A Brief Lunacy (11 page)

“Are you asking us to repent?” I ask. “To save ourselves, like the people of Nineveh? Isn't that what Jonah does?”

“I love her,” he says. His voice is so low I barely hear his words. “Where is she?”

“Maybe she's in the tree. Wouldn't you like to go and find out?”

“She's going to meet me here. She promised. I'm here to get things ready.” The hand holding the gun hangs limply at his side, the muzzle almost touching the floor. He eats one last cookie. “How far is the tree?”

“Not far. Maybe ten minutes' walk. What do you think Sylvie would do if she saw you with the gun pointed at us? Don't you think she'd be upset?”

The gun clatters to the floor before he can answer, and I'm on my feet, running toward him, the granite in my hand. I'll strike him on the temple. He will fall. I will shoot him. No. Yes. Behind me Carl whispers, “Be careful, be careful.” Before I can raise my arm against him, Jonah scoops up the gun from the floor and shoves it onto my throat, pushes me back.

“Going to hit me with that rock?”

“Jonah, we're trying to save ourselves. We're helping you. I don't think you're doing the right thing.” The cold metal hums with my words, distorts my voice, pushes into my larynx. His finger is too close to see clearly. Is it on the trigger?

“B
E CAREFUL
,” I say. “Be careful.”

I'm not sure she hears me. I say it again but barely have time to finish. He shoves that goddamn gun against her neck, pushing her, pushing her. She grips the chunk of granite in her hand. She speaks with a new sense of authority, my Jess, directly to a man who has the live end of a revolver shoved against her throat. The rock clatters to the floor beside her when he tells her to drop it. She's like a dog being reprimanded for chewing a forbidden toy, like Reba when she stole Jessie's undies and my socks from the laundry.

Jessie doesn't back away from the pistol. What has happened in one day? Jessie, who hates guns. Jessie, who pleaded with me not to buy it. Now she stands firm. Will Jonah shoot her? Will he shoot anyone? He's taken a handful of those little white pills. He could do anything, I suspect.

“Come on, you two,” Jonah says, still holding the gun at her. “You're making it hard for me. Sylvie's waiting for me to prepare the way. This is all for her. Don't you see?”

It's hard to believe he is a madman, a criminal, a miscreant. What if Jess is shot? What if he pulls the trigger and she falls with a thud onto the floor beside the granite? Then my arms will rip the goddamn duct tape and squeeze his throat until the breath goes out of him. But if I can do it after she's dead, why can't I do it now? I struggle with my arms and legs against the tape but there's little movement except for a quiet thump of the chair.

“Please,” Jonah says. “I don't want to shoot anyone, but I will if I have to. Just do as I say.”

“Well,” Jessie says, “what
do
you say, Jonah of God?”

Jonah releases Jessie and begins pacing, waving the gun. He wipes at his chin as if there were food stuck there. I think Jessie's strength scares the bejesus out of him. Sweat beads on his forehead, making his bangs damp. He stops pacing and turns to face her.

“I have to know you. Be important in your eyes.”

“You are important.”

“I don't feel it. That's why I need this. I don't feel that you respect me.”

“Oh, yes,” she says. “We definitely do, don't we, Carl?”

I can't find the strength to speak. I nod slowly but no words come and it isn't convincing enough.

“It's Sylvie's idea. She said to listen to my voices, that it was God speaking. He said to get you ready for us. And to cleanse Carl.”

“Cleanse from what?” I ask.

“Shut up,” Jonah says. “You're trying to trick me, divert me from my mission. I know. I decide what to cleanse.”

He seems to have forgotten about Jessie and is focusing on me now. His arm absently lowers the gun toward me. I command my mouth to spit razors at him but nothing forms under my tongue. The hole where my tooth used to be throbs. How stupid I am. I can't move. I can't help my wife. I can't even piss by myself.

“The police will find you,” I say.

Jonah considers what I said. He licks the corners of his mouth, and his eyes focus up at the ceiling as if he's waiting for an idea.

“Look, Mr. Carl, you do what I say and I won't hurt you. I promise. But you have to do what I say. Art. The way to intimacy is through art.”

Jonah finds his idea. But what in God's name could he be looking for in the drawer? Paints? And paper? Charcoal pencils? He pulls a small penknife from his jacket pocket and sharpens one of the pencils. He whittles the tip, allowing the shavings to scatter on the floor. He juggles the gun and pencil in one hand and the knife in the other. How can he do that? I wait for him to put the gun down on the table, but he doesn't. Then he loads his free arm with the art supplies, still gripping the handle of the gun tight in his hand.

“What are you doing?” Jessie asks.

“Getting to know you better,” he says. “Relax. Pretend we're meeting for the first time. I want to see what Mr. Carl here can do with this stuff.”

“Not much with my hands tied,” I say.

“Cut that tape,” Jonah says. “Slowly so I can see everything.”

He signals with his eyes toward a pair of scissors hanging on a nail in the beam that separates the kitchen from the living room. Jessie moves with the grace of a ballet dancer toward the scissors, and I close my eyes and pray that she doesn't come at him with the sharp points, that she does as he asks. Jonah shadows her over to the scissors and back to my chair, hovers while she snips at the gray tape a bit at a time until it's severed through on both sides. She leaves the tape stuck across my arms. I think she doesn't want to yank it off and pull my hairs with it. I think she doesn't want to hurt me. Jonah tells her to return the scissors to the nail. She watches him all the way to see if he is paying attention, to see if she might have a chance to slip something sharp into her pocket. But he watches her closely and she hooks one of the scissor holes over a nail, and the blades fall open along the wooden beam.

My hands and wrists are stiff from being taped to the chair. They seem foreign to me, as if they belong to another man, a large old man, a useless, doddering fool. When I try to make a fist, my hand seems bloated, puffy, like rising bread, good only for resting on the arm of a chair. I close my eyes and I imagine my punch, the hardest I can muster, spreading blandly across Jonah's craggy chin, soft, flaccid, futile.

“Paint,” he says. “Draw something personal. The way to intimacy is through artistic expression. Don't you know
that, Carl? You heard that before?”

“No. I haven't.” I look at Jonah, who is holding out a sketch pad. I almost laugh out loud. Here we are, being tortured by a madman, and I'm going to draw a seagull in the midst of it all.

“That's what Sylvie said. ‘Get to know them. They're family.' So that's what I'm doing. Getting to know you. Now, draw something.”

“What?”

“If I tell you, it isn't personal anymore. I don't know you, Carl. I don't know what you think about.”

The scene through the kitchen window is far enough away to resemble a framed sketch. When I finish drawing, my fingers will be loosened up, ready to hit him. I clasp the sketch pad from his outstretched hand and lay it on my lap. He plucks the sharpened pencil from his shirt pocket and waves it under my nose until I take it. Our fingers touch. If I could be sure of my strength, I would turn his wrist until the bones snapped, but I'm afraid. Instead I draw a horizon line across the paper.

Jonah steps back just a little so that he's beyond my reach. Jessie is thinking. She glances around for weapons, for ways to escape, for a break in his concentration. I begin to draw the boulder bulging from the rocky shore, round and prominent, replacing some of the horizon line. Wisps of sea grass, small round stones smoothed by centuries of water, strokes of the sharpened pencil. Blurry marks made with the side of the charcoal. I'm a decent artist. Bushes and clumps of seaweed emerge from the paper. Waves, whitecaps
on the water. The point of land projects from the right. The edge of our picnic table pokes into the lower corner. He peeks over the paper, my gun gripped in his hand, pointing toward my wife. My hands seem feeble. The pencil falls onto the charcoal boulder.

“That's it?” he asks. “Finished?”

I need more time. I pick up the pencil and search the scene. The gulls have gone but I draw twelve thin, paired lines from the boulder toward the sky, twelve reedy legs, six gulls in silhouette because it's too complicated to draw them facing us. Is it almost suppertime? I draw the gulls in groups. Two and four.

“I don't see any gulls,” Jonah says. “That's good, Carl. You love birds, don't you, Carl?”

I almost expect Jessie to ask why the gulls face the sun, but there is silence in the house except for the barely discernible car engine outside and the scuff of my pencil across the smooth paper. I fill in details. Seams of dark granite across the boulder. The birch stump that looks like a dragon, a day sailer with the jib billowing, mounds of rock-weed heaped by the tide onto the pebble shore. All I see now is the drawing framed by the window, a tranquil scene, the world of wild things in harmony with one another.

“That's enough,” he says.

“I'm almost finished.”

“You're finished with that one,” he says. “Draw something else.” He rips the seashore scene from the notebook and passes it to Jessie.

“What else?”

“Carl, why don't you draw Sylvie's tree?” Jessie's voice
is strong. She has an idea.

“Yes. I'll draw Sylvie's tree,” I say.
What,
I ask myself,
is she thinking?
But there's no time to speculate. Jonah slaps his hand across my notebook, leaving his palm on the place where I want to draw the tree.

“No tree. Draw something else.” He removes his hand and steps back.

I begin to draw the kitchen table, the candles, the teacups, two of the ladder-back chairs pulled up to the edge of the pine tabletop.

“No,” he says. When he rips the sheet from the pad, the edge of the paper cuts the back of my hand and a drop of blood seeps through. I wait for it to drip down onto the paper, flow onto the smooth white surface, but it beads at the wound and settles back down into itself.

“Draw her,” he says.

“Jessie?”

“That's personal, isn't it, Carl?”

“I don't want to. I don't want to draw her.”

“You don't seem to understand. Sylvie wants me to know you.”

“Put the gun down, Jonah,” Jessie says. “We'll tell you all about ourselves, won't we, Carl?”

“Yes. We will.”

“Art,” he says. “It's through art. That's how the truth comes.”

“I was born near Paris in nineteen thirty—”

“Shut up, Carl. I don't mean that kind of garbage. I mean, who are you, Carl? Draw. Draw your wife.”

He jabs her in the ribs with his index finger. It hurts. I
can tell. She slumps to the side, holds herself. I pick up the blasted pencil again. He wants me to draw my wife? I'll draw my wife. I make a soft line down the middle of the paper, her center. I'll draw her upright, happy, strong. Jonah steps back to give us room and sits in the chair by the art chest.

Jessie stands up straight, sets her shoulders square. Her braid flips over her shoulder and she strokes the loose end while I draw her arms. We try to talk with our eyes. Her mouth twists toward the back door, her glance following. Jonah can't see her face. I work quickly so he won't interrupt. I draw the paint-spattered blue jeans that hug her bottom, her sneakers, the knobby fingers that fondle her hair. It's the best I've done of Jessie. Her wrinkled eyelids surround perfect young eyes, and her chin sags only a little. Her mouth is so Jessie, but so Sylvie, too. They look alike,
n'est-ce pas?

“Hold it up so I can see,” Jonah says.

I obey. He glances from the drawing to the model, back and forth, following with the gun, the blasted gun. How could I have been so stupid as to buy a gun? Jonah's expression is obscure. How could he not like it? It's Jessie.

“Take them off,” he says. He's looking at Jessie. She turns toward him, flings her braid to the back. “Take them off. Everything.”

“What?” she asks. I can barely hear her hushed voice. “What did you say?”

“Your clothes. Off.”

“My clothes? All my clothes?”

“You heard me,” he says. “Glasses, too. Just drop—”
The telephone saves everything.

“Hello?” Jonah says. He sounds like a normal man answering a normal telephone call. “Oh, I'm terribly sorry. They've gone out again. But they said to take a message. I'm a close family friend. Have you heard anything from the poor woman?” Jonah walks with the telephone, back and forth. Should I call out? Should I scream? But the bullets. I'm afraid of the bullets. “Sylvie's such a dear. Isn't it too bad.” Jonah clicks with his tongue. I think they're talking to him. He holds the telephone out and I hear a voice but I can't make out the words. Jonah smiles and says, “Goodbye,” before he replaces the telephone in its cradle. It's too late to shout.

“Come on then, Sylvie's mother. Glasses first. Just begin. Pull that sweater over your head. Don't you know how to undress?”

Jessie doesn't move. She's so like Sylvie. She stands with her hands straight at her sides, mouth and jaw set like granite. Jonah stands and kicks my leg with his boot. I hear myself groan.
Shut up, shut up, old man,
I say inside, coward that I am. I don't say anything aloud. She's careful with her glasses. She places them next to my tooth on the side table. She tugs at the bottom of the beautiful Irish cabled sweater that she made for me when I wasn't quite so fleshy. Does she have anything on underneath? I don't know. Why don't I remember? She pulls it slowly up to cover her face and I see she has on a purple T-shirt with no writing. When she's removed the sweater, she drops it to the floor. It falls into a heap around her feet.