The Animal Hour (23 page)

Your brother is going to be dead.

He hurried away down Bleecker. Hands in pockets. Shoulders hunched. Heavy with his thoughts, with his solitude. Tons of solitude now. Worse than before. Traffic steamed past him, past parked cars. He strode under green gingkos and yellow elms. The leafy autumn wind curled down out of the blue sky. A T-shirted girl leaned in the laundromat doorway, arms crossed on her chest, a wry twist to her lips. But for Perkins, inside Perkins, it was all a lunar landscape. Cratered vales of emptiness; the black sky; no help from anyone. Had to find Zach. He had to.

And Nancy Kincaid's severed head floated along beside him.

Look what they did to me, Oliver. I wanted to be a dancer. I had a woman's thoughts …

He hunched his shoulders higher to ward her off. He stared at the pavement as he walked. What could he do about it anyway? What did he know about any of this? New York City politics? Democrats, Republicans, the FBI? He wanted no part of any of them.

But the blue eyes stared him down, and he thought of the woman in the leather mask.
Was it Tiffany?
He thought about standing there in front of Mulligan, unable to speak out. Silence like a wall of glass. Words like moths beating themselves to death against it. Everything felt dead now as the moon inside him.

Man oh man, am I depressed or what?

He was depressed, all right. Even the panic of his thoughts—
got to find Zach, call Nana, got to
—even this was smothered under a powerful nostalgic yearning. Oh, but he longed for the people he had loved. Just to see a familiar face on the interior moonscape.

So his thoughts went back to the house on Long Island. They had lived in Port Jefferson after Zach was born. They had had a small white house with jolly dormers and gingerbread trim. There had been a steep hill behind it. Straight down from the Hartigans' picket fence to their own cellar door. The slope glistened with snow in the winter. The gray, naked trees all around it were bright with snow. That's how he hankered for it now. He remembered tugging Zach to the top on his Flexible Flyer. Kid brother swathed to the eyes in scarves. His earmuff hat pulled down to his brows. His eyes, lamplit with fear and excitement, beaming out at the slit between. And his legs in his huge buckle boots sprawled out before him on the sled.

“Mom says I shouldn't get too wet, Ollie.”

Ollie trudging upward, tugging the rope.

“We're not gonna go over the bump, right, Ollie? You're gonna ride with me, right?”

Puff, puff, puff—cottony blasts of frost as Ollie panted. “Yeah, Zach, I told you already.”

“Cause I don't like it when it gets too fast, okay?”

“Okay, Zach-man. Jesus.”

“Mom says it's because of my inner ear.”

Perkins smiled grimly now as he edged by a troop of school-children. Trick-or-treaters in black nylon capes, plastic masks. A harried woman shepherded them past.

His inner ear, Perkins thought, shaking his head. Christ, he had to find the guy, inner ear and all. Little Zach, in the playroom with his carpentry kit between his legs, his hammer going. Or down in the cellar like Dr. Frankenstein with his chemistry set—he had known more about science at seven than Oliver knew now. He had known more about everything. He could take apart their father's typewriter and put it back together. Ollie had tried to do it himself once, just to prove he was at least as smart as his baby brother …

Oh, if the feds hurt him, Perkins thought … if the cops got hold of him … Jesus …

He could remember standing at the top of that wintry hill. Breathless. Zach sitting on the sled by his feet. Both of them looking down over the slope of snow. The stretch of darkling sky over the housetops. The lighted windows in the house below. Their mother's anxious face at the kitchen window, the fluttery spirit of the house. And upstairs in the northern dormer, their father. Seated at his desk. Turning from his work to the round window. Turning as if to glare at an intruder. Turning like a wolf from the innards of a deer.

Jesus, where had
that
look come from? That snouty rage? Zach and Oliver had debated the question endlessly. Back and forth from bed to bed in their little room upstairs in Nana's mews. Dad was gone by then, of course. Off to California with one of his students: a chirpy twenty-year-old brunette who called Zach and Oliver “the boys.” Dad hardly even wrote them anymore, but “the boys” couldn't let the matter rest. They wanted to understand it: Why had he become such an angry man?

“When you were a kid, he was a promising young grad student,” Zach would say mildly. And the fact that he said it mildly made Perkins feel guiltier still. “When I was a kid, it was all failure already, it was all disappointment.”

Dad had been an associate history professor at the university when Zach was a kid. He was popular with the students. A favorite lecturer; all that reedy, abstracted charm. Everyone talked about how much they loved him. “And they hold that against you,” he often said—grumbling at the dinner table, snapping his mashed potatoes off the fork. “According to academia, you can either be popular or scholarly. They won't let you be both. If the kids like you, then your work is looked down on. How can it be any good? You're
popular.
You must be shallow. That's that.”

Perkins came to a stop on the corner of his block. Ran his fingers up through his hair. Looked down the narrow lane of brownstones and slender trees. Yellow leaves blowing in the gutter past the closed windows of the café. Only a few cars parked way down at the far end, near Sixth. A few pedestrians. Two older men, a couple, carrying groceries. A sheepdog dragging its dumpy matron for a walk. They could be cops, he thought. Any one of them could be watching him. Could be feds even. He stood, feeling obvious and exposed. Feeling guilty.

Look what they did to my head, Oliver.

Yeah, yeah, but for God's sake, what did he know about it?

And again, he thought of the woman in the leather mask. Her strands of black and silver hair. The curve of her naked spine. The man—this Fernando Woodlawn—was drawn back from her a little so you could see most of her ass.

And all at once, he felt a chemical change. His loneliness, this bittersweet nostalgia, thickened into real sadness.
Oh. Oh. Oh.
He shuddered.
For many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death.

Little Zachie, man. His father had grabbed him by the back of his neck. Pinned him facedown to the big writing desk, his cheek crushed against it. The little boy's legs were dangling over the side. His corduroy overalls were dangling around his thighs. “
Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!
” he kept screaming. But Daddy kept lifting that heavy brass ruler. “This—will—teach—you—to stay—away—from my—things!” Bringing it down on the child's bare ass till the flesh turned purple and then practically black. While Zachie screamed till he was hoarse. And Mom stood to the side, her fingers fluttering helplessly at her lips. Staring with blank eyes. Smiling a dazed smile. And Oliver stood in the doorway. Drawn from his homework by his brother's shrieks. Stood with his hands out from his sides and his fists clenched. And he couldn't speak then either. His throat felt bunged with excitement and terror and he could only stand there, thinking,
But I broke it. I broke the typewriter.

A breath riffled out of him. He shook his head. “Fuck,” he said aloud. He started toward his building, head down. And fuck Mulligan too, he thought. And the NYPD, and the fucking Republican FBI, all of them. He'd get a lawyer, that's all. He'd go to the newspapers, break this thing wide open. Kill his brother, would they?

God, he was depressed.

He reached his stoop. Paused there for a last narrow-eyed look around. A bald man in a red dress strutted past the end of the block, his high heels clicking.
And Christ, you can't tell if you're being watched or not. The entire Village is in disguise.
He waved off the world. Fuck it. He jogged up the steps to his door and pushed inside.

He went quickly up the stairs to the third floor, to his door. Fumbled in his pocket for his keys. Maybe Avis was still upstairs, he thought. It would be a relief to talk to her, lay all this out. She was not going to believe it, that was for sure. He found the key. Unlocked the door. Stepped in.

The door swung shut behind him. He snapped on the light. And he froze where he stood.

Hey. Somebody moved Goethe.

Perkins's hand went around behind him. Felt for the doorknob. Seized it. He stood stock-still there, his chest rising and falling. His ears pricked. He was ready to bolt at the slightest motion, the slightest sound. His head stationary, his eyes panned from one end of the apartment to the other.

The place had been cleaned. All the empty brown bottles of Sam Adams beer had been picked up. Dumped into shopping bags in the kitchenette for recycling. That was Avis. It had to be. There was no stopping the little dope once she got started. She'd done the goddamn dishes too. Picked up his clothes. Straightened the bedcovers on his mattress. Had she polished his writing desk even? He thought he remembered a few bottle rings that now seemed to have been wiped away.

But his books. The dust-gray piles of books against the wall from floor to ceiling. In tilted stacks between bed and table and chair. Wedged under the windowsill … Avis knew better than to rearrange his books. They were all carefully in place. He knew the location of each by heart. Avis was too sweet to send that kind of shockwave through his universe, but somebody …

Somebody had moved the Goethe.

Right there. That short stack right at the foot of the mattress. Poe's
Tales
at the bottom. Which, of course, had reminded him of Lacan, and so of Freud, so that Otto Rank's
Myth of the Birth of the Hero
came next. Which led him to think of Rank's
Will Therapy
, so that Schopenhauer's
The World As Will and Representation
was on top of it. Which brought to mind
Buddenbrooks
, so that Mann's
Dr. Faustus
was on top of that. Which had led him by a far more direct line to Heinrich's
Mephisto
and so finally to the two volumes of Goethe,
Faust II
and then
Faust I.
At least that's how he'd left it: the second part under the first. But now—now, someone had obviously slipped the second part out. Glanced at it maybe, then casually tossed it back on
top
of the pile, as if he wouldn't notice.

He was sure of it. Someone other than Avis had been in his apartment.

Slowly, he released the doorknob. Came away from the door, looking this way and that. He stood in the center of the room finally. Listening. Hearing nothing, but the faint whoosh of traffic over on Sixth. Once again, tense, poised, he surveyed the room. Passed his gaze over the books, from window to mattress to lamp to bathroom …

He stopped there. The bathroom door. It was closed.

Oh no. Not again.

What the hell was it closed for? Had he closed it himself? He couldn't remember. Maybe that was Avis too. Sure. And maybe Avis was still in there …

Don't think it.

Right. Right, don't think it. Only maybe she
was
right in there, right through that door. In that toilet. Staring up at him from behind her big square glasses. Her lips gray, parted. The curls in her blonde hair straightening as they became soaked in the puddle of her own …

Just don't even think it, man.

He gritted his teeth. Shit. Shit. It was just a door, just a closed door. No reason to just stand there staring at it like this. Confronting it like an adversary, head jutting, fists clenched. He ought to go right over there and open it, that's what. Open that door right up. Yessireebob.

He took a slow, slow sliding step toward the bathroom.

And the bathroom doorknob turned. The latch clicked. The door began to swing open …

I'm here, Oliver. I came to your house. To show you my head, what they did to my head.

Stopped in his tracks, Perkins watched the door come squeaking out little by little. He watched—as a human head did, in fact, come squeezing through it. Peeking around the edge of the door. Big, dark eyes sneaking a look at him around the wood.

“Ollie? Is that you?”

And Perkins rushed toward him. He had not even realized how worried he'd been until now, when it all drained out of him. And he shouted: “Zach!” He strode toward him with his fist over his head as if to club him down. Crying: “Zach, where the hell have you been, you idiot? You
stupid
son of a bitch!”

R
unning. The long corridor. The distant door. Its square pane of glass dark with the shadow of the cop.

The shouts behind her were growing louder. Nancy held on to her letter opener as she ran, hiding the blade against her wrist. Her head was swimming.

Not me
, she was thinking, almost dreamily.
I'm really nice. This isn't really me.