The Schwarzschild Radius (21 page)

On the train to Long Island, fear overwhelmed Rachel as she sensed the thing she was pursuing drawing closer. She was horrified at the thought that one of these perverts had been watching her house, obsessed with Olivia. He might have also observed Rachel. He would know her, but she wouldn’t know him.

Sonia flipped through the messages on her phone. She had about three dozen steady clients who were forever texting their love to her.

“Did you know that more people are killed annually by donkeys than in air crashes?” She pressed the advance button on the cell phone. “A pig’s orgasm lasts thirty minutes. Christ, can you imagine? This is how I got most of my education. I only made it to seventh grade.”

“Why’s that?”

“Where I come from, no one gets past eighth grade. I’m Amish.”

“Get outta town.”

“No, really.”

“With the buggies and baking? Where?”

“Intercourse, Pennsylvania. Go ahead. Laugh.”

“So what brought you here?”

“We were a big family. Fourteen of us living in one house. A big house with a barn. I had an uncle who would take me into a room every day and rape me.”

“Did you say anything to anyone?”

“You have to understand that things are very strict in an Old Order Amish household. You just don’t go accusing someone of rape and sodomy, especially if you’re nine years old. So this went on for four years until one day I told my mother. She told me to shush. Women don’t have a lot to say in that society. I finally got up enough nerve to tell my father, and he whipped me for lying.”

“Don’t they have elders or something?”

“When I was thirteen, I went to the bishop after a prayer meeting and told him. He told me to wait where I was and I saw him conference with the elders. Well, the conclusion of all this was that they told my father and he whipped me again. Pretty soon people were avoiding me and stopped talking to me. Even under my own roof. This was more fucked up than getting raped every day. And this uncle, Lemuel, wouldn’t even look at me at meals like he was building up for all the attention he was going to give me later. Then, no matter how hard I tried to stay in a room with people, he’d call me away for chores. This is in a place where if you wear your hat crooked, you get disciplined. If you use an electric saw instead of a hand saw, the course of your life can be changed. Once a boy was going to marry his girl and someone brought up the matter that he was seen using a neighbor’s electric saw, and the bishop wouldn’t let them marry.”

“So what did you do?”

“So I made up my mind that I wanted Lemuel dead. I prayed for this, but it wasn’t answered. Every Saturday morning a Mennonite friend would come over and cut wood for the family. He could use a chainsaw since he was Mennonite. But I knew that Uncle Lemuel secretly loved to operate that saw. The only time I saw him grin was when he made that sawdust fly. It was to the point where my uncle was doing all the work.

“In a grocery store, I had once heard a radio story that some tree-rights activists were driving spikes into redwoods to keep the loggers from cutting them down. What happens is that when the logs are processed and cut, the saw blade hits the steel spike and shatters. Sometimes it kills. I found some rusted ten-penny nails and banged them into four or five logs that were in the next day’s stack of firewood.

“Sure enough, when the chainsaw arrived the next day, Uncle Lemuel started cutting. I heard the scream because the saw stopped and I could see him running around the yard trying to hold the two halves of his face together. The Mennonite friend put him in his truck and drove him to a hospital where they managed to save his life. He was out a week later with a mark across his face that looked like something God had made. He couldn’t work for a long time and others had to do his planting. But even though he couldn’t plant corn, he had a hatred growing in him. They had taken the nails out of the fire wood and concluded that because they were rusted, they were probably there for a long time. But he knew it was me, and I knew that it was only a matter of time before he was going to do something to me. I wasn’t going to let him rape me with that face of his. The face I had given him. And he was getting better and better. I took fifty dollars out of the jar and went to the train station. The teller thought it was strange to see a fourteen-year-old Amish girl traveling alone, but he had no way of confirming my story. Amish people don’t have phones. I’ve been on the streets ever since.”

“And these clients don’t scare you? A lot of the men at the Palace scare me.”

“They don’t pretend to be something to me that they’re not. I can handle a transaction―I get that.”

“What about this doctor? He’s a pedophile too?” asked Rachel.

The other girl nodded. “Lost his wife three years ago. He did the daddy/daughter role playing with her all the time. Now he doesn’t have to role play.”

“You’ve slept with him?”

“I sleep with all my clients.”

“And―you don’t mind me asking…”

“Ask.”

“You play his daughter?”

“He loves it. I drive him crazy and that gets me off―the power I have over them.”

“Did you start out just dancing for them?”

“Everyone starts out like that. Then you give head. Then sex. It’s a natural progression.”

“So I guess I’m on my way.”

“No one forces you. You just wake up one morning and decide to go all the way. It’s a lot more money; why give it away to some jerk whose going to have a good time for a few months, then stop calling? You’ve got to look out for yourself.”

“You’re not scared going to the homes of these men? I am.”

“My clients are all pillars of society with a lot to lose if they got in trouble with the law. They’re businessmen and doctors, not killers.”

Dr. Willard Sartorius opened the back door and ushered them inside before any greetings were exchanged.

“There’s a bucket of wings on the table. Potato salad and corn. Help yourselves,” he said without asking Rachel’s name.

He was a large man, over six-foot-three with massive shoulders and legs and a Buddha’s belly. Rachel had always been intrigued by the dignity which the title medical doctor conferred. She saw this point played out in the movie
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
when several escaped mental patients are, one by one, introduced as doctors. As the camera pans to each, their blank stares and disheveled hair exude learning. Here again, Rachel saw this phenomenon at work as the surgeon’s inelegant paunch and bald head evoked power, not plainness.

“Excuse me,” he said and exited the kitchen.

“This is some house, huh?” said Sonia. “It could be on MTV Cribs. It’s got fireplaces in the bedrooms and a game room downstairs.”

The doctor was elusive. When he wanted Sonia, he poked his head into the kitchen and said, “See you for a moment?” He knew beforehand that Sonia was bringing a friend, so there could be no surprises here. He seemed extremely self-conscious about what he was doing.

After dinner, the girls took showers. Rachel was instructed to use the guest bathroom in the basement. It was large and lined with white Italian marble, yet there wasn’t a bar of soap or bottle of shampoo in sight. Rachel closed the door, but it wouldn’t lock. She hung her knapsack on the door hook, then let the water run. As the mirror began to mist, she undressed.

Fortunately, she had brought her own soap. The hot water felt so good on her back as she massaged her feet and legs. After putting on a change of clothes, she went in search of a blow-dryer. She checked some linen closets and shelves. There was a constant droning sound that had been there all the while, and she finally located its source. It was the water pump of a huge aquarium. The two-hundred-fifty gallon tank was populated with exotic fish that Rachel had never seen, and she felt even farther from home as she shared these depths.

She opened the closets one by one. The musty smell of old possessions enveloped her. Here was a gift graveyard, a place where all the unwanted and unusable Christmas presents and birthday notions of the last twenty years had gathered. Everything here was new, but old. She inspected the cheap ashtrays and picture frames doled out at weddings that never saw their intended use.

She found old notebooks, meticulously arranged in boxes from Sartorius’s medical school days. Rachel went through them and came to know a twenty-four-year old med student better than she wanted to.

He had been a prolific margin writer. Alongside the lectures on anomalous pulmonary venous return and ischemic heart disease was exhaustive commentary on the breasts of female students and the examinations he would like to conduct on them.

As the semesters went by, the comments became more graphic, more self-revelatory. Sartorius related the autopsy of a young girl in what began as clinical observation. Suddenly he wrote of the girl’s beautiful white, untanned skin and firm breasts that he so loved. He wrote of his excitement even as her body was being cut open, of her undiminished attractiveness. The words now spilled beyond the narrow column alongside the page. It was as though the thin blue margin that had separated the sane from the psychotic had given way. Then, in the darkest sentences of all, he described how he had returned to the body later that evening and had done things to it.

achel wanted to vomit.

She wanted to run out of here, to rid herself of these men, to end the pursuit and get back to her life. As she darted to the top of the stairs, she ran into Sartorius.

“Find everything?”

“Yeah,” she said.

“What were you doing down there so long? The shower stopped thirty minutes ago.”

“I was looking for a blow dryer.”

“Are you all right?”

“Where’s Sonia?”

“Upstairs in the shower,” said the doctor, not yielding the way.

“I―I need a blow-dryer. Do you have one?”

“My ex-wife had one. Come with me.” He led her upstairs to his bedroom. Rachel could hear the shower going.

“Rachel is such a Biblical name,” he said in the bedroom. Already Rachel felt violated. Why had Sonia given him her real name? Rachel couldn’t think of anything to tie in with that, so she kept working on her hair with the towel.

He appeared to be looking for the dryer, but Rachel believed that there was nothing in this immense house that was beyond his cognizance.