The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 1

by Daniel Kraus

  I rapped my knuckles against the door. I could tell by the rattle that it was unlocked.

  “I am coming in, Doctor. I hope that is tolerable.”

  Hweeeeee . . . fweeeeee . . . hweeeeee . . . fweeeeee . . .

  I entered upon straw, much more of it, tossed with mangled remnants of the delivery vessels. Naturally I had presumed the shipment to contain medical equipment, instruments toward the elongation of our etiquette; for that I was prepared.

  This, though, was much worse.

  A single operating table had been situated like a desk facing the Revelation Almanac. Behind it sat Leather in suit and tie. Or who I assumed was Leather, for the motionless figure wore a tall bullet-shaped helmet wide enough to cover both head and sternum. The helmet was constructed of iron but lined with yellow felt so that it might rest comfortably upon the shoulders. The face was smooth and featureless except for two circular windows at the position of the eyes, both of dark, reflective glass. Just below these windows, a tube snaked out to connect with an oxygen tank set upon the desk. With fearsome slowness, the helmet titled upward and fixed me with a blank stare.

  Hweeeeee . . . fweeeeee . . . hweeeeee . . . fweeeeee . . .

  It was the sound of the contraption’s inhale and exhale.

  For an overlong moment two blinkless beings regarded each other.

  “Dr. Leather,” ventured I, “are you quite all right?”

  His muffled voice came in fragments between sucks of air.

  “It is called the Isolator. Direct from New York. Genius device. Sounds penetrate only from. Six feet away or less. Narrows the vision to a. Single line of text. Just what I need—” He paused, winded from the brief monologue. The needle on the tank danced upward. “—to concentrate.”

  Upon the table were arranged not the handsaws and forceps I’d envisaged but tall stacks of musty books. These tomes were of low mint and I could but make out scattered words from moth-nibbled spines: “Magick.” “Daemonologica.” “Grimoire.” “Inquisitorum.” “Chiromancy.” One volume was splayed open, its foxed pages bearing the fresh wounds of ink-pen incisions. Leather tapped one of these notes with a finger.

  “Already the Isolator has bred. Lush fruit. I was correct to eschew. Modern methods. For methods more historical. In nature. My fault in our meat etiquette. Was not reaching back. Far enough. Back to the ancients. Men unprejudiced by things moral. Or proper. Men open to the fear. That lives in the dark. The dark of their hearts.”

  It had been a cool December at the Pageant of Health when I’d met a proud heretic who’d spoken to me of “saving humanity” and making the world “retch religion and superstition.” What, then, to make of the man’s swerve toward supernatural balderdash? I had the notion that Leather would be happy, in fact, to destroy humanity if that’s what it took to plant his flag upon science’s highest peak.

  Yet he was the father and I the son.

  I measured my words through clamped teeth.

  “Tell me how I can be of assistance.”

  The dead black lenses offered nothing, but the body beneath beckoned me with a slow hand that appeared to crest upon an invisible wave of oxygen. I took a step through the straw, a single step, and only as a gesture of goodwill.

  “I have missed your. Buoyant contributions, Mr. Finch. You will, of course, accompany me. During my interviews. Here at last we reach the. Homeward stretch of our journey. A stretch you and I shall cross. Together.”

  As little as you like the sound of these “interviews,” Dearest Reader, I liked it less. But I saw no space in which to wedge alternate terms. I nodded assent to the featureless mask and he clapped softly, his two palms barely striking each other as if the smallest of noises might defile the Isolator’s well-won solitude. I figured that he might well be smiling beneath that helmet and so I forced a smile of my own. In turn, Leather fiddled with a knob on the tank. The little red needle leapt higher.

  That needle—my twitchy little grasshopper friend.

  I would grow all too accustomed to seeing it jump.

  XIII.

  LEATHER CONDUCTED THE FIRST ROUND of interviews as would a sane man. One, he greeted his visitors decked out like an au courant gent of the 1910s: fitted three-piece suit with thigh-length double-breasted jacket; shirt starched to hell and back; fat-knotted tie; trousers creased like shark fins; hair slicked back to an otter’s specifications. Two, he met them in an urbane setting: a drawing room beautified by a crackling fire and fresh nosegays from Mary’s garden, as well as a table of tea, crustless sandwiches, jellies, and pound cake.

  Three, he did not wear a large metal mask upon his head.

  For these reasons, the early interviewees were the lucky ones. The New York phrenologist, for example, who canvassed my skull with tape measure to appraise what he insisted were the twenty-seven different organs of my brain. Or the French hypnotist, who claimed that, through suggestion alone, he could deliver me from folie de doute (my apparently piteous lack of self-confidence), thereby facilitating the memory of the events that led to my petite problème.

  It was all I could do not to kick these shysters in the nuts. Leather, of course, took boxes of breathless notes. His professionalism began to erode only with the arrival of the spiritualists. Still he wore the suit, still he used the drawing room. But his face and neck were an alarming pink from last-minute treatments of the Isolator. The seers and clairvoyants put on their best shows regardless, and we were treated to lively seances and amusing memoranda from the spirit realm. Leather tried to keep up with his notes, but it was a challenge, what with those fat droplets of sweat smearing his ink.

  You are a perceptive reader. You see where this is going?

  Away went the tie. Then the coat. Next the tea and sandwiches. At last went the drawing room itself. Soon Leather was receiving each aspirant fraud in the lab itself, devolved by then into a grotto of haphazard, broken instruments and a Revelation Almanac in disarray. No wonder the tarot card reader, a turbaned Italian matron, could not complete a reading of me before gathering her deck and scuttling away. Leather paid her little attention. His hand kept straying to stroke the Isolator, its sumptuous felt surface, sensuous eye windows, and long, ridged oxygen hose.

  Mary sent me looks of panicked appeal when we crossed paths. Merle, herself an untamed bitch, sniffed the alpha dog’s rabidness and laid low. Even Gladys sensed the bad juju and kept clear of her father, dragging away her ceramic dolls by the feet, their once-beautiful heads of hair serving as mops for floor dust.

  Better than the dust of the street, thought I. I must make the doctor see the family he is driving to bankruptcy.

  The idea of forcing a tête-à-tête gave me misgivings, but so did watching the devolution of the single man in history who’d extended to me both sensitivity and respect. A truthful, if uncomfortable, encounter might make me a better son; was it too much to hope that it might inspire the doctor to be a better father?

  Severed from Harvard, Leather had nothing but time, so I needed only follow the disconsolate strains of “Moro, losso, al mio duolo” to find him during a spell of repose. The Victrola had been moved to the laboratory and was the single piece of equipment kept spotless. That night I found the doctor draped across a hardbacked chair, the Isolator perched high upon his head like a welder’s cap. His eyes dragged and his skin was yellow and glossy.

  I stood there until he gasped.

  “Right there, you hear it?”

  Saliva ribboned his lips. It was a nauseating but common sight; the excess of oxygen acted as low-creeping fog, filling his lungs with dew.

  “I did not,” said I.

  “It was the sound of a single sense split into multiple nonsenses, and then those nonsenses fornicating in orgy to conceive a new sense. Gesualdo, he understands me. The question is, Finch, have you found your way to understanding him?”

  “My ears, I think, have
heard too much burlesque.”

  A bleary smile stretched across his flushed face.

  “That’s Harvard talk. They would be the first to damn my dear Gesualdo. Did I tell you he murdered three people?”

  “Dr. Leather, please forgive me for saying so. But it is you, I worry, who is murdering three people. Your wife. Your daughter. Yourself? That is, if you do not patch your broken path.”

  “A few small deaths in a wider war. What difference could it make? Now, Gesualdo, the story goes, returned from a fabricated hunting trip to catch his wife in flagrante delicto with a duke. He killed them both, of course, and displayed their corpses outside the castle for passers-by to enjoy. There was much to enjoy, too; the conniving wife had been stabbed twenty-eight times and her body was shortly violated by a passing monk—so it goes, Finch, so it goes. There was a son, too, whom Gesualdo suspected as being the offspring of the duke. Gesualdo swung the boy on a high swing, back and forth, back and forth, until he was rattled to death, while below a choir sang madrigals exalting the beauty of death.”

  “Back and forth, yes—this is the futile motion of the cheats and shammers you bring to this house. Have you lost your way so badly?”

  “Lost my way? Gesualdo himself was an alchemist as well as a composer, and did not shrink from human experimentation. Had he lost his way? These passions led to his lifelong insomnia, further so-called insanity, and death at the hands of his servants, whom he ordered to flagellate his body with maximal barbarism. Had he lost his way?”

  “You compare yourself to this musician again and again, and to what end?”

  “Gesualdo’s madness was his genius. The Harvardians think I am mad, and, indeed, I hope that I am. Mad as Eratosthenes, as Darwin, as Columbus!”

  My efforts were useless. Had I urinated in the doctor’s face, he’d have likely applauded my inspired lunacy and taken fevered notes upon piss-soaked pages.

  The Isolator clamped down over his face.

  “I wonder.” (Hweeeeee . . . fweeeeee . . .) “If I might use a hose. To attach the Victrola. To the Isolator.” (Hweeeeee . . . fweeeeee . . .) “Create a pristine capsule. Of musical enlightenment.” (Hweeeeee . . . fweeeeee . . .) “Do you, Finch. Suppose that I might?”

  Limits of decency exist even for walking corpses. So I shan’t tell you of the voodoo priestess the doctor shipped in from Haiti to distill from me a driblet of Death, a woman of copper skin and gray bristled hair whose feats included having foretold the recent sinking of the RMS Titanic. No, I shan’t tell you how she dappled my face with sweet-smelling paint and danced along to a tuneless drum. I shan’t tell you how she kissed my ear, how her tears moistened my flesh, and how I felt rising from her body a warm sorrow that extended backward to include countless sympathetic ancestors.

  Because what service would such information provide but to depress you? Instead I shall tell you how, partway into the woman’s ritual, the doctor took up the Isolator, asking, “You don’t mind if I . . . ?” and then suctioned so hard that the hose crimped. I shall tell you how he scoffed as this woman performed an augury that any damn fool could see was legitimate; how he giggled at the vial of Death she presented before he dashed it to the floor; how he lifted the oxygen tank and brought it down upon her back; how she scrabbled away on all fours while he chortled laments about the charlatanism of the Negro hegira; how she made it away bleeding only because I entangled the legs of the helmeted maniac.

  That I shall tell you because it is important.

  XIV.

  IN THE FALL OF 1912 the creditors took the furniture.

  Merle came alive; in fact, she was incensed. A typical young miss of the era would have shrunk from the burly menfolk bashing their wide shoulders through our narrow archways. Not this daughter of mine. While the lady of the house wept in the corner, Merle nipped the workers’ heels. One minute she foamed with newfangled curses: “You meddlesome boob!” “You swinish dingbat!” The next, she affected a faint as they hauled away a favorite piece: “Oh, Dearest Lord, not the bedframe! Anything but my Italian bedframe!”

  Merle’s frenzy might have possessed some absurdist humor (none of the furniture, after all, belonged to her) if not for the poignant path of her fall, and rise, and fall; having at last settled onto a summit of luxury, she was now being inched back toward the precipice of poverty. Exhausted, she collapsed onto a six-legged gilded French sofa; they took the sofa. Demoralized, she crumpled onto a Persian rug of curvilinear motif and raspberry color; they took the rug. From there she trembled upon the bare floor, the only thing she, or any of us, could count on.

  The Leathers, after all, had to eat. The doctor watched dispassionately from the third floor, where he held himself against a bannister and gnawed upon a stale wad of bread. Three stories down, Dixon, just as silent, swept each crumb into a white-gloved hand.

  In the winter of 1912 they took everything else: the Pierce-Racine touring car, the four-in-hand draft horses, each urn and lamp and mirror, every last piece of family silver. And, of course, the art: earth-hued neoclassical nudes, glowering portraiture, and countless marble busts, each of which glared in disappointment as it was packed into a crate.

  In the spring of 1913 they took the clothes. Wardrobes were halved, then halved again. Mary became emotional as she made the calculations of which gowns would fetch the most at resale—the prettiest ones, always the prettiest ones. Gladys handled it with less poise, sniveling as she watched her favorite items of pink and lavender being dragged away as if to the gallows. Merle, of course, was the worst. My, how she shrieked when Dixon came asking for items to sell. She gave up nothing, not a single damned glove or garter.

  In the summer of 1913 they took Gladys—or, at least, they tried, a delegation of concerned womenfolk from a local orphanage who came knocking. I watched from an upper window. The woman in charge apologized to no end as she relayed the leaves of gossip that had blown their way, stories regarding the doctor’s severance from Harvard, fantastical experiments, corpses in the garden, and, of course, the drain of assets that had been streaming from the front door for months for all to see. Might it not be best to remove the child from so toxic a situation before harm befell her?

  It was Mary’s breaking point. Though her face burned in shame, she cast away the meddlers. That night, for a change, I was not the only sleepless one; Mary’s forceful exhortations to her husband stretched on for hours, no doubt every second of it necessary, for the doctor had behaved of late as if the only plane of reality was the third floor.

  What an address Mary must have delivered! For the first time in two years, Leather materialized for breakfast. Mary, Gladys, and Merle stopped mid-chew and Dixon dropped a bowl of fruit. Leather ignored the reaction and sat, his red eyes the most vivid accessory of a colorful ensemble, the last one he owned: a white shirt with high collar, bold orange-and-brown tie, long white-on-black-striped jacket, and matching pants turned up at the cuffs.

  “A good day to all,” said he, reaching for the bread.

  Appetites all around were lost. Never having had one, I leaned over the bowls of hominy and lyonnaise potatoes (our meals had gone downscale) and scrutinized the doctor. Without his oxygen tank, he labored to breathe, yet managed to display that stiff upper lip we Americans had heard so much about, pushing morsels of food past antagonistic teeth despite how they nauseated him.

  Mary, oh intrepid one, chose to downplay the event.

  “Doctor,” asked she, “will you be having tea?”

  “Tea.” Dixon echoed the word from a stupor. “Yes, very good!”

  Leather lifted a hand to halt him.

  “I wish, instead, to have a word.” He brushed his sleeves in a fair facsimile of refinement. “This morning I shall travel to the college to see Dr. Obediah Cockshut. You may recall his name, Mother; he is the last man in that crumbling asylum who possesses even a grain of vision. His study on congenital cataracts is a la
ndmark, and few men in the world know as much about syphilis. If anyone will hear me out, it is Cockshut.”

  “And what,” ventured the wife, “will you ask of him?”

  “To come here.” The insolent tilt of his chin dared anyone to complain. “To dine with us.” He cut his eyes at me. “To see for himself the metaphorical goldmine I work day and night to excavate. I do not relish bringing another miner into my quarry. But I no longer see a choice. Cockshut, of course, will agree with my assessment and use his agency to convince the college to reinstate my funding. He must!”

  If you desire an unabridged catalog of Dr. Leather’s failings, I can supply it, free of charge, provided that your shelves are strong enough to bear the weight. There is no doubting, however, that he was a master persuader. That same eve he returned to our nervous lot victorious from what he portrayed as a superlative presentation, though he made us wait an hour to receive that news, having staggered inside as he did, gasping for the Isolator.

  After some oxygen, though, how he paraded and puffed and whipped us into militarism! Dr. and Mrs. Cockshut would arrive at our house the following night and everything, absolutely everything, stressed he, rested in the balance.

  Leather snapped his heels at Dixon, who shot up to his full height of twelve or fifteen feet. What satisfaction the old butler found in being ordered about again! Cockshut, barked Leather, would require the finest whiskey! The best cigars! Playing cards, too, and do not shy from ribald designs, for Cockshut fancied himself an accomplished lecher as well as player of lansquenet. Naturally we would need a full staff, too, so Dixon would need to hire and train, for tomorrow night only, a housekeeper, underbutler, two valets, two maids, two footmen, a cook, and a scullery maid. Such an expense would leave the Leathers without a cent to their name, but this was the ineludible gamble.

  Dixon and I had our differences, but by Gød, his “Yes, sir!” stirred me to my bones! This event might mark the household’s last stand, but we would make that stand as a family. Leather clapped and the butler shot away as if he had shed thirty years.