Serenity House

by Christopher Hope

  Dr Castro parked in the trucking depot, a stretch of wasteland behind the mobile home park. Slightly less chance of his beautiful Ferrari taking a walk, or being crippled, scarred or torched. No way would he drive into the park itself. Kids were so hyped-up in there it was like Beirut.

  Dr Castro had treated Marta when she could still pay. She had not paid him now for months. But he went on seeing her. Immigrants should stick together. And the poor woman lived with the boy with a brick for a head; a tube where his heart should be. A slob, loafer, creep. Yes, immigrants should stick together and help to protect each other from natural Americans, like her crazy son Jack. Dr Castro double-locked his Ferrari, moved swiftly around the Burger King on the corner, and walked down the track between elderly Pontiacs and mobile homes with small chimneys in their roofs, and the rusted back-ends of air-conditioners, like wounds that would not heal, gaping moistly as he passed.

  Marta’s caravan was the last on the left, before you ran into a swampy patch of reeds and a dead, dark pond at the end of the track. Three-fifty a month. An elderly loquat tree leaned above the roof of Marta’s home. A line of irritable crows carried on the kind of conversation he’d only heard from stockbrokers. Somewhere behind him the ceaseless traffic of Orange Avenue, north to Orlando, south past Lake Conway, on to Kissimee, roared like the ocean.

  Yes, immigrants should stick together. Only that morning Dr Castro had learnt that his application for membership of the Clear Lake Country Club had been rejected. ‘It’s not that we have anything against Hispanics, or any other ethnic group,’ the club secretary explained frankly, ‘it’s just that some of the members feel entitled to hear English spoken, now and then. They’re American citizens; they don’t like living in a foreign country.’ When his own country was free again, and its dictator, his namesake, overthrown, then, Dr Castro prayed, it would become an island for the settlement of natural Americans: those who ate only pizza, dreamed of killing someone soon, believed all they saw in the movies and spoke only English. Like a country club reserved for their special use. Wouldn’t that be good? ‘You betcha!’ Dr Castro told himself. He was learning English fast, though he travelled everywhere with a fat black Spanish-English dictionary.

  Dr Castro knocked gently on the flimsy door of Marta’s trailer and, stooping slowly, a dignified lowering of his shining dark head, he walked inside. Sprawled on the floor, in front of the TV, sat Jack wondering what it would be like to eat – a giraffe. He was watching pictures of the occupation of Kuwait, hungry Iraqi soldiers eating the animals in Kuwait Zoo. Now that was pretty neat. The cameras brought him close-ups of the carcass of a half-devoured giraffe. Its bones, barrel-like and bare, shone in the sun. Jack was reminded of Big Bennie’s Rib Cage, ‘Eat Till You’re Beat!’ said Big Bennie. And Jack said, ‘Yo, boy,’ to that. Jack ignored the doctor’s presence and if he heard him enter Marta’s bedroom he gave no sign of it. Nor did he look up twenty minutes later when Dr Castro left Marta’s bedside and offered his diagnosis with the help of his Spanish-English dictionary.

  Dr Castro looked around at the remains of dozens of Chinese meals in their Styrofoam boxes, piled one on the other. These were the walls in Jack’s life, the Great Wall of China, made up of old Chinese meals. And then the video wall, box after box of nightly delights for the boy Jack. There was Dwarf Killer 3 and KIDS. Yes, Dr Castro knew that one. That was about the Bolivian vet with an interest in particle physics who stalked and caught young children around Miami, ate their soft organs and, by a method known only to a remote tribe of Bolivian Indians, shrank their heads to a size convenient for their use as glove puppets with which he gave shows at kids’ parties across the city. Very popular those puppets. The occasions, of course, were used by the Bolivian headshrinker to garner more kids for his larder. His greatest triumph came when a children’s fund issued a series of Christmas cards featuring his puppets. The video had been one of the hot shots of the season and when busybodies tried to get it banned, civil liberties groups had picketed the town hall.

  ‘Your – granny – is being taken. Her time is nigh. Are you listening what I tell – creep?’

  Dr Castro closed his pigskin case, that sleek sausage packed with steel and glass. Jack heard the crisp snap and he thought, yes, that’s Dr Castro closing his nice yellow case full of knives and rubber hoses. Nine neat syringes and a stethoscope. Stethoscope! Just to say the word made Jack salivate. Jack wanted to steal Dr Castro’s case. He had wanted to steal it for ever so many years. The only trouble was that, in order to steal the case, he knew he’d have to kill Dr Castro first. He kept it chained to him, that costly pigskin case, ‘because of the neighbourhood,’ Dr Castro used to explain, peering out of the window into the soft, liquid, Florida light and shutting his case with its priceless click. ‘Here I wouldn’t wear a rosary. If a man walked round with a crown of thorns someone would mug him, believe me, Jesus.’

  Dr Castro called the Abe Lincoln Memorial Hospital. He called the ambulance. He directed the guys when they arrived with the stretcher and Marta, eyes closed, was taken from her home – the ambulance men stepping over the reclining Jack who never said a thing.

  He was watching a woman in chainmail castrating a stockbroker. You knew he was a stockbroker because this was taking place at night on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and because the camera cut between the open mouths of the dealers bellowing like branded steers during the daytime’s trading session on the crowded dealing floor and the O of horror made by the mouth of the man in the hands of the lady in chainmail who held a hunting knife in one hand and his erect penis in the other. Even at the door, Dr Castro checked himself and thought – a bit far-fetched that erection, allowing himself this little medical flourish in passing and pleased to be thinking again in native Spanish. I mean, some time to get a cock-stand! Oh, man! while watching her slice the stalwart member at its base in a mushroom of blood. Doctor though he was, he turned before she began on the testicles, while Jack licked his lips and watched the bloody globes dropping slowly into the sacrificial silver dish. ‘Boing, boing!’ Jack carolled happily. He’d seen Chopper several times and was entitled to the light, jesting demeanour of the film buff, not so much ribaldry, as affectionate recognition.

  *

  Reclining on the carpet in the main room of the box on wheels that it was his privilege to inhabit, Jack had run out of money for new videos. The distant portals of the Aardvark Video Emporium saw him no more. Instead, he was watching TV, propped by an elbow upon a pink leather pouffe.

  Jack was hungry. No Marta. No money. No movies. No food. He had not eaten in two days. No more seaweed for Jack; no beef in black bean sauce, Mr Hung’s speciality; no bean sprouts, no lemon chicken, no special fried rice, none of the delights of the Pleasure Garden wedged into a tiny space, on the broad and thundering grey macadam river that is Orange Avenue, red roof, lacquered shutters, between the Orlando Foot Clinic and the Syrian Lebanese American Club. No, not even so much as a prawn cracker.

  Jack thought of the treasures Marta had hidden, of the times she would get out of bed and appear in the TV room, rather shaky, sure, but definitely Marta, swaying a bit and holding on to the back of the cane chair with the red cushion seat, wearing her old Chinese stole, the one with the dragons – ‘Once, Jack, there were two Dragons, little and large, whose mother perished in a terrible fire. . . ’ – her face so grey it looked almost blue in the flickering light of the screen. She held – what? Wrapped in pink tissue paper.

  Now, Jack thought, he could go and take a look under Marta’s bed.

  If Marta had known about that she’d have killed him. How would she have killed him? Ah, well, she would probably have followed the method she’d told him about. It was one of his favourite stories: after forcing him to dig a trench in the ground she would make him kneel in front of it and then very quickly, but carefully (at least he had assumed it would have to be carefully, after all you couldn’t be running up and down the line shouting oops! didn’t do you properly,
back in a moment), she would shoot him in the back of the head. One shot and he’d tumble into the ditch to join dozens of other Jacks. You could believe in it. Like you could believe in the story when Marta told it to him: ‘Towards the end, when we began to get all these Hungarians, the place was too full. Maybe a few thousand each day had to be specially treated. All the facilities were full to overflowing so we went manual. To take care of the load. I remember a man called Breitkopf was one of those who did it. They made them dig first, a trench, in the early morning. Then they knelt along the side. Edge? Anyway, whatever. The border of the trench is what they knelt along. And then Breitkopf treated them and they fell into the trench one by one. Then the fire followed. However, and this is important, there was a shortage of fuel at this time. So what did they do? That’s right – they improvised! They gathered the fat, yes? The fat that comes from our own bodies, they collected it. From earlier treatments. In pails. And with these pails the fires in the trenches were fed.’

  ‘Snap!’Jack liked to shout at this point in the story. ‘Crackle, pop!’

  Jack drew Marta’s treasures from the dark beneath Marta’s big wooden bed, where she used to lie all day staring up at the pink angels playing their silent music until Jack wanted to scream and hit them so they would make a sound. He tore off the pink wrapping paper.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Jack Goes to Market

  Nicely filling a brown bag from Mr Hung’s Pleasure Garden, still with a hint of ‘crab claws à la Chinoise’, was a bundle of goodies scooped from beneath Marta’s bed. Jack placed the bag carefully on the desk before Mr Kaufmann. Mr Kaufmann, having greeted him warmly in the Kissimee Flea Market, was standing elegantly before his table laden with antique ‘sharps’: hair clippers, nail cutters, scalpels, tweezers, cut-throat razors, pincers, moustache trimmers, ear-hair twiddlers, secateurs, nostril-hair shapers, flick knives, surgical probes, dental needles. ‘Step this way, young man’, Mr Kaufmann said, ‘into my special office, my den. We will be less public, less pointed. The cutting edge of things without, the anus mundi within.’ And Jack said, ‘Gee, sir, anus – what?’ and Mr Kaufmann smiled his gentle smile and said, ‘Later, my boy, later. First let’s see what you’ve brought me.’

  Jack had made a sweep of the Flea Markets before finding Mr Kaufmann. They were dotted around from Kissimee to the far north of Orange County. Giant plastic oranges, as big as aircraft hangars, full of T-shirts and promises that they did not sell ‘abused merchandise’, offering instead Tex-Mex snacks, Disney souvenirs, Florida crafts, suitcases, clothes, cosmetics, toys and underwear and a thousand bad imitations of Swiss watches. Coral reef ripped untimely from the sad sea-bed and tortured into necklaces. Approximate imitations of ‘big-name’ perfumes.

  Mr Kaufmann, thin and smiling, sported a cow’s lick of strong grey hair falling across his papery white forehead, shaped like a sickle, and little round steel-rimmed glasses that caught the light and threw it back in pinks and lavenders as if there was a party going on about an inch above his nose which Mr Kaufmann knew nothing about. He wore a grey suit. He looked like a businessman ought to look.

  But his friends! Why, they looked just like butterflies, or tropical birds in vivid plumage perched around the sides of Mr Kaufmann’s jet black executive desk. Mr Kaufmann went around the circle. Jack took in baggy pink and shimmering gold shot through with black thread. The Japanese-looking friend wore a pair of huge purple pants. Mr Kaufmann ticked off his friends, licking his finger each time as he pointed, as if he were turning the pages of a book, or, no – rather, as if he were counting off money from a big fat wad of greenbacks. Lick, flick . . . ‘This is Agliotti, Giuseppi. And the gentleman here? He is Suares. That’s Tony Suares to his friends. Right? And meet next Gary Soonono,’ lick, flick. ‘My partners and friends. Experts each in their fields. Madonnas of the Black Forest – Agliotti, who else? All of them of world renown, the only kind I’d have as my associates. Suares, Tony to you, handles sexual aids through the ages, belts, whips, inflatable rats for those of more Proustian tastes. You name it, Tony will date it, provenance it – float a figure for the catalogue. Soonono? Well, he’s rock and pop ephemera through those same ages. Those ages get bigger, faster, as we move into modern times. Thus we can say that the leader of the Beach Boys is the Leonardo da Vinci of pop. And Tony Suares has his first surfboard, and Bill Haley’s kiss curl, right down to the toilet seat said to be the very one upon which the late great King Presley expired in his bathroom. Though, in the case of this item, provenance is difficult to nail down. Am I right in saying that, Soonie?’

  ‘Provenance a real bastard,’ agreed Soonono.

  Kaufmann patted the empty chair beside him. ‘Sit, sit, boy, and show me what you’ve brought.’

  Jack sat as he was told and handed over his paper bag.

  ‘Mr Hung’s Pleasure Garden?’ said Mr Kaufmann raising wispy eyebrows like fragile feathers above his glasses. ‘Crab claws à la Chinoise?’

  Jack was so impressed he could only nod and smile, showing his strong white teeth. ‘Live on ’em.’

  ‘We all have to live on something – don’t we Giuseppi?’ asked Mr Kaufmann. ‘It’s only reasonable.’

  Mr Kaufmann opened the bag and drew out three packages. Neat, wrapped in pink tissue paper, tied with waxy yellow twine. He placed them gently on his knees. With doctor’s hands he lifted the first parcel on to the desk, undid the twine and began unwrapping it carefully.

  What emerged looked like a pair of giant tweezers.

  ‘Ice-tongs,’ guessed Soonono.

  ‘Fire-tongs?’ Agliotti tried.

  ‘Closer. Or at least warmer,’ murmured Mr Kaufmann as he laid the tongs carefully in the centre of his big black desk. ‘Callipers,’ whispered Mr Kaufmann. ‘Oh, Jack, what have you brought me?’

  Then he took the next pink parcel and, so softly you could hear them all breathing, he unwrapped it. ‘Well, gentlemen?’

  ‘Easy this time,’ said Agliotti.

  ‘Too easy,’ said Suares. ‘Seen enough of those. Place is lousy with them. Whole damn country is lousy with them.’

  ‘Shooting sticks,’ Agliotti said.

  ‘Pretty old and dirty but sharp and pointed. Needles. Definitely not to be passed around,’ said Soonono.

  ‘Syringes, two,’ said Kaufmann. ‘Circa nineteen forty-two or ’forty-three. Not used since then, I’ll bet. All that time hidden in the darkness waiting for this day.’

  ‘Under her bed,’ Jack confirmed.

  Mr Kaufmann held the syringes to the light. He looked up at their glass bodies high above his head and smiled a really happy smile. ‘If you look carefully, you’ll see a deposit adhering to the side of the glass. We’ll leave it to the laboratory tests to prove it. But I’ll lay a hundred to one we’ll find phenol traces. It’s rather yellow, you see? It would have once been a kind of pinky yellow. Directly into the heart, it was injected. They tried a lot of stuff first. Benzine, hydrogen peroxide, prussic acid. Even tried air. Yessir! Sometimes into the vein. But that took longer so they found a quicker method. A stubby syringe. Like this. And a good long needle. This wasn’t for intravenous stuff. This they pushed – just here,’ and Mr Kaufmann tapped himself slowly on the chest. ‘It went into the fifth rib space. Straight into the heart in fact. The numbers treated varied. “Sprayed” they called it. Abgespritzt in the jargon of the time. The going rate was about fifty treated in anything up to two hours. On a good day. If we can show that there is phenol in these syringes then the value quintuples. Oh, happy days!’ And he wrapped up the syringes in their pink paper and placed them gently beside the callipers. ‘It brings up the short hairs on the back of my neck.’ Mr Kaufmann stroked the back of his neck and Jack did the same. It was true. He could feel his hairs rising. ‘Very rare, these syringes. Very fragile and hardly any at all remain – except in very special collections. To have two, to have two survive, with traces! I say again, happy days!’

  And now he was unwrapping the last of the th
ree parcels carefully, gently, the fingers like wings, Jack thought, even though it was a very thin package. Because he hated silence and wanted to pass the time and was beginning so to like Mr Kaufmann, Jack made a little conversation. Mr Kaufmann had friends. So Jack told them about his friend Josh. The sound of his own voice broke the silence. Silence was like the grey cold hole when the screen went dead. Silence was like waking up in the deep of the night with nothing in your head and hurting from the emptiness.

  ‘My friend Josh, he died,’ Jack began. ‘Ordered this real live gallows from Fat Mansy’s catalogue. Silken rope, hangman’s knot, mobile scaffold – the works. Black leather tunic and cutaway gloves. He spent hours trying it out in front of the mirror. Trying it out – right? Nothing serious. So what happens? One afternoon he slips, stumbles, falls – I don’t know, anyhow, he drop! His girl, Miranda, she finds him. Swinging. What can she do? She gets over to Fat Mansy’s place, Guns ’n’ Gold, on Orange Avenue and says: What you gonna do about it, you fat dwork? And Mansy says: What d’you want – a refund? Did he read the instructions? Those traps can be dangerous, if you don’t read the instructions. I’m pregnant, says Miranda. You are! says Fat Mansy. Well, you should’ve taken precautions!’

  ‘What I’d like to know’, Tony Suares chipped in, ‘is do Americans like killing people? An inbuilt trait? OK we know they like reading about it. Love watching it. Videos – movies. In their heads. But is it natural? Part of the job definition? Like, the French love garlic. And the British crazy about the weather.’

  ‘Difficult one that, Tony,’ said Soonono. ‘In theory I guess you’d have to say they do. In theory yes, I’d say they like doing it. In art, they’re streets ahead. Write a book about a man who kills nuns and slices off their breasts and you win prizes. So OK, why not? It’s a free country. Tell the city fathers you want to take photographs of kids, while sodomising the little angels, and they’ll give you a grant. Write a musical about a yuppy who kills tramps in New York and you’ll pack ’em in.’