The Life of Hope (37 page)

“Ah, Louis,” I said, as the naked monster materialized in the picture window, “I’ve been expecting you.” I opened the door for him. He hid in the shadows of some trees, but his obscene flesh glowed. “Come on in!” I shrieked. Louis had to cling to one of the tree’s lower branches so that he wouldn’t topple over. “Louis,” I said patiently, “get on in here. It is of paramount importance that you and I discuss the mysteries of Hope.”

“Hope?” Louis gurgled. It sounded like an air bubble, one that had escaped from the bowels of the earth. “Dat’s me!”

“Hope,” I repeated evenly. Then it occurred to me that God hadn’t heard, that all of the lesser deities had misunderstood. “HOPE!” I screamed, silencing even the bullfrogs.

Louis let go of the branches, and his eight-foot body pitched forward. I got out of the way just in time. Louis Hope collapsed in front of me, a white mountain of quivering fat. I was reminded of my childhood; Crayola had forever failed to include a flesh-colored crayon, even in the huge 64-pack, leaving me with three alternatives; to color people an overhealthy brown, to make them a glaring yellow, or to leave them alone, as white as the paper they existed on. Looking at Louis, I thought that God had run out of flesh (and brown and yellow) crayons.

“First things first,” I told Louis. “Food.”

The monster began joyously to push himself up into a sitting position. I went to the kitchen and made a chicken sandwich, putting most of a boiled chicken between two slices of bread. How the chicken came to be there is another enigma; perhaps some altruistic bird, concerned for my welfare, plucked itself, leapt into some cooking pot and subsequently into the Frigidaire. Well, the fowl didn’t die for naught; Louis Hope devoured her with much gusto.

Meanwhile, the “Vocalise” filled my homestead. As Louis ate, I talked over the music, fitting my words into the haunting holes opened by the melody. “My wife, Louis,” I said, “that is, my wife Elspeth, Louis, is convinced that the Russians are going to blow us up. They have nuclear weaponry, Louis. We have nuclear weaponry. Everyone has fucking nuclear weaponry!! The four-year-old girl living down the road has a Cruise missile in her sandbox, Louis. But the thing of it is, is …”

Louis crossed his eyes suddenly, indicating an interest in what the thing of it was, was.

“Listen to this music! This beautiful goddam music! This is the USSR State Orchestra, for fuck’s sake! My old buddy Rachmaninoff is a Russian! How can we—you and me, Louis baby—how can we listen to this music and believe in our heart of hearts that the Russians would do that to us?” I had a drink of tequila, one that nailed me squarely between the eyes. “Ours is an unpopular position, Louis. But we’ve heard the music.”

I climbed to my feet (I hadn’t noticed, but somewhere along the line I’d fallen over) so that I could address a larger audience. “Take away the nuclear weaponry. The Russkies aren’t gonna attack. They’ve got their own problems. Olga is fucking some
Slav on the side, Louis. Ivan is drinking too much. Everyone has enough fucking problems of their own without worrying about nuclear weaponry. So just fucking take it away. I trust you agree.”

Louis seemed to consider it. He stared at me and came to some resolve. “Give it to Louis,” he said slowly, awkward and warped words.

“Give what?”

“Nookyer whapponwy.”

“Nuclear weaponry?”

Louis Hope nodded. “Take it ’way.” Louis gesticulated vaguely in his own direction. “Louis is big. Louis knows how to hide.”

“Good of you to offer, Louis. But it ain’t that simple.”

The monster was crestfallen. I thought I’d change the subject.

“All right, Watson,” I said, “let’s put on the old ratiocination helmets and get down to brass tacks. Let us try to reconstruct the night that J. B. Hope was murdered.”

On the back of Karl Dekeyser’s neck (which was thick, red and wrinkled) was a mole, about the size of a nickel, from which sprouted a tuft of wiry hair. Joseph Benton Hope was fascinated by this excrescence. Hope thought to construct new theory. Stupidity causes carbuncles. Joseph Hope laughed aloud, the callow burst of used air alarming all of the men.

Karl Dekeyser turned around and said something in Dutch. Hope nodded vaguely, getting the gist. Dekeyser pointed the way then, even though everyone, including Hope, seemed to know where they were going.

Hope recognized none of the men that served as his escort, and found it hard to believe that so many strangers could have
intruded into his life. He’d considered telling them of Perfectionism, explaining how he’d simply filled Gretel’s naked corporeal being with the Holy Spirit. But in his heart, or whatever twisted organ now served in that capacity, Joseph knew it wasn’t so. He’d filled her with buckets of stuff, tiny wriggling minutiae that swam hell-bent, driven by the extremely remote possibility that yet another petty human existence could be forged. Hope didn’t begrudge the men their anger, as little as he understood it.

Neither was Hope concerned for his own safety. If they chose to kill him (Hope assumed it was some vengeance they sought, and killing him would seem a logical one) he would simply elevate on the Planes of Experience. He would become one of Polyphilia’s spiritual hooligans. Hope almost chuckled. He would give an exhibition of Spirit Rapping, he would indeed; he would destroy the entire town of Hope, Ontario.

They neared Look Out, too suddenly. It occurred to Joseph that the lake itself was an accomplice and had moved to meet them halfway. The moon was full that night, which meant something. Hope had complicated theories about lunar cycles, although at that moment he would have been hard pressed to say what they were. The moon’s being full simply meant something, good or ill it didn’t matter, and with that Hope decided that the moon’s being full meant nothing.

Hope saw two men standing by the water’s edge, and he felt an emotion resembling surprise. One was the gaunt aboriginal, Whitecrow. Whitecrow was smoking a cigarette and seemed to be both impatient and at ease, like a man waiting for a train. Beside Whitecrow (and this is what had almost startled Hope, except that even base emotions were oddly mutated inside his being) was Isaiah. Isaiah, lanky and gawkish, stood in the moonlight, bathed in its light, drowning in that orb’s maudlin poetry.

“Hello, Father,” said Isaiah, and there was something snide in his voicing of the address.

“Isaiah,” croaked Hope, merely acknowledging the fact that the young man was present.

“These men,” said Isaiah, “have a quarrel with you.” Isaiah laughed by sucking air through his too-long nose. Joseph wanted
to slap him.

“I take it that you do as well,” said Hope. The writing of adolescent verse and silly stories had apparently not served its purpose.

Isaiah shrugged, his bony shoulders thrown up together but out of kilter. “I have just come to spectate.”

“And you?” Joseph cocked an eyebrow at the Indian.

“You know me,” said Jonathon Whitecrow, exhaling a thin stream of smoke. “I find this all very interesting.”

“Oh, do you?” Hope half expected the dwarfish Theophilius Drinkwater to pop out from behind the trees, eager to unsettle whatever muck was about. But that man had died, at the extremely advanced age of 107, as if God had delayed as long as possible before admitting the little imp to the Holy Kingdom.

“Say you are sorry,” said Karl Dekeyser, and Joseph Hope laughed his birdlike laugh.

“No,” Hope said, for a variety of reasons, only one of them being the fact that he wasn’t sorry at all. He watched Dekeyser’s face. All of the Germanic features hardened, set by fury. Hope wondered at this. Surely it must be uncomfortable to feel anything so strongly.

In the middle of this rumination, Joseph Benton Hope noticed that his left ring finger had been neatly removed from its hand.

Joseph’s reaction was outrage. Dekeyser was holding Hope’s finger in the air, partly brandishing it as a prize, partly removing it in disgust. This was precisely the sort of apelike, antediluvian behavior that Hope had sought to remove from the face of the earth. “Say you are sorry,” Dekeyser had said, to which Hope had answered, perhaps a tad hastily, “No.”

Joseph had expected at least one more exchange; he wanted an opportunity to open his chest (an old sea chest), to haul out the Holy Books and charts, to
explain
. But no. Dekeyser, simple and simian, had taken a knife (Mr. Opdycke’s knife, Joseph noticed, although the fact had little import) and hacked off the anulus from the propagative hand. This didn’t hurt (blood pumped out at a sickening rate; Hope tore a piece of material from his shirttail and tied a tourniquet without thinking) but it enraged him. Hope called the men several terrible names, training
his hawklike eye on the collective, and then he saw something that caused him to produce his queer laugh. Isaiah, white as the moon, had fainted, and was lying on the ground in a ragged heap. Joseph studied the man for a moment and then dismissed him.

“Well,” said Hope, “that’s that, is it? Unless you care for another finger, or perhaps a toe?”

Dekeyser was still marveling at the brutal sense he had caused the world to make. Hope’s prattle disturbed him. Dekeyser had to do something dramatic, and he was inspired. “This is shit!” he said of the finger. Karl walked over to the lake and held the finger above the water. “Food for fish!” he said.

Some of the men, unable to look at Hope’s disembodied finger, turned their eyes to the water’s edge. The moon was reflected there; some of the more observant of the men noted that two moons were reflected there, round and full and side by side. And then these twin moons pushed out of the lake.

The Fish rose up almost slowly, dancing on deliberate motions of the fluke, to a height of five feet, five feet of silver, lunar muscle. Karl Dekeyser dropped the finger, and it almost floated into the fish’s mouth, a mouth all needle and bone. Then, in a rapturous state, the Fish acrobatically presented his tail to the stars, spraying the night, and went back into Lake Look Out.

Isaiah had come around just in time to witness this; he promptly fainted again.

Karl Dekeyser’s world ceased to make sense.

The Indian, unflappable, lit another cigarette.

Joseph Benton Hope, after a long, stunned moment, let loose with a terrible howl of anguish, and then he turned and ran away from the men. He ran, his elderly elbows and knees flapping awkwardly, toward the home of George and Martha.

At Lake Look Out, Jonathon Whitecrow took a handful of silver water and gingerly splashed it across Isaiah’s brow. The young man woke up dreamily, aware only of the fact that his penis was inappropriately but enormously enlarged. “Where’s my father?” he asked conversationally, merely curious.

“With your mother,” answered Whitecrow.

Martha Quinton Hope had no truck with such niceties as suns and moons, day and night. If there was work to be done, Martha’s thinking was do it, regardless of whether there was light enough. The world was a bully, but in many ways Martha was a bigger one. So she instructed George that it was time to slaughter some animals.

It was not, in fact, a time to slaughter animals. It was an idea she’d gotten from the moon. Martha didn’t know why she’d been gazing at the moon like some foolish, apple-cheeked schoolgirl, but she had. She’d been struck with the realization that her woman’s body was a horrible thing, designed by God to do horrible things, to bleed and to swell as if with disease. Of course, that was all behind Martha now, a thought that brought a tear to her eye. The tear, though, knew better than to try to sneak out through the dust-dry duct; it retreated sheepishly. Martha was suddenly filled with rage, which she covered by bellowing out a whimsical “La-dee-dah.” Once she’d sighed “La-dee-dah” in the chicken coop, and one of the hens had keeled over, stone dead.

“Time to slaughter animals, George!”

They climbed into their workclothes. They did this in each other’s company, both indifferent to the gross and muscular nudity. George wondered what they were going to kill. They owned a cow, and George hoped it wouldn’t be this old bossy, whom George secretly named “Emily.”

“Pigs,” said Martha.

This happened all the time, the answering of unspoken questions. It had long ago ceased to alarm George. “Pigs,” he agreed. Pigs were ham, George reminded himself. Even Martha could cook ham.

Both wore cotton workshirts and dungarees. The shirts, big even on the monstrous twins, obscured both George’s massive chest and Martha’s rocky bubs. Martha, looking at George, felt as if she were looking into a mirror.

George looked at Martha and felt no such thing. George was always amazed at how dissimilar they were. Martha knew things. She knew, for instance, why they had removed themselves from the Fourieristic Phalanstery. This was the great puzzle
in George’s existence. Some years ago (around the time of the first experiments in stirpiculture) Martha had instructed George to make them a house. George had done so, and he’d finished building the thing (and laid the foundations for a barn) before he’d stopped and wondered why. George was happy with the others, in the town; why should he and his sister isolate themselves? George had asked Martha; she’d punched him in the stomach, a hard blow but ineffectual against his muscle. Then, alarmingly, Martha had almost cried. Her eyes became full of water; Martha screwed them shut, blinked a few times, and then seemed better.

Martha was remembering the same moment. It was the first time that she’d allowed the anger to consume her. The anger tickled her belly and throat, it slapped her in the face until she was dizzy.

Martha had talked, George remembered; at least, she’d babbled, words galloping out of her mouth. The words confused and enraged Quinton, so he disregarded them and continued constructing the barn. George never asked again.

The twins walked out to the barn and picked up their axes. These had been presents from Jonathon Whitecrow, fine tools with sturdy handles and blades that seldom needed honing. George admired his briefly as he held it in his hands; George admired simple and beautiful things.