Penny Dreadful (36 page)

Moon, I said. I’m sorry about this.

Downstairs and I barely recognized anyone. It was like the mothership had touched down in my absence and reclaimed the pods. Dizzy Bloom had tangled her hair into a complicated bun. Her face was different, too. Dark lipstick and round little steel-framed glasses. They were much nicer than Ray’s glasses. She wore jeans and a black cardigan sweater and she was reading a newspaper, a cup of tea or coffee in her left hand. The swirl of steam around her face. There was a plate of bagels on the table and now she put down her coffee and reached for the cream cheese. A young man with a very serious posture sat across from her, smoking an unfiltered cigarette and staring intently at the screen of a laptop computer. Thin blond hair pulled into a severe ponytail and no jewelry. Expensive white dress shirt with cuffs buttoned, dark green twill pants and black shoes. If I was not mistaken, this was Mingus. His eyes were bright and not the least bit psychotic as he smiled and held out his hand.

Hello, said Mingus. I don’t think we’ve met. I’m Matthew Roar.

Okay, I said. I’m Phineas.

We shook hands and I looked as far as I could into the man’s face, his mouth and eyes. There was no hint that this was part of the game.

And you know my wife, I believe. Dizzy Bloom, he said.

You two are married, I said.

Dizzy smiled, a cruel flash. I kept my maiden name, she said.

Uh-huh.

I looked sideways and saw Eve. And I knew her, I recognized her. I had seen her in multiple incarnations and this was but another one. She wore black boots and white stockings and a silky black skirt with a thin blue sweater that she must have borrowed from Dizzy because the skirt was sexy but much too collegiate and the sweater was a little too small. There was a white line of flesh at her hips between sweater and skirt and the sleeves were too short. Her hair was tucked behind her ears and she held a coffee mug in both hands. She was blowing on it with pale puckered lips, staring at me.

You look nice, I said.

She flinched. Thanks.

I went to the stove and poured myself a cup of coffee that was hot and black as death and smelled of cinnamon and chicory. I sipped it carefully as Dizzy picked up a pencil and began to examine the crossword. Matthew was bent over his laptop, which now made a happy chirping sound to indicate that he had mail. I nodded. Dizzy and Matthew were not fucking kidding about this game of tongues. Their characters were so divorced from their real identities that they were probably going slowly but surely clinical. But I had a feeling they knew it was over. They must. Their friend had died in their kitchen last night and they were calmly eating bagels and cream cheese and they were probably sorry they had no smoked salmon to offer us but their worlds were going to crash soon. The cops were coming and I was tempted not to warn them. Eve came over to stand next to me.

Do you have a cigarette, she said.

I gave her one. I want you to come downtown with me, I said.

Okay. Why?

I have an errand to run. And I don’t think you want to be here.

She lit her cigarette at the stove, careful not to set her hair on fire.

Why? she said.

Because the cops are coming.

Dizzy Bloom looked up. Do you know a six-letter word for “dark”?

Opaque, I said.

Thank you.

Did you hear me?

What? she said.

The cops are on the way. Two minutes, maybe three and they’re in your living room.

What do they want?

I shrugged. Madman on your roof.

Dizzy smiled and nodded. Of course.

I felt hot, irritable. I poured the rest of my coffee down the sink and yes, I wished there was more of the Pale. The others were so fucking unflustered, like robots. Something was very wrong with them. They were all supposed to be junkies, right. Confused. Out of touch with reality. I looked at them and thought maybe they weren’t real, maybe they were only pretending to be normal people for my benefit. I wiped at my face and told myself I had one minute left.

Eve and I are going, I said.

Will you be back for lunch?

No. I don’t think so.

Matthew looked up and there was a trace of something like sadness around his mouth. I hesitated. The sun was coming through the windows and I could hear sirens in the distance and I realized I was going to miss the little Breather. I bit at my tongue and wondered when Chrome would walk in wearing a T-shirt and sweatpants, hungover and slack-jawed with ordinary life and carrying a basketball under one arm.

Do you want to shoot some hoops, he would say.

Dear Jude.

I have no soul inside, only gray matter.

I think Ulysses is finally getting to me. I jumped ahead to the end, to Molly Bloom’s melancholy monologue and after two pages of somber cocksucking and the philosophy behind the mixing of urine and menstrual blood, I was freaking out. The physical details are heavy of course but pretty casual by modern standards. The consumptive nature of her voice, though. It’s like cancer. Her voice is relentless and unwavering as a slow-burning fire. I can’t read that shit anymore. Okay. I understand that Joyce was trying to re-create the random sound and fury of a human mind at work but I’m not sure why he would want to.

Painful and blinding. Trapped in the wheels of another’s thoughts.

And moreover I’m not sure why Dizzy would choose such a tragic character to be her number one ancestor. Molly Bloom suffers a lot of weird and profound indignities as the object of her husband’s whim. Leopold asks her to walk barefoot in horseshit as a kind of demented foreplay and when she is fat with milk he begs her to let him squeeze a few drops into his tea. And he torments her in the end with the seemingly innocent request for breakfast in bed which now strikes me as a truly frightening though nonaggresive act of marital sadism and I wonder if Dizzy truly hates Matthew Roar for being weak and virtuous and kind to her and maybe she wishes for a physically grotesque man like Leopold Bloom. If she wishes for someone like Moon, like Jimmy Sky.

A horse named Throwaway, I said. Throwaway.

Are you okay, said Eve.

No.

The belly wail of sirens were close and getting closer and they might as well have been inside my head. I grabbed Eve by her small hand and squeezed it, the bones moving beneath her skin fragile and rubbery like the ribs of a bird and I only hoped she wanted to come with me. That she wouldn’t resist or pull away because I needed her and was not sure how or why, but I did. It wasn’t that I was particularly afraid but I had no plan, no idea what I would say to McDaniel. Maybe she could help me there. She apparently had some higher knowledge of torture and not to change the subject but part of me was happy, I was happy that Goo had not slept with Ray Fine, for instance. Although that might have been the least frightening and strange of all the possible combinations.

Outside and I pulled her across the backyard. Jimmy might have become sweaty and agitated by the sound of the sirens and I imagined he was up there flapping his naked arms like an angry crow and I didn’t want him taking any potshots at us. One of the more annoying voices in my skull proclaimed that we should stick around and see him through this but I disagreed. Because you can only save yourself, right.

Yourself.

Running. Wet grass.

I told myself not to crush Eve’s fingers because she wasn’t resisting, she was light as a shadowpuppet and she followed me without a word through the back gate and across a curve of gravel and suddenly I knew that I wanted to have another look at Chrome’s body because after that little scene in Dizzy’s kitchen it seemed more and more likely that his death was just a crooked line in the script, a typographical error.

He’s dead, said Eve. Her voice was sharp.

What?

Christian, she said. You’re wondering if he’s really dead.

Come on, I said.

I pulled her across the vacant lot, ignoring the little path. I was pretty sure by now that he would be reclining beside one of those blue Dumpsters, that he would be a blood-stained but unusually handsome homeless man. He would be scratching his jaw and dazedly contemplating his ruined clothes and wondering what exactly he had been up to last night. I pulled her across the parking lot, slower now.

The only footsteps were our own.

The parking lot stretched before us like the sky and suddenly we were upon him. His body was where we had left it, stiff and gathering flies.

Eve sucked in her breath.

I didn’t need that, she said.

Oh, fuck.

Yeah.

It was a stupid idea, of course. I had carried him here just a few hours earlier and he had been cold and dead in my arms, he could have been a posterboy for death but dream and game and daylight had seemed so readily interchangeable that anything should have been possible. Eve backed away, one hand over her nose.

He stinks, she said.

That’s the garbage, I said.

But that was a fucking lie and why did I want to lie to her.

Yeah, I said. He stinks.

Eve wrinkled her nose and I saw how pretty and young she was without Goo’s face tangled up around her own. It would be inappropriate to kiss her now, standing over her dead boyfriend’s body like this. The air ripe with his gasses. But I wanted to kiss her.

Let’s move him into the Dumpster, she said.

Why? I said.

The cops will want to ask me a lot of questions. Won’t they?

Probably. You’re the girlfriend.

If we move him, maybe they won’t find him today.

I stood there nodding like a dummy and it wasn’t that I disagreed with her. Eve was right, of course. I had no idea why I had left him exposed like this. He should be moved and there wasn’t a lot of time to stand around talking about it but I wasn’t sure I wanted to touch him again.

He had such a pretty face, pale and puffy even as it was in death.

I made sure the Dumpster was not padlocked and threw open its jaws with a screech of metal that would send the rats running for shelter. I hoped that a pimply kid in Burger King brown wasn’t on his way out with an armload of rotten buns and meat even though I could probably use his help.

The dead are heavy, after all.

I lit a cigarette and took two quick puffs, then gave it to Eve. I stepped over the body and without pausing to let myself freak out or feel sorry for him, bent down and sunk my hands into the soft fleshy pockets of his armpits. I dragged him up to a rubbery standing position and danced him over to the blue Dumpster and his knees dipped and buckled comically as I slipped one hand between his legs and got a firm grip on his crotch. I lifted and tried to throw him over the side of the Dumpster but I was too short or he was too heavy or something because he tumbled down on top of me and favored me with a damp, gruesome embrace.

Eve didn’t laugh and for that I thought she was pretty cool.

Help me, I said.

And she didn’t balk or hesitate at all. Eve locked her teeth together and held her breath as she lifted one end of the body. She was grim and almost smiling as she held him by the feet and I wondered how many times she had watched him tie the laces of those boots. Together we managed to sling him up and over and into the Dumpster and two minutes later while she crouched in the shadows wondering if she was going to vomit, I climbed in and covered her boyfriend’s body with trash.

But first I patted him down for cigarettes, money, weapons.

Eve finished retching, or gave up trying. Now she walked quickly away from me, across the parking lot. I climbed out of the Dumpster feeling about as clever as a drunk raccoon. The stink of French fries in my clothes and hair. I followed her, glad to see she was not walking back to Dizzy’s house.

Jimmy was on the roof, naked and angry.

I hoped the paramedics would be able to talk him down. I hoped we wouldn’t hear screams or gunfire. I hoped we wouldn’t hear the deadening silence that meant he had fallen. I followed Eve to a little plastic igloo that housed a pale green bench with the names of a hundred assholes gouged in the wood. I sat two or three feet away from her. I hoped there was a bus coming.