This Must Be the Place: A Novel (21 page)

“Who—?” he said, pointing at the projection on the white wall of Astor’s studio, and Astor said “A couple of serious surrealist wackos named Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí.

“Provocation. Juxtaposition. Dream logic. Following your impulses, no matter how bizarre—that’s what the surrealists were about,” Astor said.

“They sound awesome,” Eugene said.

“I’m sure they were. They were also probably assholes, but hey, sometimes the world needs creative assholes.” He reached over and grabbed Eugene’s head in his hand and shook it, a kind of full-frontal noogie. “Noble creative assholes.”

Eugene laughed. His skin prickled. He hadn’t felt this close to Astor in ages. Certainly before Brooklyn.

Astor closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the couch. He still looked young, had all of his dark brown hair, though he wore it short and neat. Both Wendell kids took after their dad, with their long thin frames and beaky features. Eugene, watching his father beam at him, knew he was looking at the one person he loved most in this world and, in that one moment, was so full of awe for his father that Patricia lost the debate forever. Astor Wendell was a superhero doing a stupid thing, but his son Eugene believed in him utterly; believed that what the world needed was this particular noble creative asshole. His forgeries were an amazing, incredible thing—not just a work but an
act
of art—and if Patricia was too concerned about her own comfort and well-being not to appreciate that, Eugene was done with her.

Eugene Wendell wanted to be just like his dad. But with neither the talent nor the resources to forge actual art, he chose to forge the one thing he could create: himself. It would be relatively easy, since he was already something of a blank canvas at school. Eugene did his work, participated when it was required of him, went home. He didn’t exist on the fringes so much as the dead middle of the road and was therefore invisible. But all that would change with the Wendy Project, his first great surrealist work.

The Wendy Project didn’t go into full production until Eugene was a freshman in high school, though he had been planning it for about a year, teaching himself to walk a certain way, talk a certain way, glare a certain way. Wendy Wendell was a complete screwup, a cartoonishly violent, antisocial motherfucker, who got into scrapes with hookers and drug dealers—a touch Eugene thought struck just the right absurdist note, given their immediate surroundings (unless, unbeknownst to everyone, some sick bastard had taught cows to turn tricks).

Wendy was introduced to Ruby Falls High through a series of carefully orchestrated rumors. Eugene dropped notes on the floor in the auditorium, fake gossipy missives between people “who had been there,” people “who had seen him” punching football players in the neck at away games; he scrawled cryptic, menacing graffiti in all the bathrooms. To act the part, he slumped and lurched through the hallways; made a game of seeing how long he could go without blinking. He committed tiny disciplinary infractions. Nothing he did was grave enough to warrant suspension or a black mark on his permanent record, just the occasional detention or stern talking-to. More importantly, he made people wonder what he might be capable of.

And then all Eugene had to do was sit back and watch it happen, as the faithful sheep of RFH played their part in the Wendy Project: made a nonexistent bully out of thin air and words, from their tiny minds, hungry for scandal and violence. Occasionally a rumor would make its way back to him that was so hysterically distorted from anything he had ever started that Eugene allowed himself a moment of grudging respect for some of the darker, more perverse imaginations of his fellow students. He couldn’t be entirely contemptuous of them, he supposed; after all, they were a key component of his work. They had placed him at
the top of a tower and left him mercifully alone, protected behind a dense bramble of thorns and black eyes and broken bottles—and the greatest work of art ever perpetrated by a surrealist who had barely begun to shave.

The first six months of the Wendy Project had been an amazing time in Eugene’s life. He had come home from school every day with a giant grin on his face, elated that he had pulled it off. Eugene Wendell, the quiet skinny kid who hadn’t been much of anything for years, was suddenly revered and feared. In the spring of his freshman year, it started to lose some of its appeal, but he was committed. He was bored, he supposed; even the greatest teenage geniuses get anxious to move on to their next work. So he started masturbating to alleviate some of the boredom, and that had turned into a great work of its own. Shortly after his masturbation habits kicked into high gear, he started to feel angry for no reason, to hate things in ways he had never hated things before. Thus Eugene was faced with the unpleasant truth that perhaps his projects would have to wait, at least until he got laid—unless, of course, he made getting laid his next great work of art.

Eugene flicked on the light beside the door and Astor’s office was suddenly so bright his eyes watered. When he could focus again, he saw that his father had been working on a small landscape. The nearly completed forgery sat quietly on its easel, side by side with the original. It looked a little too tame for a girl as messed up as Oneida; besides, he needed to palm something Astor wouldn’t notice was missing. He felt a little bad about raiding the office without asking first, but Astor was working late at an opening and wouldn’t be home until close to midnight. Oneida—and Eugene’s libido—couldn’t afford to wait.

There was a small bedraggled suitcase, old and brown, on Astor’s desk, and Eugene snapped the latches open. Neatly arranged inside was a random assortment of knickknacks, old yellowy papers and plastic junk, the kind of garbage you saw in flea markets and antiques shops and junk drawers that hadn’t been cleaned out since before he was born. He had no idea what his father was doing with it. More importantly,
there was so much junk in the case it would be impossible for Astor to miss any of it.

Eugene pulled out a long, thin strip of dark blue velvet that had been rolled tight like a cinnamon bun. It felt nice between his fingers, warm and rich. This had been a good idea, and Eugene felt a little sideways affection for Patricia. She wasn’t a bad person, or an uncool person, under it all; she just didn’t get their father. Which was her loss, really.

Eugene shuffled through the suitcase. The papers were very old, brittle and crumbling, and comprised an odd assortment of playbills and photographs and pages torn from what might have been science textbooks, full of old-fashioned illustrations of constellations and birds and rickety flying contraptions. He had never seen this suitcase before, but its contents gave him a pleasant sensation of déjà vu, as though they were scraps he himself had saved for some special purpose he couldn’t quite recall. A green glass bottle with a fat corked neck, tucked in the bottom of the case, gave him an idea. He rolled up the dark blue velvet, which he had been rubbing absently during his investigation, and jammed it in the neck of the bottle. Perfect: a flower for a freak.

Eugene held the bottle at arm’s length and smiled in spite of himself. It felt right, perfectly right, to give this weird flower to Oneida Jones, who was weird herself and weirdly beautiful. It was the first time he had thought of Oneida as beautiful, and it made him smile again. He saw himself holding out the green bottle to her, saw her face redden in his mind, and watched in dismay as his mental version of her knit her brows together and glared as though he were dangerously deranged.

“Shit,” he said. “I can’t give this to her.”

Wendy would never give anything like this to Oneida, nor would Oneida ever accept anything from Wendy. He would do better to stuff it anonymously in her mailbox or hang it outside her window than walk up and say, “Here. This is for you.” She’d run away or smash it at his feet, and he wouldn’t blame her; in fact, he’d be a little disappointed in her if she didn’t. Eugene had delivered a sucker punch to his own gut: he didn’t want a girl who would have anything to do with his other half.

And then it happened, like it always happened. He felt it first in his stomach, a nauseating heaviness as though he’d swallowed a hot stone.
The heat from the stone rose up through him, boiling as it went, until he was so weak with anger that he didn’t know which arm to lash out first. This was the worst, and he knew it: the urge for sex was uncontrollable but ultimately nothing compared to this insane rage, this desire to beat the living crap out of anything and everything, for no reason whatsoever.

Eugene felt like screaming until his throat bled. Felt like he’d been boxed, nailed inside his own coffin. His breath grew ragged, his heart hurt. How much pressure would it take for his skull to explode, for his blood and brains to blend into the loops and comet tails of oil and paint? Very Pollock, he thought, very Pollock. He looked down and realized he was still holding the green glass bottle with the blue velvet inside. He hurled it to the floor.

It broke with a tender pop: like a raw egg, cushioned in its fall by the velvet. Eugene stared at the tiny pile of green and blue rubble and felt some of the anger leave him, draining from his limbs and leaving him rubbery. So this was the cure for anger: smashing velvet-filled bottles. He sat on the floor of his father’s office and scooped the debris together with his bare hands. He felt woozy and weak. He felt terrible that he had broken what would have made, really, a perfect gift for Oneida, who he suspected could benefit from smashing it just as much as he had. That was probably why he liked her. Thank God there were more bottles in the case.

9
New Blood

Anna was the first to notice.

“Something’s up, kid.” She rustled the sports section. “You’ve got your panties in a serious twist.”

Mona wrinkled her nose and poured two cups of coffee. She hated the word
panties
. Just something about it. She set the coffee on the kitchen table and Anna tipped the paper forward, the better to seek aggressive eye contact.

“I’m a vet, Mona. That means I know without having to be told.”

“That one of the courses at the Cornell vet school,
Psychic Bonds with Quadrupeds
? Taught by adjunct professor Dionne Warwick?”

“Ha ha. Come on,
I know you.
”

Not as well as you think you do.
Mona frowned into her cup of coffee. But Anna was right, she was blocking out the world with lame jokes. Overly ambitious wedding cakes. If she actually saw the world and smelled the world and told the world what she knew—that Amy Henderson was dead, that Amy Henderson met her end with the help of a hundred volts or more (and hadn’t they both learned, as lab partners in junior high physics, that it wasn’t the volts that mattered, it was the current?)—Mona didn’t know what it would all mean. She only knew she feared it, and the only thing she wanted to do now was talk to Arthur Rook about a girl she had been a girl with. Arthur wasn’t part of the real world and, when they were together, neither was Mona. They could bring Amy back to life between them and pretend their suspended animation was a sustainable state.

The last thing she wanted to do was tell Anna—anything at all. Strike that: the
last
thing she wanted to do was talk to Oneida. Her heart
ached at the thought of her daughter, that after every hour, every day, every year they’d spent growing up together, Mona couldn’t explain herself to her. Didn’t want to. Wondered if she would ever be able to, and prayed, like a coward, that she would never have to.

But today was Wednesday, and here was Anna, being Anna. On Wednesdays, Anna didn’t go into the clinic until eleven, and she and Mona would pore over the local paper, drinking coffee and chatting, both of them procrastinating like champs. It had been a ritual for as long as Anna had lived at the Darby-Jones, and despite knowing, deep down, that Anna was a good person and probably her only real adult friend, Mona secretly enjoyed Wednesday mornings less and less. Anna was something of an emotional vampire, and in this new unprecedented age (the Second Age Without Amy), she was far too nosy for comfort.