Zod Wallop (16 page)

“Helen,” Jeanne said. “Should I come down there?”

“No, honey. I’m leaving myself. The police will let us know when they find them. Or Harry will call. And there’s no point in sitting around here.”

They had talked for another five minutes, and on a second reassurance from Helen that all would certainly turn out all right, they had said good-bye and hung up.

“So what was that about, Halifax?”

Jeanne Halifax regarded her boyfriend, Mark, with mild surprise, as though she had forgotten he was in her apartment. He was standing at the door to the bathroom, naked and tall, his chest mottled with hair, clumped thickets that, for a moment, suggested some sort of tenacious weed blackened by fire.

“Come on, Halifax. What’s this ‘Should I come down’ shit? You got a sudden yearning to see your ex-spouse?”

She had changed her name back to Halifax in one more vain attempt to elude the past, and Mark had taken to calling her that despite—or perhaps because of—her objections.

“Harry’s missing,” she said.

Mark came up to her and hugged her. He was wet and the wetness soaked through her nightgown, a clammy embrace. Instantly her apartment’s air conditioner hummed on, as though poised to chill her. “Missing on all cylinders,” Mark said.

She pushed him back. “Hey. Come on. It’s not funny.”

He shrugged, walked to the dresser and dried himself while watching her in the mirror. “So what happened?”

She told him.

“So what?” he said when she was finished. “Maybe he’s been eaten by fucking mosquitoes. You know, you could pay a little more attention to the man who is in your life. I get a little sick of ‘poor Harry’ this, ‘poor Harry’ that. That guy fucking left you, remember? He walked out when you needed him most.” He lifted a small green bottle and poured liquid into his hands, leaned forward to massage his face. He dropped his hands and smiled at his reflection. Then he turned and threw himself backward onto the bed, arms outspread. “I’m here.”

“Mark,” Jeanne said, turning to him, “just because I’m not married to Harry doesn’t—”

He reached out and caught her by the arm, jerked her toward him. She toppled into his arms, into the sea of his eye-watering cologne. His hands, big, rough blocks, lifted her nightgown up; her arms rose reflexively and it was gone.

“Mark,” she said, but her voice wasn’t protest. Her voice sounded, she thought, like a woman trying to place a stranger’s name.

“Yeh, babe. That’s right, Halifax. Mark. Man-in-your-life Mark.”

He had her panties down around her ankles and then his finger was in her, businesslike, as though holding his place in a book, and then he rolled on top of her.

Jeanne stared at the ceiling. Harry’s disappeared again, she thought. She felt a twinge of envy.

After the phone call from Jeanne, Helen thought about Abe. God, how she missed him. Still. Always. He had been so crazy wild about her that she had come to think of herself as beautiful.

And even now, when she thought of him, she seemed somehow strengthened. Conjuring an image of his face, the fire of pride in his eyes, knowing that she was its inspiration, she could rally her self-esteem, she could go on.

She felt sadness for married couples who could not sustain each other. She saw them all the time, these men and women who had contracted to live together but took no joy in it, frightened that they were wasting their lives, hoarding love as though it were a commodity to be bargained.

Abe had taught her, that was the thing. He had taught her that the well was bottomless and that spending recklessly would not exhaust his affection.

Helen sighed and walked over to the kitchen cupboard. She found a can of soup, chicken and rice, and opened it. As she heated the soup, stirring slowly, she thought of Harry and Jeanne. They had been unreservedly in love, blessed. Amy had come into their lives like a benediction, and her death had been a brutal explosion, shattering their marriage.

What they did not understand, what Helen knew because she had lived with Abe, Grand Master of the Open Heart, was that the terrible blast of fate had not destroyed one scrap of their love. But dazed, full of recriminations and pain, they had decided that seeking consolation could only be a sin. There was no way to ease this monstrous ache, and to try was to demean the loss. Together they had agreed, in silence and withdrawal, that nothing survived their daughter’s death. But Harry had been the greater offender. He should never have left that day.

Helen poured the hot soup into a cup. Outside, the storm was in full cry. The thunder seemed to run along the ground, shaking the floorboards. The rain was hard, raging inside the wind, the dismal hiss of the downpour accompanied by the waterfall slap of the cabin’s emptying gutters.

Helen had taken the first sip of her soup when something thumped against the door. She looked up. Silence. Then an undeniable thump again.

Helen put the cup down and went to the door. As she crossed the room, the noise became a rhythmic, muffled pounding.

She put her hand on the doorknob, paused. The noise seemed to come from the bottom portion of the door, and she doubted that it was inspired by any human agent. It wasn’t the rap of knuckles.

Perhaps the storm had hurled something against the door, an uprooted bush, perhaps, and it now banged mindlessly, animated by the wind. Or perhaps it was some forest creature, seeking shelter. Helen did not fancy sharing the cabin with, for instance, a skunk.

She pressed her ear against the door. “Hello?” she shouted.

She heard a noise then, an answering whoop, and she flung the door open and the monkey named Arbus entered, head down, arms akimbo, dripping water and muttering to himself.

 After Helen had toweled the monkey down and watched it noisily gorge itself on soup, she wrapped it in a blanket.

“Well,” she said, expecting no answer, “where is Harry? Where is your Raymond? Where are they?”

The monkey’s eyes had begun to droop. It opened them at the sound of Helen’s voice but it looked, if the term can be applied to an animal, dumbfounded, and closed its eyes again, lost in exhausted slumber.

Helen placed her small monkey-bundle on the armchair’s seat and moved to the bed, changing quickly into her nightgown and sliding under the covers. She turned off the bed lamp.

She was awakened from a dream in which the sky was filled with floating marigolds and some sort of a parade was in progress and she was on a gaudy float, waving at people with her free hand. Her other hand was clasped in the small hand of…she looked down and there was Amy, smiling up, her hair wet and glued to her forehead, her features intense. “Aunt Helen,” Amy said. “Why is Heaven so stupid?”

Helen woke then, so suddenly that the dream refused to leave, at least entirely. The storm had passed, and the moon had returned to fill the room with pale light, and Helen looked down at the hand she still held, hairy and black, and saw the small, dark body of Arbus curled on his side. The monkey’s body exhaled a musky, reassuring odor. As Helen watched, Arbus rolled on his back and absently scratched his belly.

Helen remembered then, with a powerful shiver as though the memory were a revelation, that Abe had often reached out for her as he slept; hand-in-hand they had dreamed.

You choose your omens, Helen thought. She squeezed the warm, sleep-offered hand and felt the nearness of her dead husband and his gentle vigilance.

We’ll find them
, she thought.

H
ERE
H
E
W
AS
again, down in the Great Tiredness of Group. It was a little different, of course. At Harwood, he had never been in group therapy with Emily, Allan, or Rene—and they were definitely here in their catatonic, truculent, and volatile (respectively) selves. But Harry had been in group with Raymond, and it was Raymond who dominated this new, mandatory gathering, Raymond with his gaspy, mustache-fluttering fervor, his wild eyes and sweeping gestures.

Today, it was difficult to make out just what Raymond was saying. Harry felt oddly meaning-impaired. He could not seem to get the sense of words. That is, he could recognize individual words (a word like “danger” would suddenly come up to him, as a curious fish might approach a scuba diver’s mask) but these words refused to shake down into logical sentences.

That was probably the result of the drugs they had given him. The drugs were, he assumed, designed to make him more receptive to his feelings.

When they asked, he said, “I’m tired. I’m really tired.”

That, apparently, was not a legitimate feeling. They kept at him.

“Where am I?” he asked, but they said that he was trying to change the subject.

“Sad,” he told them. “I feel sad.”

They wanted him to elaborate. He said that he felt sad for everything. He saw the President on television and felt sad that a man could be so filled with need that he would become a politician. He then felt sad for the media pundits who came on after the President in order to savage him, leaning forward in their chairs as though something besides their balance was at stake, mean-spirited, unhappy people whose parents had never, not once, said, “You are important. We love you.” He felt sad for the talk-show host and the talk-show audience and the desperate guests. He felt sad for the actors on sitcoms and the people who crouched in dark rooms and watched them zing their one-liners into the void, and he felt sad for himself because he was one of the watchers, and so he got up and walked to the window and saw the children laughing under the streetlamps, and he felt sad for them because the futures bearing down on them were heartless if not actively malign and mostly he felt sad that being a human being was such an embarrassment of fouled motives and excuses that weren’t good enough and transient desires and cheap dodges against death’s unwinding.

They nodded their heads, took notes.

They were after something, and it seemed to Harry that what they were after wasn’t his mental well-being at all. Perhaps the drugs had awakened a deep, unlooked-for intuitive sense. Or maybe, like many crazy people, he was simply growing more paranoid.

Still, it seemed to Harry that these doctors believed that he and his companions shared some secret, some vital information, and that with careful and relentless prodding, the truth would be revealed.

“I don’t know anything!” Harry wanted to shout. Certainly nothing that anyone would want to know.

Harry concentrated all his attention on Raymond’s moving lips, red, wet, and quivering with urgency. Harry watched each word as it was formed, hoping that close attention would bring whole sentences into focus. Raymond was sitting upright with his hands on his knees, a strangely old-fashioned attitude of body suggesting sepia-toned photos of portly baseball players braced solemnly for time exposures.

“We have to leave here,” Raymond said.

Ah. Attention was paying off. There was a statement: succinct, certain in its meaning, delivered emphatically.

“The Frozen Princess cannot wake up here, in confinement. She must be at the Ocean of Responsibility when she wakes. It is our only hope.”

So much for sense. Harry felt quick, light lizard feet scramble in his chest, and he was frightened. Frightened by the dim, elusive acknowledgment that it would not, absolutely not, be a good thing if the Frozen Princess were to awake here, far from the Ocean of Responsibility, here in the Great Tiredness.

And that fear made the rational part of his mind panic, because there was no Frozen Princess, no Ocean of Responsibility, no doom brewing in the Gorelord’s Domain.

Gorelord
? Harry wondered.
And what makes you think this hospital is Blackwater Castle
?

Fear focused Harry’s mind, and he was able to give his full attention to the counselor’s words.

“Raymond,” the counselor was saying, “I wonder if you could explain all this to me. I’m afraid I’m not following you very well.”

“That’s right,” Raymond said, nodding his head rapidly. “You are just a soldier. You don’t know anything. You are just instructed to torture us, extract information, hand it on to your superiors. It’s nothing personal. I know that.”

The counselor, a narrow-faced man with limp brown hair who had decided long ago to adopt a hearty, familiar style (although a silent, thoughtful approach would have been better suited to his temperament and countenance), grinned painfully and said, “I hardly think I would call group therapy torture, Raymond. It can be uncomfortable, of course, to bring up certain events and the emotions attached to those events, but the end results are positive and—”

“You are working for the Gorelord,” Raymond said. “You have no doubt drunk the blood of the Rawn Worm and inhaled the bone dust of the Hunkering Spinespits. To expect you, a minion of He Who The Vile Venerate, to be anything more than a pawn would be wrong. You can’t really help it. Your mind has been usurped by a stronger Will.”

Harry did not realize he was nodding his head in agreement with this assessment until the counselor, Mitford, spoke: “Harry, you seem to know what Raymond is talking about. Perhaps, then, you would be willing to clarify this business. We have spent a few weeks circling in on this fantasy you all share, and I’ve taken notes and even availed myself of your children’s book,
Zod Wallop
, and I confess I’m no closer to understanding what we have here.”