it your way!” Leather gasped for air, white froth gathering at the corners of his mouth. “He shall swallow this portion at your request, and then, my dubious friend, at
my
request you shall probe the portion lodged within his stomach, feel it unspoiled by digestive acid!”

The doctor picked up a dining fork and enclosed my hand around it. I looked at the ham but could ne'er well imagine putting it inside of my mouth. Out of morbidity I pressed upon the meat with the fork and watched the juices rise.

Leather's bloodshot eyes were the latest two bullets I had to face.

“You embarrass me in front of our guests,” muttered he, “pushing around fine food as if it were dead rat. Elbows, Finch! Napkin, Finch! You leave no doubt of your graceless age.”

Lifting my eyes from the fractured dish, I found Dixon paralyzed against the far wall, Mary watching me through a well of tears, Olive peeking from behind spread fingers, and of course, two Harvard professors awaiting the outcome of this different sort of meat etiquette.

Click click, click click.

Was there any doubt of what I'd do?

Teeth long unfamiliar with the textures of food began their mastication. Strings of fat caught between molars; my out-of-practice lips slobbered grease; a warm coat of ham slime coated my cold tongue. Yet I forced down that moist blob of pig and thumped my chest with a fist until I felt it settle into my unresponsive belly.

“There you have it,” said Cockshut.

Leather heaved for air. Sweat popped from red pores.

“Now feel his stomach!”

“I try to make it a habit not to paw the bodies of young men.”

Leather kicked back his chair. It struck Dixon, who hobbled aside in fright. With a tremendous sweep of his arm, Leather cleared half the table clean of dishes and food. The crashing surpassed any noise the house had ever witnessed. China split and resplit, somersaulted and split again, each white dagger imprinting itself on my vision like lightning. And the food! An entire market's worth, for which the Leathers had spent their every last cent, turned to carnage. We were spattered.

That was but one second. In the next, Leather lifted me by the lapels and pounded me down upon the cleared table. The back of my head shattered a glass and my hair soaked with wine. I struggled against this domestic attack, adoptive father to adopted son, but his arm was braced against my chest. I heard Leather's free hand sift through the nest of silverware and saw silhouetted against the ceiling
what he found: a knife, a good sharp one. It hovered over my stomach.

“WATCH! I'LL CUT HIM OPEN! YOU WILL SEE THE DRY MEAT!”

The Cockshuts were on their feet. The alabaster monkey was raised in defense.

“For the love of what's holy, stop this!”

“YOU'VE WATCHED ME CUT A THOUSAND CADAVERS! YOU DOUBT MY HAND?”

“I doubt your
mind
, sir!”

Leather let fly a tear of laughter and then, Dearest Reader, he began to cut, through my shirt and into my stomach, a
C
-shaped flap. My gut opened with a rubbery sound, a squirt of vestigial moistness.

Screams of horror spread with wildfire fleetness, through the dining room, down the hall, into the kitchen. Bedlam erupted. Olive was tripping her way toward the door and Cockshut was scrambling to help her. One musician had his mouth clasped as if holding back a tide of vomitus while the other had lifted his lute for use as a shield. Olive managed to shove open the dining room door and beyond it I saw the gaping faces of incredulous footmen and valets, the fleeing forms of maids. Dropped glass exploded from multiple locations. Dixon ran off after something, anything, everything.

Gladys, abandoned by her keeper, cried from afar.

The cosmetics of Cockshut's cheeks had smeared; he was a backpedaling harlequin.

“Not only will you never return to Harvard, I'll see to it that no institution upon this Earth will have you! If I have my way, sir, you'll be behind bars come morning!”

It was enough to distract Leather. I took his wrist and whipped it to the table, where it came into rough contact with a candlestick.
The knife spun free and when he reached for it, I shoved him over and scrabbled for the table edge. The flap in my gut yawned open; I faltered and that gave Leather time to take hold of my shirt. Across the table we paddled in circles. I snatched his ear and pulled. There was a ripping sensation; there was blood.

He blink-blinked at me as if surprised by my company, indeed by his own presence atop the dregs of dinner. He was purple from lack of oxygen. His cheeks were war-painted with gravies, his hair spiked with jellies. Yet through this animalistic rawness rose an expression of dawning dread as he began to read the story told by these chaotic runes, one of a once-promising family and once-limitless career. Everything now was broken, and to pieces so sundry that no scientist, no matter the extent of his patience or brilliance, could hope to mend it.

XVI.

B
Y THE TIME THE CLOMPING
of Cockshut's cane had faded, I was on my back upon the befouled floor. No student of Luca Testa let his guard down for long; I lifted myself to a defensive crouch. It was a bad idea. Organs inside me shifted as if about to spill out of my stomach flap.

If history's worst dinner party had proven anything, it was that my innards were my only real possessions, even if just nostalgic ones. I leaned back against the wall, gripped tight my abdomen, and searched out my abuser. He, too, had slid from the table and now stooped over the far end. Food was painted across his every inch of clothing.

We sized each other up.

Mary could suffer no more violence. She wiped her splashed face with an arm of equal soilage and addressed her husband.

“Give those simpleminded scholars no more of your spirit. We'll take your findings to New Haven. Or Philadelphia. Or New York. The doctors here mistrust you for the silliest of reasons. You're not as ancient as they? You can't grow a beard? These are the accusations of fools. We do not need them.”

Leather took her by the throat. Panic soared inside me and I rose, an isolated moment of true valor, but my guts betrayed me by rolling toward freedom. I leaned backward, else I lose my stuffing.

Mary's back hit the wall. She pulled at the doctor's arm.

His fingers turned white as they sunk into her neck. Short of breath, he hissed.

“I can grow a beard, wife. I choose
not
to. It is a
choice
. Beards are
unclean
. They are as
vain
as a medallion. It is
you
, I think, who
believe
me to be a child. The way you
patronize
me. How you claim we don't need these people's
help
. Indicate, wife, that you understand.”

She could do nothing of the sort. Her face purpled and her eyes reddened with popped vessels. I slid down the wall to the floor and began to slither closer with one arm wrapped about my stomach. I floundered with such energy that my chin struck the patterned tile and a piece of my eyetooth shot outward.

It was noise enough to knock Leather from his furious blank. His hand unclenched from Mary's throat. She screeched for air.
The Isolator
, thought I,
someone bring her the Isolator.
She dropped to her knees, hands pressed to scarlet cheeks and saliva bubbling as she fought for sweet air. I could almost taste it myself.

Leather adjusted his vest despite its trashed state. He tromped to the entryway, lightheaded and weaving, before turning to deliver a final pronouncement between gaggings.

“Come morning, Finch—I'll repair your abdomen—you in turn—will repair your attitude—in the interim—I'm afraid—you will need to hold those—precious organs of yours—just as you will—learn to hold—your tongue—it is your fault, not mine—your refusal to cooperate—that holds success—at arm's length—tomorrow at dawn—we demonstrate at Dock Square—why, I'll run you through—with a sword—shopkeepers, the bourgeoisie—those unburdened by learnedness—it is they—who shall save me—who shall demand—my fame, my funding—who shall beg me—with purses outstretched—to
fix what—in the human machine—is broken—oh, how they shall beg.”

Sauce, gravy, cream, wine, and blood marked the path of his exit.

Mary and I behaved like the two surviving worms of a post-rain playground stomping. I recommenced my pitiful writhe in her direction while she edged along the wall closer to me. Five minutes later we'd found each other. She rested against me, rubbing at her bruised throat. When at last she spoke, her rasp smelled of hot, bloodied spit.

“The doctor must be right. Let him sew you shut. Then go with him to Dock Square. Don't cross him. Please don't, please. For the same reason I don't take Gladys and run. He'd never stop chasing us. Do you understand? Do you?”

It was for the sake of her merciful visage that I smiled.

“You wish me, ma'am, to indicate?”

Mary blessed me with a single hoarse laugh that peppered her chin with dark blood. Nevertheless, I captured the sound in a hand and tucked it away inside of me, in a place where there were no open wounds through which it might float away.

No one had bothered to attend to Gladys. The child's woeful moan experimented with a louder volume. Mary gathered her strength and, with the wall as her guide, brought herself to two feet. She did not offer me a hand but that was all right; the doctor would be most favorably met come morning should he find me right where he'd left me.

Before exiting, she turned off the electric lights. It was a small blessing.

From the lightless room I listened. I heard Mary open and close doors in her search for Gladys; I heard her find the girl inside of a closet; I heard shushing, anodyne words, promises that all would
turn out for the best; I heard mother and daughter lock the house doors as if it were any other night; I heard them go upstairs. I did
not
hear them lie in bed and dream of what was to become of their wrecked lives, and for that one mercy I was grateful.

The house, exhausted after such upheaval, slept, and there were no sounds, not for hours. Not until what my Excelsior insisted to me was two in the morning did some indestructible thing stir from the ashes.

Click click, click click.

My daughter, alive and pecking.

The pair of shoes chuckled their way into the room. There was no mistaking the silhouette of a genteel dress, a stylish arrangement of hair—and what was that in the figure's hand but a leather portmanteau bulging with packed clothing?

Merle knelt, arranged her skirts, and whispered.

“Once my father asked to start a new life with me as a family. Fathers know better than daughters. I was wrong to say no. I am sorry, Papa.”

Was she crying? I cursed the darkness, for I could not tell.

“You say this now,” said I. “Now that the Leathers are ruined.”

“I know I can be harsh; it is a stain from a hard life and I promise to scrub it away. You are my father and nothing can change that. You are the boy of whom my mother spoke the most tenderly. Her tender, understanding, forgiving Aaron.”

Even better than Cornelius Leather, Merle Ruby Watson knew where to stick the knife.

“The doctor plans to take me into town come daybreak,” said I. “Mrs. Leather believes there is gain to be had from it.”

“Of course she said that. She's protecting herself. Is this what
you
want, Papa?”

I shrugged; even that smallest of motions rocked my entrails.

“It might mean money,” said I. “I know how fond you are of money.”

“I am not fond of money; I am averse to starvation. In this suitcase I have a dozen fine dresses. Plus silver. And jewelry. Anything I could take from upstairs. We'll sell it. It will get us far from here.”

“Mrs. Leather is not often wrong. Our fortunes may indeed improve when the people of Boston see that I cannot be hurt.”

I heard the teacup chime of Merle's underbite parting to show its lethal fangs.

“Oh,” purred she, “but you can.”

Who knew this better than she? The girl had seen me cower upon her first arrival and later beg understanding of my abhorrent existence. Both proclaimed my pedigree of pain, and pain was something that Merle was skilled at delivering as well as receiving.

She stood and offered her hand as Mary had not.

When I showed her my opened abdomen, she looked away to gather herself before lifting the crumpled tablecloth from the floor and wrapping it around my torso snugly enough to keep my insides intact. She knotted the cloth and hoisted me to my feet. It was a courageous field dressing and yet I found myself thinking of Mary and her swollen, contused neck. What would become of her if the doctor, my second failed father, that oxygen-slurping maniac, awoke to find me absent, a runaway child yet again? I was abandoning Mary to a bad fate as I had abandoned so many before her.

The excuse that came to mind was from Leather himself:

A few small deaths in a wider war. What difference could it make?

By the time
Merle let go of me to open the front door, I could stand under my own power. She fiddled with the locks, cursing like a sailor, as I gazed one last time upon the beautiful, upsweeping stair
case. The Little Miracle Electric Mexican Stuttering Ring waited, patient and hopeful, upon the bedside table near my third-floor berth. For an unimaginable fifteen years I had worn it as a reminder of the rogue possibility of goodness in the world; that itself had been a little miracle. Without the talisman, worried I, the modest grace I'd since acquired might be lost as surely as if there were a
C
-shaped flap cut into my soul. Also upstairs, nailed to the Revelation Almanac, were the hundreds of scraps reaped from my body in Leather's attempt to pare me down to a Nothing in Particular. Did this daughter of mine have what it took to make me whole once more?

Merle's grip tightened around my waistcloth and drew me from the winking furnishments of the once-great hall and into a limpid sea of night. This was the real world; I recalled Mary's advice and commanded myself to blink, to blink again. Merle pulled me down the flowered walkway as if I were a stubborn cow, past the front gate, and into the street. I hugged my guts and followed as best I could.

Capably steered though I was through a night world muddled with late-night drunks and grousing inkeeps, I could not relax. I would have sworn that behind us advanced the muffled panting of a madman trapped within the cage of a metal mask, a father terribly disappointed by his fostered son, halving the distance between us with every city block, impatient to impart a new etiquette. He was an apparition impossible to outrun; indeed he would chase me throughout the night and following day, then the following weeks, the following months, the following years.

Listen.

Can't you hear him even now?

Hweeeeee . . . fweeeeee . . . hweeeeee . . . fweeeeee . . .