Fear itself: a novel (15 page)

“I’m going to be talking to Dr. Yo later this morning. Let’s see what she has to say, first.” The nurse returned; Simon took the carafe from her, held a sliver to Missy’s sunburned lips.

Missy didn’t have the strength to throw a tantrum—pitching a royal, Simon called it—but there were other approaches; when it came to getting her way, Missy’s IQ was in the genius range. Much as she wanted that ice, she turned her head away. “Home.”

“Honey, your poor lips, they’re all cracked and—”

“Home.”

“I’ll talk to Dr. Yo as soon as—”

“Home.”

Home. It took a few hours to work out the details, sign the waivers Dr. Yo required before she would discharge her patient, arrange for round-the-clock private nursing, then rush home to be there before the Home-Med techs arrived to set up the hospital bed in the living room (no stairs for Missy—Dr. Yo had been quite insistent on that point). None of it came cheap, but it was worth every penny—by noon, Missy and her day-shift nurse were playing Candy Land in the living room, and Simon, at long last, was free to visit the basement. By his reckoning, close to twenty-four hours had passed since Dorie had broken her nose. She ought to be ready for a game by now, Simon told himself. He certainly was.

Linda Abruzzi was a city girl, born and raised. Several times during the night she had awakened with the sense that something was terribly wrong; eventually she figured out that it was the quiet that was bothering her. It seemed unnatural, somehow—it wasn’t until the birds began singing in the gray faux-dawn light that she was able to get a few hours of uninterrupted sleep.

Unfortunately, the metallic burr of her windup Baby Ben alarm clock was among the noises that failed to interrupt Linda’s sleep, so she ended up racing through a truncated version of her morning routine, skipping her PT exercises and chasing her vitamins and supplements with instant coffee instead of a smoothie. Luckily, it wasn’t one of her Betaseron mornings (self-administered subcutaneous injection of .25 mg every other day), so she was spared that painful and time-consuming task.

She made it to the office on time. Pool handed her an old-fashioned pink while-you-were-out slip. It was the first such slip Linda had ever seen with every blank filled in—date, time, caller, reason for call, action requested, message taker’s initials—even though according to the time entered, the call, from Thom Davies, at the Criminal Justice Information System, had come in only two or three minutes ago.

“Great,” said Linda. Having struck out in her own attempts to locate someone from the PWSPD Association by phone, she was anxious to see what Thom had come up with. “I’ll call him right back.”

“I’ll get him for you.”

“No, that’s okay; I’ll call him myself.”

Fat chance—Davies was on the line by the time Linda reached her desk. “Thank you, Cynthia,” Linda called.

“No problem,” was the reply from the anteroom. “But please, call me Pool.” Then, before Linda had a chance to examine her feelings to see how badly they were bruised: “All my friends do.”

Linda felt absurdly better. “Thank you, Pool. Hi, Thom—whaddaya got?”

“Nuttin’—and plenty of it. Are you quite sure you haven’t hallucinated this entire PWSPD Association business?”

“Sure I’m sure—I was logged on to their web site just the other day. Phobia-dot-com.”

“Try it now—I’ll wait.”

Linda logged on. “I got a No URL.”

“Try a search engine—any search engine.”

She tried Yahoo, then Google. “No hits either way—not even cached pages.”

“Precisely. And I have access to some databases you’ve never heard of—and if you had, I’d have to kill you—that could tell me who your date was at the Junior Prom.”

“Tony Guglielmino. No wonder I struck out with four-one-one.”

“Whoever did this is a real wizard. So what we need now is a wizard of our own. The best one I know of is Ben Wing, with the Nerd Squad in San Jose. I left a message for him to call me when he gets in. That’ll probably be around noon, our time—if you’d like, we can make it a three-way.”

“Yes, please, a thr—I mean, a conference call would be great.”

“Oh, you’re no fun,” said Davies.

“You’d be surprised,” said Linda.

“Here’s to the hair of the dog.” Pender raised his recently refilled glass.

“Ed, the fucking dog is bald by now.” Two o’clock in the afternoon, and by Sid’s count it was Pender’s fourth drink of the day—one Jim Beam on the rocks at the airport bar in Monterey, a Bloody Mary on the connecting flight to San Francisco, and now, after receiving the call from Linda about the disappearing PWSPD Association, another Jim Beam at the airport bar in SFO.

“Don’t nag me, man—I’m feeling very vulnerable.”

“I know.”

“I was being facetious.”

“The hell you were.” Sid reached across the too-high, too-small round pedestal table, the kind you find only in airport bars, to give Pender’s beret a sharp sideways tug. “There, much better.”

“What was that all about?”

“If you insist on wearing a brown beret with a plaid sport jacket, the least you can do is adjust it properly.”

“I was going for jaunty.” Pender glanced at his drink and seemed surprised to find it half empty. “You know what doesn’t make sense?”

“I can think of a few things. What did you have in mind?”

“Your whole life, they tell you clean up after your mistakes. You break it, you fix it. Then you reach a certain age, you screw up, and now it’s ‘Get the hell outta here, pops. Go home, grab a nap, we’ll take it from here.’”

“I believe that’s covered in the book of Ecclesiastes,” said Sid. “To everything there is a season. One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh. It’s the way of the world, Sparky—you might as well get used to it.”

Pender made a well-I’ll-be-damned face. “Since when did
you
start reading the Bible?”

“Since right after Esther died.”

“Did it help?”

“Turns out there’s a lot of good stuff in there—you ought to try it sometime.”

“You know, I just might,” mused Pender, looking down at his glass, which had somehow emptied itself again. “I just goddamn might.”

“Excuse me, sir?” It was the female flight attendant—all legs and smile.

Sid took off his reading glasses and looked up from the in flight magazine; there were still five minutes remaining before takeoff and he’d already read everything in it that wasn’t about shopping. “Yes, dear?”

“Your friend asked me to give you this.” A brown paper bag from the gift shop.

“My
friend?” As far as Sid knew, Pender had excused himself to use the terminal rest room before boarding—the airplane toilet was yet another modern invention that hadn’t been designed for men his size. “Are you sure you have the right guy?”

The stewardess looked around the first-class compartment to see if there were any other little old men wearing blue blazers and gray toupees. Seeing none, she nodded. “He said he marked a passage for you. He also asked could you please pick up his clubs in baggage claim when we get to Dulles?”

Sid reached into the paper bag and pulled out a leather-covered, pocket-sized Holy Bible. It was black, with gilt-edged pages and a gold silk ribbon sewn into the binding. He opened it to the page marked by the ribbon and saw that Pender had circled a passage in Ecclesiastes; the print, however, was too small for Sid to make out, even with his glasses on.

“Would you mind reading that for me?” he asked, handing the Good Book back to the stewardess.

“Of course.” This
was
first class, after all. “It’s Ecclesiastes…chapter, lemme see, looks like chapter nine, verse ten:

“Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.”

You lie in the dark long enough, you start to make your peace with loss, with loneliness, with pain and regret and the shame of having wet yourself and the fear of knowing you’re about to die. You make your peace with all that and it’s like a headache after a couple of aspirin: you know it’s in there, it just doesn’t hurt anymore.

What Dorie missed most of all was her house. She wasn’t proud of that, and she definitely didn’t want to examine the meaning of it too closely, but that’s what it boiled down to for her. Not her friends, not her painting, and not even her on-again-off-again lover Rafael (a fine-looking Big Sur carpenter who would have made a great poster boy for Peter Pan syndrome), but rather a fifty-five-year-old frame house nestled under a live oak at least twice its age. In her mind, she went through it room by room, stood like a ghost in every doorway, looked out from every window in every season. It was hard to imagine a stranger living in it after she was gone. I should have made a will, she thought. Left it to some starving painter.

It took a few seconds for her eyes to adjust when the lights finally came on. The room was obviously a basement; a tall man dressed all in black was padding across the cement floor. Dorie, still on her side, still hog-tied, avoided looking up at his face, instead keeping her eyes trained on his black-slippered feet as he approached. When her glance did begin traveling upward involuntarily, there was something disturbingly familiar in his easy, Clint Eastwood, backward-leaning slouching walk and the way his long-fingered hands dangled loosely at his sides.

Who
are
you? was Dorie’s last thought before a glimpse of the Kabuki mask covering his face propelled her into an alternate universe where there were no thoughts, only wordless terror welling up from somewhere deep inside, in the dark region of the brain stem where the lizard-self still ruled, and the human mind never ventured.

When it worked, when it all came together, there was a rare quality to the fear displayed by a phobic confronted with the object of his or her phobia, a purity and intensity to which your average Joe or Josie could never aspire. At such moments, the emotional closeness between Simon and his victim/partner made him feel the way other people seemed to feel when making love, even when his victim/partner was a male; when it was a naked female, any naked female, his sense of involvement was so acute as to be almost unbearable.

With Dorie, however, the relationship was both enhanced and skewed by the unfamiliar presence of a third party—the lurid Kabuki mask. Wearing it took Simon outside himself, somehow. It was as if he were seeing himself approach through
her
eyes and hearing the whispery rasp of his slippers on the rough cement, the buzz of the overhead fluorescents, and her own shallow panting through
her
ears. He felt the shock down to his bones when she saw the mask; when her terror peaked, when her thoughts shut down, he knew, and understood.

He was even glad for her when her vasovagal reflex kicked in, causing her to lose consciousness. He was glad for himself as well—the connection was too intense to be endured for extended periods, and it wasn’t until it had been broken that Simon realized he was in a state of extreme arousal.

And with that realization came the release. As always, the premature climax was unsatisfying and anticlimactic—a shameful, irrelevant spasm, a dribble and a blush instead of a gush and a roar.

Simon’s shame quickly transmuted itself into anger. Dorie was awakened by a series of open-handed slaps. Hog-tied, all she could do was tuck her chin tight into her chest and wait it out. It didn’t hurt much, anyway—or at any rate, it didn’t hurt any worse than the pain from the broken nose, cramped limbs, and parched lips that it had supplanted.

The mild beating also helped take her mind off the mask—that seemed important. And afterward he was gentle. He loosened her bonds, rolled her onto her back, and retied her wrists in front of her. Her legs were left free; it wasn’t until he slipped his hands between her knees and urged them open that she realized he hadn’t left her ankles untied as a mercy.

But her captor apparently changed his mind about molesting her sexually when he caught the scent of urine.

“I think
somebody
needs a bath,” he said, patiently but firmly. It was the first time he’d spoken in her presence.

Simon Childs, thought Dorie. Our founder. Of course, of course: the fox starts a support group for the geese. Which makes me the biggest goose of all.

Though her eyes were closed again, she sensed that he had moved away; then she heard water running. Not a gentle plashing, but loud and violent, the sound of water falling from a height into a big, empty, metal tub. It made her want to pee again, but she decided to save it up this time. Having a name to put to the monster, and even more important, a face to put behind the mask, had sent Dorie back into survivor mode: she had remembered the anti-rape measures she and her girlfriends used to recommend to each other. Act crazy. Laugh, don’t cry. Howl, gibber. If you can pee, pee; if you can shit, shit your pants; and if you can’t do either, stick your finger down your throat and puke all over him. Anything to kill desire, buy time, stay alive. Where there’s life, there’s hope—isn’t that what everybody always said?

Then Dorie remembered something else, a parable her father once told her when she hadn’t sold a painting in a year and was thinking about giving up and taking a straight job. It was about a man sentenced to death who promised the king that if his life was spared, within a year he would teach the king’s favorite horse to talk. His friends told him he was crazy, that he’d set himself an impossible task. But a year is a long time, he told them. A lot of things can happen in a year. The king could die. The horse could die. Or maybe—who knows?—maybe the horse will actually learn to talk.

Stranger things have happened, thought Dorie. Miracles have happened—you just have to stay alive long enough to be there when they do.