by Alan Russell
“And root beer.” That, from Caitlin’s mouth.
“We don’t have root beer...”
“Any soft drink is fine,” Cheever said.
“And I’d like some water as well, please,” Helen said.
Danni nodded and wrote. She was about to leave when Helen’s face twisted and then changed. “And rum.”
“Excuse me?”
“Nothing,” Cheever said.
“Rum,” Eris said. “The drink of the devil.” She offered a full smile.
Cheever shook his head to negate the order. Danni looked from one head to another. Cheever wondered how many heads she saw. Danni clicked her pen a few times, then walked off, backed off really, without saying anything. Eris wasn’t as ready to leave. She encircled Cheever’s legs in her own, then started pressing her thighs into them.
“Miss me?” she asked, then laughed.
“You can dress her up,” he said, “but you can’t take her out.”
Her pressing became more rhythmic, more sensual. “You’re a professional mind-fuck, aren’t you?” Cheever asked.
She pretended to be a Southern belle. “Why, Detective,” she said dramatically, “such language.” She didn’t stop her thigh massage.
He picked up his menu again, held it so as to not have to look at her, but she just laughed. He thought about pulling his legs away from her, but figured he’d probably upset the table in the attempt. Eris would undoubtedly enjoy his making a scene. She was slightly slouched, but with her long legs, and the tablecloth, no one in the restaurant had any idea what was going on.
“I hope you’re having fun,” he said.
“Always.”
The drinks arrived. All of them. Eris offered a pretend pout at not having any rum.
“I’d like to tell you about today’s specials,” Danni said. While clicking her pen, she proceeded to do so. Cheever wasn’t dissuaded from his original choice, but Eris and the Greek chorus were a more appreciative audience, commenting on everything she mentioned.
Danni finished reciting the selections on a weak note, her voice, and pen, trailing away at the end. “I’ll be back for your orders in a minute,” she said, not bothering to linger. Probably afraid to.
“What are you going to have?” Cheever asked, hoping to expedite the process.
“I was thinking of asking for the head of John the Baptist.”
“Without even dancing for it?”
“And here I thought we were shimmying just fine.” She offered him another pelvic thrust.
“You like men to lose their heads over you, don’t you?”
“And they like to give them up.”
“Tell me about your male friends.”
“You mean my lovers?” Emphasis on the last word with both her mouth and legs.
He nodded.
“Long-term relationships have never exactly been my strong suit.”
“No wonderful memories?”
“Many. But none worth reliving.”
“What about the others?”
“They’re notoriously bad about selecting men.”
“What kind of men do they like?”
“Losers.”
“For example.”
“Art students. Activists on their way to being carny barkers. Idealists. Romantics. There was even a divinity graduate student, if you can believe it. He’s probably studying exorcisms now because of me. He was Eurydice’s choice. They’d probably still be sitting around drinking tea and talking deep, gloomy thoughts if I hadn’t appeared on the scene every so often.”
“Any married men?”
“There must have been. But no long-term affairs, if that’s what you mean. Hey!”
She squeezed him particularly hard with her thighs. “What?” he asked.
“We’re talking about sex and you’re still managing to make this conversation boring.”
“I’ll try to do better,” Cheever said. “Why don’t you tell me about your first time? How old were you?”
“Why?” she asked. “Is that how you get off? You like stories of young tail? I can do better than that for you, you know. I could actually deliver you a little girl in just a wink of my eye. We could be in bed—”
“Shut up,” Cheever said. He didn’t hide the mean in his voice, or the threat that was there, but she kept talking anyway.
“We could be doing the in and out, and then she could come on the scene. She wouldn’t know what’s going on, but over her cries you could take her anyway. The younger the meat, the greater the treat, right? You could make the feathers fly...”
He felt his blood pounding, felt his own face hardening and changing. He reached out with his hands and grabbed her under the table, digging his fingers and his fury into her thighs. For several seconds she pretended to enjoy the pain, smiling as he pressed into her, but then her face changed, and her legs loosened from his. Cheever eased his grip.
“There are going to be bruises on my thighs tomorrow,” a voice said. It was a voice of experience, but Cheever wasn’t certain which personality it belonged to.
“I’m sorry,” he said, removing his hands. And he was. For losing control. For being so angry. Now he felt spent and embarrassed.
As if cued by disaster, their server appeared. “Are you ready to order now?”
Going out to eat was a bad idea, Cheever thought. But he still didn’t know how bad.
“I’ll have the albacore melt,” Helen said.
Then, in a voice Cheever hadn’t heard before, “Give me a very rare New York steak.”
Nemesis? he wondered.
A little girl announced, “I’d like a peanut butter and jelly samwich.”
In a sad voice, as if Eurydice was the sacrificial lamb, she said, “I’ll have the lamb salad.”
“And for me,” Eris said, “the chicken fajitas. And make it as spicy as hell.”
Cheever wasn’t hungry any longer. “Just bring me a coffee,” he said.
The waitress repeated the orders in an uncertain voice. “The lady would like an albacore melt, a very rare New York steak, a peanut butter and jelly, a lamb salad, and the chicken fajitas. And the gentleman wants coffee. Regular or decaf?”
Cheever savored her question for a moment, craving its normality. The choice was easy. He’d had enough excitement. “Unleaded,” Cheever said.
He noticed Helen trying to catch his eye while motioning to the menu. She had her finger on a specialty pizza with feta cheese and artichoke hearts. Pandora had come out and wanted to put in her order as well.
Join the crowd, he thought. “And the artichoke heart pizza,” Cheever said.
Danni’s hand was trembling as she wrote down the last order. It was probably one of her first jobs and she had never had to deal with a woman speaking in tongues and ordering for a football team. “Shall I bring everything at the same time?” she asked.
Why not? Cheever thought. He nodded. “And bring lots of doggie bags,” he said.
At least Cerberus wouldn’t go hungry tonight.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FOUR
Round and round the mulberry bush...
Lunch with the damn detective and now everything was swirling, going round and round.
...the monkey chased the weasel...
She felt caught in the whirlpool, was being sucked down, down, down.
...round and round the mulberry bush...
Her art wasn’t enough of an anchor. That fuck Cheever had started some heavy domino clicking in her mind.
...POP goes the weasel.
She kept switching. Personality parade. Who goes around, comes around. Everything and everyone changing. This was going to be a very intense episode. Her own personal earthquake was on the way and there was nothing on which she could hold. Heart racing, afraid, so afraid of the fall. On the threshold waiting to be kicked over, waiting out the desperate moments before a migraine, or serious cramping, or a seizure.
But the rainbow was also inevitable. She tried to h
old on to that. It made everything worthwhile, that moment of intense clarity where she would see and touch all. The details didn’t matter, just the kinship she felt. God opened up to her, and she felt close to this God. For an instant she would be Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus, Buddha under the bo tree, Joan of Arc in all of her glory. But there was a price to pay for such visions.
It was coming closer. Soon she would lose herself to it and the madness that would follow. Helen began to twitch uncontrollably, her muscles moving by themselves. Her personalities were taking their place at the start line: some wanted only to run; some, to run over bodies, to trample those in the way; and some only hoped to not be left too far behind.
Vigorous exercise sometimes helped her ride the storm. Helen walked to Broadway and then headed west. She had no known destination, felt momentarily panicked at that. Having a place to go always made things easier. There was a lot of car traffic, and for a time she kept pace with a Jeep traveling in the same direction. She kept being confronted by its bumper sticker: JUST BECAUSE YOU ARE PARANOID DOESN’T MEAN THEY AREN’T OUT TO GET YOU.
All of this was Cheever’s fault. Their lunch conversation, and his words, kept following her.
“Tell me about your mother,” Cheever had asked.
“Isn’t that the kind of question some bearded shrink is supposed to ask?”
“Were you mad at her for committing suicide?”
“No.”
Faster. She could walk faster. Already she had put the old and ornate US Grant Hotel behind her. She could put everything behind her.
“You were a little girl. I would think it would be hard for someone so young to forgive. Mothers are supposed to nurture...”
“By dying she escaped her pain.”
“She passed it on to you.”
Maybe if she walked fast enough, maybe if she ran, she could outrun her thoughts. Her strides lengthened, quickened. Stores and buildings passed. But Cheever kept trying to herd her in. He had asked: “Do you have a key to the art gallery?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Since I was only a few blocks away sometimes I helped Bonnie out.”
“What kind of things did you do?”
“Closed up some nights. Worked on graphics. Things like that.”
“And dressed your statues.”
Lights flashed in front of her, the present supplanting the past. The San Diego Trolley was moving along the tracks between Kettner Boulevard and the Pacific Coast Highway. The trolley was red like a fire truck, and clanging, probably at her. She slowed, let it pass, then kept running. Her breath was ragged and her sides ached. Helen wasn’t dressed for running. Somewhere she had lost her hat. Her head.
“You looked nice in your black wig.” That fucking detective wasn’t one to give compliments. She should have known. “But with your coloring you’d probably look even better in a red wig. Do you have one of those?”
She had nodded.
“The night Bonnie Gill was murdered,” he said, “there was a woman with red hair out in the garden.”
She had reached for a piece of the pizza. You are what you eat. And he, Mr. Watchful, had backed off. His pale blue eyes didn’t miss much. He had known the pizza was Pandora’s choice. But when she went on to other food he had started in with his questions again.
“You wanted to call your exhibit What the Gorgon Saw,” he had said. “Tell me about the Gorgon.”
Aloud, Helen repeated what she had told him in the restaurant, but this time she did the telling on the street with strangers around her. “Medusa was once a beautiful maiden, but she was changed by a goddess into a gorgon. She became a frightful monster and whatever living thing she beheld turned into stone. Medusa is the one who is always portrayed as being so ugly, as having snakes for hair and fangs, but what about some of those she looked at? There is ugliness out there that should not be hidden, that should be turned to stone for everyone to see. A gorgon cannot say, ‘Today I’ll put on makeup.’ The purpose of a gorgon is to turn beings to stone.”
Those around her stared, not saying anything back, but stepping away as if she were some walking contagion. Through their silence Helen could still hear Cheever talking in her head: “Was that your purpose?”
She thought about closing her eyes. Maybe that would close her mind. Maybe Cheever would stop following her. And if she had her eyes closed she couldn’t turn anyone into stone, could she? But it was too late for not seeing and changing things around her, in her.
“Did you hear about the second murder?”
She hadn’t replied, but he had kept talking. “A man was stabbed to death just two blocks away from where Bonnie Gill died. There’s no apparent motive for his death either. Some people think a serial murderer is out there.”
Storm’s coming, move faster, faster. She ran out of road at the end of Broadway, found herself confronted by Harbor Drive and San Diego Bay. Walk south or north? Or walk on water. Behind the commercial and naval and tourist enterprises she could see stretches of the bay. Directly in front of her was the Broadway Pier where boats were docked and docking, loading and unloading their mostly human cargo.
WHALE WATCHING.
That’s what the sign said. November was the start of San Diego’s whale-watching season, the time of year when California gray whales migrated by San Diego on their way to their southern breeding grounds. The picture of a whale underneath the sign drew her to it. She could make out barnacles on the whale, little crustaceans. Hitchhikers. The whale image overwhelmed her senses, reverberating there. That’s what she felt like, a whale that had sounded, that had gone deep to try to escape the hunters. She was at a depth where human probes could not venture, where the fathoms made everything murky. But there was still this pressure to breach, to breathe. That would leave her exposed. And those with the harpoons knew that.
The Bay Ferry’s whistle made her jump. Gulls shrieked and called; their cries frightened her. Helen wasn’t comfortable around birds. She felt the urge to escape, but was unsure which way to go. She spun round and round, ended up dizzily facing north. That was the direction.
For ten, twenty steps, Helen walked as if she were drunk before regaining her equilibrium. She made her way along at an uneven pace, slowing down whenever she was distracted, which was often. The signs of the times interested her. She could take a boat to Ensenada. Get lost in Mexico. Get one of those huge straw hats and lose herself under it.
She walked past the B Street Pier, slowing down as she approached the Maritime Museum. The Star of India captured her attention, a windjammer well over a century old. It was one of the legendary big ships that had once sailed the Seven Seas. The ship’s high wooden masts stretched up to the sky and Helen had to tilt her head back to take in their expanse. To reach those heights would be a daunting climb...
She was no longer looking up, but looking out. Her epiphany arrived and carried her atop the mast. The day was clear, the waters calm. She saw with a clarity that was surreal. The world was so vivid, so alive, so full. The intricacy of how everything fit together didn’t frustrate her like the putting together of some incredibly difficult puzzle, but instead gave her a sense of awe at the complexity of the mosaic. Even she fit into it, misshapen as she was. She belonged.
The overwhelming lucidity heightened her ecstasy, each sensation building on the last. There was so much to experience, to feel, but even that didn’t matter. The storing of impressions seemed such a miserly and unnecessary act. To be truly alive, that was enough. There was this feeling of being on the edge of a wave that was pushing her forward, but she wasn’t afraid. She was on the vanguard of the ineffable.
Under the weight of bliss she collapsed and dropped into the middle of the boardwalk. Half a dozen people ran over to help her. She was moaning, but not because of injuries. There was this feeling of abandonment, of paradise held and lost, of her having gone from all to nothing. She returned with the Greek chorus out of control. People surrounded her, b
ut she didn’t notice them. They were just obstacles to her seeing.
She looked beyond the bystanders to the three berthed ships and raised her hand and pointed in their direction: “The Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria,” she announced.
The onlookers laughed uneasily. One of her personalities joined in with the laughter, while another asked, “What’s so funny?” A third alter wanted to say something to keep everyone laughing.
“Are you all right?” she was asked.
There were too many answers to that question. She didn’t respond.
A man noticed her bracelet. “She’s wearing one of those medical bracelet things.”
Nina, Pinta, Santa Maria. When Columbus had sailed, the maps of his time had warned, “Here there are dragons.” True words, she thought, true words. There were dragons everywhere.
A hand reached down to her, grasping for her bracelet. The shifting of bodies allowed her to see the names of the ships. Her mistake, she realized. Columbus hadn’t sailed on any of these. The biggest of the three ships was the Star of India. Next to it was an old ferry called the Berkeley. It took her a few moments to make out the name on the smallest vessel.
“It says to call a Dr. R. Stern,” said the man holding her bracelet. He yelled out her telephone numbers, repeated them a second time to a woman writing them down on a piece of paper.
“No,” Helen said, suddenly afraid. Not at the prospect of their calling Dr. Stern. But at the name of that third ship: Medea.
The portent caused her to uncontrollably shiver. Medea was not a sorceress to be regarded lightly. She was evil.
“Medea murdered her own children,” she shouted. “Medea couldn’t stand that Jason had chosen another woman to be his wife, so she murdered her, and then she murdered her own children because she had borne them to Jason.
“Flesh and blood didn’t matter to Medea. Jason should have known this. She had her own brother murdered to help him. When Jason and his Argonauts captured the Golden Fleece, they had to flee from Medea’s father, the king of Colchis. Just as the king’s ship was overtaking them, Medea had her younger brother killed and his body parts thrown into the sea. It was with horror that the king saw the bobbing head of his son and was confronted with his scattered limbs. He ordered the ship stopped so he could gather up the remains of his dismembered boy, and that allowed the Argonauts time to escape.”
