The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 1

by Daniel Kraus

  Until that moment, I knew not the trampling shame of disappointing one’s father.

  “The city, they say, has been torn asunder as if by a pride of giant lions. Harvard speaks of nothing else. Bored surgeons filled with patriotic poppycock were fighting to catch a train west to help sop up the blood and, perhaps, feel better about their misspent careers.”

  “That is dreadful,” managed Mrs. Leather. “Are there many dead?”

  “A few thousand, give or take. What does it matter when we have a few hurt feelings to dress right here at home?”

  Mrs. Leather looked down at Gladys’s head. Seeing this firecracker of a woman so easily defused left me feeling bereft.

  “I have reinstated Dixon,” continued Leather. “He is now the most handsomely compensated butler in the Northern states.”

  “Retain them all,” blurted I. “Mrs. Leather let them go on my behalf. I will live elsewhere. In the shed out back. Or off the property entirely.”

  Leather’s eyebrows rose.

  “A white knight. Here in our own home. How novel.” He gestured lazily at his wife. “No, you shall have your way, Mother. What difference is it to me? Fewer prying eyes and thieving hands, I say. The staff, save Dixon, will be gone before lunch. Which reminds me: you’ll need to prepare lunch. You’ll also be on your own with the child from this point forward. I presume you thought all of this through before firing our entire staff.”

  Mrs. Leather continued to study Gladys.

  The doctor slapped his thigh.

  “So much business so early in the morning! But as I feel no quakes suggesting the imminent rending of this half of the continent, I bid you, Finch, to meet me in five minutes’ time, not in the laboratory but upon our back property. Reassure me, why don’t you, that you do not require a leash.”

  He exited as briskly as he’d entered. Gesualdo’s loathed madrigal came to an end, the steel needle of the Victrola snapping at the center of the disc. I brought myself to my feet, levered the needle, applied the brake, and turned so as to follow the doctor.

  Mrs. Leather stood blocking the doorway, Gladys held to her bosom.

  “I know why the staff feels as they do,” said she.

  It was not a subject I wished to address, not while I was needed for some mysterious purpose out back. But women are a nuisance to sidestep, Reader, what with their hips and chests and countless other parts you dare not nudge.

  “It is your eyes,” said she.

  “What of them?”

  She offered me a sad smile.

  “You do not blink, Mr. Finch.”

  You are no stranger, I’ll bet, to being told that a wad of salad leaf resides in your teeth. The sensation that settled upon me was similar. I’d not realized that I’d deserted the practice of blinking, and now that the fact was voiced I was quite dismayed. Blinking was so basic a hallmark of Mammalia.

  With her free hand she reached for my face. I flinched but she was quick, her thumb touching one eyelid, then the other, pulling both over my eyes. The friction against my eyeball was unpleasant. Mrs. Leather pulled the eyelids open again, then shut them, then did it several times more, until much of the stiffness worked itself out.

  “A small detail,” whispered she. “But it will help put others at ease.”

  Mrs. Leather, then, knew the truth. Had she figured it out on her own? The doctor would never have shared information above what he considered her intellectual grade. Even knowing what she did, there she stood, trying to help.

  “Every time you have a child, Mr. Finch, you lose a piece of your soul. I believe that. It’s right there in the blood and tissue. Souls do not come apart cleanly; it’s a surgery. You of all people understand surgery. You understand that even when an operation is successful, it brings the patient closer to death.” She caressed her daughter’s wispy hair. “Gladys is my miracle. I must do what is necessary to protect her, above myself, above you, above anyone. I do hope that you understand. The doctor’s interest in children is nonexistent.”

  Lies still came easy to me. “That’s not true.”

  “It isn’t, not entirely. He did enjoy each pregnancy for as long as it lasted. He enjoyed examining me. In the beginning he’d even warm his instruments before using them. It’s why he married me, you know—the tumor. He knew there would be miscarriages. And though the good doctor does not care for babies, he is rather fond of miscarriages.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” asked I.

  “Because you are but a boy. Until you are not, you are vulnerable.”

  I would never not be a boy. Never, never, never.

  Leather’s voice echoed into the great hall.

  “I see you need a leash after all, Finch. Join me now and I shall fashion you a strong one.”

  Thank you, Mary. The words waited at my lips but I knew better than to grant them passage. The gift of her first name had been given to me on careless impulse. But not even Dr. Leather could control how I used the name in my mind. From that moment on, Mrs. Leather would be “Mary,” and though never once did I speak the name aloud, it is how I think of her to this day, these many long decades after her death.

  VII.

  THE BACK LAWN WAS VAST, immaculate, and cultivated into a green parade of absurd geometric formations. The grass was silvered with morning dew and by the time I caught up with Leather my pants clung hard to my shins. We passed the pitted moonscape of the kennel, a barbed-wire coop too small for the ten dogs packed within. (As a former cage-dweller, I sympathized.) The hounds were not for sport—they were flabby, overgrown, and irritable—nor were they proper pets—they scratched at unkempt fur, rampant fleas, who knew what else.

  They whined as I passed.

  Leather paid the animals no mind and together we skirted a thick frontier of trees and, to my surprise, emerged into a garden of spectacular arrangement. A flagstone path guided us beneath a lattice arbor tossed with creeper vines as tumultuous as a girl’s hair after a romp in the sack. This sylvan tunnel exited into flower beds of kaleidoscopic color. Even I, creature of dulled senses, was jarred by the heady perfume of rich jasmine, chocolate cosmos, stimulating gardenias, sweet lily-of-the-valley, and feminine roses.

  There was another odor, sweet but unidentifiable. I could not place it.

  Leather pointed. “This way.”

  He tromped across the terrace and hooked a right by a lily pad–laden fountain. Then he bent to unlock a short wooden door all but hidden between shrubs. Through it, he disappeared; I ducked and followed. When I surfaced, brushing hyacinth from my sleeves, Leather was shading his eyes with a hand.

  “Lovely, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, most. But I do not understand why we have come.”

  “Is it not obvious? Your tricycling adventure betrays a desire to intermix with the general populace. You have not progressed to that point, not quite, but that does not mean I cannot introduce you to others like yourself to whom I’ve become close. It is my hope that you will become close to them as well.”

  He drew a magnific breath. I followed suit and good lord! The odor! The sweetness I’d detected before had become an inundation. I looked about and saw spread before us on a small patch of trellised lawn a Victorian garden party in progress. A congenial party it was indeed, excepting the fact that the partiers were, to an individual, dead.

  To our right, three bonneted corpses were perched in rustic cast-iron armchairs, empty eye sockets and lipless grins tilted toward a checker board gray with bone dust and featuring the additional playing pieces of fallen teeth. White parasols had been wired to the ladies’ gloved hands. Finger bones poked through the silk.

  To our left, a croquet game. A man in a beanie stood with mallet cued up to the ball. Hurry, take the shot, urged I, for his buttoned shirt was about to pop from putrefaction. His body was held erect by two fence posts dug into his mottled flesh. Specta
tors watched from basket chairs and marmoreal benches, legs crossed, hats jaunty, shriveled hands secured to teacups or tumblers.

  Closest to us was a septet of musicians. Soft chords hummed from their instruments but it was the breeze that cajoled the strings. Together they made for a handy timeline of decay, beginning with a violinist of greenish tinge and ending with a cellist whose black suit was but a sack to contain his crumbling bones.

  The name printed upon their sheet music?

  Carlo Gesualdo da Venosa.

  Here was the doctor’s long-promised People Garden, the sunny-weather project of a deranged landscaper, and one does not witness such outright depravity without bolting away and screaming the entire while. But Leather had me by the elbow and, beaming with pride, forced my stricken legs to stroll with him down a gravel path. We were assailed by slow, overfed flies that bumped into our faces before continuing about their feast. Leather gestured at a particular spoiling body.

  “Ah, relaxing with a decanter of port, are we, Mr. Two Weeks? Was the refreshment tent out of pâté de foie gras? How tragic, my good man! Then I insist you try the lobster salad. I swear it was imported from the shores of Eden itself!”

  Leather chuckled, then spoke sotto voce as if Mr. Two Weeks might overhear.

  “Watch, now, as I roll back his sleeve—roll, roll, roll. There, that translucid skin, see how it peels away by its own volition? Touch it; it crinkles in a delightful way. You refuse? Tut-tut. You embarrass me in front of our guests.”

  Whistling Gesualdo, Leather unbuttoned the man’s vest and shirt.

  “Note the fissure in the fatty tissue? From there is whence the foul stench cometh! Few sights are more educational than that of a self-devouring intestine. Shall we take a closer look?”

  Long have I been lousy with names. I cannot reliably report if it was Madame Four Months whose bug-eaten neck had been propped open by silverware, or if it was Professor Three Weeks whose monocle had been cracked by an outgoing tide of maggots, or if it was Lady Eight Weeks whose body was ringed by serving trays collecting every category of bodily slurry. At the edge of the garden I tore myself away from Leather and found ballast against a flowering urn.

  “Did you murder these people?” pleaded I. “Is that it?”

  Leather’s lips twitched in amusement.

  “You are quite certain you do not require a sherry? You look more peaked than usual.”

  “You think I’m not capable of doing something about this? I could run. I could try. I could tell everyone in Boston.”

  “What, indeed, is stopping you? Besides our promise to each other, of course. And what else do you possess, Mr. Finch, aside from that promise? Why, the clothes on your back are not even your own.”

  “Is this your end game? To put me here?”

  He laughed! The psychopath laughed!

  “Finch, you ox. I am no murderer. Harvard is the recipient of a stream of fresh cadavers, a number of which I spirit away from the unimaginative dicing of my colleagues. They are happier in my garden, I assure you, and twice as useful. Here I inventory the active, transformative process of death in ways never before considered. Indicate that you understand.”

  “I indicate nothing!”

  “At least consider Mr. and Mrs. Five Weeks here, enjoying their soda waters. Charming couple. Lost in an equipage accident. In five weeks of death they have given our world more than if they’d lived ten tedious lives. Unlace their clothing and you shall find the expected degeneration. Her aorta, though—pristine! His prostate—healthy as a boy’s! So: questions. Where does death choose to feed and why? Where are the loci of the body’s strongholds? The body produces curatives in life; does it produce other curatives in death?”

  “And I help you in this, do I?”

  “Help? Finch, you are the polestar! With my People Garden, I isolate effect. With you, I isolate cause.”

  “You must show me this for a purpose.”

  His smile showed a touch of affection.

  “Our work has yielded preliminary results.”

  Distraught though I was, I experienced a rush of woozy excitation.

  “It has?”

  Leather caught a butterfly in his palm and studied its throes.

  “You are dead, Mr. Finch. Officially, medically dead beyond any stretch of doubt. Yet here you are, walking and talking. What I have done—what we have done, together—is comb, at an atomic level, for the spark that, though hidden, feeds your animation. Look at the results. Your skeletals and cardiovasculars: nothing. Your lymphatics and endocrinals: nothing. But in your sensories I have found tracks, the same as if left by a colony of ants, of a self-generating energy originating in your prefrontal cortex.”

  “My brain,” said I.

  That is all I said, but what I saw was the Barker and his velveted box of pins, so many that he’d pushed through my eyeballs within shaving distance of my brain. He’d been no academic and yet he’d sensed the seat of my vitality, the same as Leather.

  “What, then, do we know of your brain? Radiological imaging confirms behavioral analysis: your capacities remain absolutely consistent with those of a seventeen-year-old male. You have the capability to learn, that much is obvious, but one need only study your superior gyrus and precentral sulcus to observe the lack of frontal-lobe neuron growth typical to anyone alive for thirty years. Your cortex should have thinned; you should be drifting in the calmer tides of adulthood, enjoying the increased capacity for reason. Your brain and hypothalamus, however, continue their excitable, impulsive, youthful twitch. I’d go so far as to say that you are trapped in your seventeenth year, caught like the engine of that infernal motorcar of mine.”

  I felt like an untethered boat knocked about harbor stones. At seventeen years of life, I’d been a Black Hand bandit, an exuberant maimer, a dabbler in minor mutilation, and deserving of my friendless death. Leather’s findings sent me into ecliptics of distress. Was I forever doomed to relive that fate? I swore I could hear the pitiless clang of another monkey cage slamming shut.

  Call me, if you wish, “Mr. Seventeen Years.”

  “Remedy the long face, Finch, for you are not completely lacking inertia. That stiffness you feel? The Romans called it rigor mortis and it is, in its own way, a maturation. You are rotting away the same as our friends here. There are differences, of course. I’ve graphed them and they are extraordinary. Your decomposition is moving at zero-point-eight-three percent the rate of a typical cadaver. Why, you could last over a century, maybe twice that, given variables of climate, wear and tear, et cetera.”

  “No,” whispered I. “I’ll never last that long. I can’t.”

  Leather squeezed the butterfly and dropped it; the breeze stole the lifeless thing away. His voice became the soft shush of the grass.

  “Just know that it is my mission to keep you out of the People Garden. Do you understand at last? I said I would remake you and I will. So I beg of you: no more tricycling, no more trifling. You must do as I say the instant that I say it, and trust that my lead is true. This household cannot sustain another disobedient.”

  The source of my revulsion shifted from this ghastly display to my precarious future. I lifted my nose and tried to smell the lush flower beds that served the purpose, I now realized, of shrouding far gamier scents. What was the doctor if not unbalanced? Yet I, when placed upon Nature’s scale, was more unbalanced than he. Perhaps it was only our combined, if oppositional, weights that would tip the final judgment away from monster and back to human.

  VIII.

  MEAT ETIQUETTE” WAS THE CUTE nomenclature Leather coined for the phase of experiments that were to consume the next few years of my death. The nickname was apt if satirical. Flesh, you see, has secrets. To be granted access to those secrets, one must approach the flesh with the appropriate manners. Which is to say, no manners whatsoever.

  It was a messy affai
r. The sterile room to which I’d grown accustomed transformed, day by night, into a volatile, disorganized birthing room where together we conceived, delivered, raised, and euthanized the unspeakable offspring of Leather’s mind. How did the slaughter commence? Reader, there was no mistaking it. The discharge of the household servants freed the doctor from the last bindings of civilized decency and he swiftly succumbed to his wildest abstractions.

  Both my hopes for inner tranquility—to understand who I was, why I was here—as well as more narcissistic instincts—to attain global glory for helping to eradicate death—depended upon the continued brilliance of my adoptive father. So it was with quiet but mounting dread that I watched his obsession with my brain begin to debilitate his own. I knew something was amiss the very first morning of meat etiquette, but could not put a finger on it until I entered the lab. But of course: the dogs. For the first time since I’d arrived, there had been no crack-of-dawn braying.

  That is because the dogs were inside the lab, at least in a manner of speaking. Lined ear to fuzzy ear, their severed heads sat upright within pans of their own congealed fluids. Dual electric pumps sat elevated on either end of the table, powering the flow of blood from a glass container suspended above a burner. Tubes ran from this container into the first dog head; a tube ran from that head to the next; and so on, linking all ten heads in a single chain.

  Between each industrious chug-chug of the pumps came pitiful whimpers, as the remains of each dog tremored, nose jerking at its own fresh-meat odor, ears twitching as if ducking through thorned underbrush, and tongue lolling upon the table within a plash of sizzling froth.

  Leather spoke without turning from his work.

  “Death, life. Black, white. In this lab, Finch, we shall invent the color gray.”

  Two hours later, the last dog head went still. Leather took it well. So many notes to be taken! So much knowledge to process! I grabbed hold of the window frame for support and saw Dixon down below, his tall old body wrestling with a shovel as he turned bloodsoaked kennel dirt into a mass grave. Leather, meanwhile, had moved on; the heads had been stacked inside a metal tub for later disposal and he maintained a stream of excited chatter regarding what he’d learned and how he’d apply it.