“Oh, Nigel,” she cooed, gently dropping to her knees beside him. He purred, a sound like a tiny fur-covered outboard motor. She scooped him up and held him to her breasts, softly squeezing. “I’m sorry I yelled at you. I’m just not in a very good mood.”
Nigel struggled a little, looked her in the eyes, and mewled again. She understood. “Hypocrite,” she said, setting him down and then standing with a tired, motherly grin. “You just want something to eat, don’cha?” He meowed, loudly this time, and circled her feet as she moved to the cupboard.
Josalyn withdrew a can of 9 Lives Western Menu from the shelf, set it down on the counter, and started rooting in a drawer for the can opener. “This is going to be tremendously exciting,” she informed him. He meowed in agreement. She laughed, feeling better already. “John Wayne used to eat this stuff by the case.”
Nigel reacted indifferently to this piece of information. It occurred to her that he didn’t know John Wayne from a hole in the wall, and that, in essence, she was just talking to herself. She shrugged, equally indifferent, and continued to dig until she found the opener, while Nigel meowed ever more loudly and began to pace at her feet.
“You’re all alike, you know it? Men are all alike. I don’t care what species they are.” Nigel, unfazed, continued to whine. “See? It’s just ‘gimme gimme gimme.’ You don’t care about my needs. You don’t care about my problems. All you want to do is to sleep with me and eat my food.”
The can came open. Josalyn wrinkled her nose, but Nigel seemed to find it quite stimulating. “Mmmmmm, boy,” she said, trying to conceal her distaste. He started to go wild on the floor; this time she did knock him aside with one foot. “Hold your horses, asshole. Don’t get so uppity. When was the last time you made me dinner?”
She smiled, slightly; it faded. This whole happy encounter had been, she knew, just a diversion. In the end, it had brought her right back to where she started: with the phone, and the man on the other end.
No, scratch that, she amended. Make that the child on the other end. She smiled again, ruefully. Just then, Nigel reasserted himself at her feet. “Oh, yeah,” she mumbled, absently picking up the cat bowl from the floor, filling it up with Western Menu, and putting it back down again. The cat let out one last meow of anticipation and set upon the food in earnest.
Josalyn watched him chow down, his back to her, as if to say you’re dismissed. It reminded her of the look on Rudy’s face after one of his selfish sexual performances. After a half-hearted premature ejaculation (his standard offering), he would slide out from between her legs and roll away from her; in that moment, she would catch a glimpse of his eyes … just a flash, before he pulled away.
Only on their last occasion in bed had she figured out what his eyes were saying.
They were saying I got mine, bitch. Get out of my face.
It made her furious, just thinking about it. Furious with Rudy, but that was the least of it. Mostly, she was furious with herself for ever having let that soft-headed, brainless prick through the door in the first place.
She turned to stare at the phone, practically daring it to ring. It hung there: silent, white, innocent as a baby’s first tooth. She shook her head, tried to clear it. When that didn’t work, she moved to the living room and stood foggily in front of the stereo.
Dan Fogelberg was gathering dust on the turntable. She’d put him on last night, after the big to-do with Rudy. It harkened back to happier days … less complicated ones, anyway … and helped her to get the tears out of her system.
She slapped him on again, cueing the needle by hand. She was not very good at it … it always made her nervous … and the involuntary shaking of her hands didn’t help.
When the phone rang, she almost ripped the tone arm from its socket.
“DAMN IT!” she screamed. The needle dropped to the middle of the first song. She went to fix it, trembled in a mad sort of paralysis, and then just let it go. The phone rang again. A cacophony of voices howled through her brain like a tornado, and she wrestled with them. The phone rang again. And again. And again.
Finally, when she could stand it no longer, she moved back to the kitchen and brought the receiver to her ear.
“Hello?” she said, painfully aware of the weakness in her voice. It misrepresented her position. It didn’t belong. It made her angrier still.
“Josalyn?” She jumped at the sound; it was not the voice she expected to hear. “I don’t believe it! Do you know that I’ve been calling all day?”
“Uh …” she droned, mentally off-balance. “Who is this?”
“It’s Stephen!”
“Oh.” Her thoughts snapped back into place with a nearly audible click. “Hi,” she said, thinking so this is how you try to get back into Josalyn’s good graces. So we’re still in kindergarten, after all. You bastard.
“Hi,” Stephen said. “Uh … listen. Is Rudy there?”
What? she thought. It took her a second to answer. “No,” she said finally, “he isn’t, and …”
“Well, have you seen him? Talked to him? Anything?” There was something desperate in his voice. Josalyn wondered briefly what Rudy had told him, what kind of story he got, and the anger flared up like a Roman candle inside her.
“Listen,” she said. “Rudy is a very bad subject for me right now. I don’t want to talk about him. I don’t want to think about him. If I never see or hear him again, I’ll still have seen and heard too much. Now, if you don’t mind …”
“But you don’t understand!” Stephen cried, his voice stripped of veneer. “Rudy has disappeared! I can’t find him anywhere!” And then, seeming to realize that he’d begun to sound melodramatic, “I think that … something might have happened to him.”
“Stephen, you don’t understand.” Her voice was cold; she felt it was a definite improvement. “I don’t care what happens to Rudy. Rudy can jump off the nearest bridge, as far as I’m concerned. He’s a pig, and I hate him, and that’s all there is to it. If you want to find him so badly, you can call almost any other number in New York and have a better chance of it. Because he’s not going to be here. Never again. Do you understand me now?”
“Josalyn …”
“What?” He seemed to be on the brink of tears. She tried not to let it bother her.
“Josalyn … did you hear about the murders last night?”
“What murders?”
“On the subway. On the downtown RR train, to be specific: about 3:30 or 4:00 in the morning. Eight people were killed. Horribly. Are you interested now?”
“Not really,” she said, but a little something in her voice betrayed her. “It’s the train he would have taken. I know it is. He was on his way to my apartment. He called me from the station …”
“What did he tell you?”
“Well …” Stephen hesitated for a moment. “Just that there was a big fight, and that …”
“That I was a cunt, right?” Josalyn could no longer contain her fury. “Surely he couldn’t have left out the undeniable fact that I’m a cheap, stupid, naive little farm-girl cunt who thinks that her shit smells like roses! His words, Stephen! Do you see why I don’t want to talk about it?”
“But …”
“If Rudy was on a train where eight people were killed, then I’m sorry, but I think he’s probably the one who did it. Why don’t you just call the police?”
“What?”
“He’s the only person I know who’s nasty and vicious enough to do anything like that. What were they: Grandmothers? Babies? That sounds just about his style.”
“Josalyn!” Stephen sounded furious now, as well. That makes two of us, Josalyn thought with a grim kind of satisfaction. “Do you know anything about this story?”
“No, and I …”
“One of the people was eaten alive by rats!” Stephen yelled, and it came through the receiver with such force that Josalyn shuddered despite herself. “Do you think that Rudy could possibly have done that?”
�
�It wouldn’t surprise me,” she said, trying to sound cooler than she felt. “To be perfectly honest with you … and no offense, Stephen … they’re the only kinds of friends he deserves.”
“I don’t believe this!” Stephen was screaming. “Rudy could be dead, and you don’t even care!”
“That’s right. I don’t.” Come to think of it, she actually felt as cold as she sounded. She felt nothing at all.
“You’re every bit as big a bitch as Rudy said you were!”
“If you’re stupid enough to believe that, Stephen, you’re stupid enough to believe anything. How about this one? Rudy is Jesus. Rudy walks on water. Rudy …”
“I don’t believe this!” Stephen yelled for the last time. There was a loud click, followed by silence. Blessed silence. Josalyn felt like spitting on the receiver, decided it was pointless, and hung up with a hand that shuddered in deliberate spite of herself.
“Jesus Christ,” she thought out loud. It was so absurd: even if it were true, the timing was unbelievably, riotously funny.
It’s like Glen, she thought suddenly. The thought sobered her, and her mind drifted back to her tenth grade year. She had been going with this guy named Glen Burne … another self-styled poet, of course … and finally just decided that she didn’t want to see him any more. He was a nice enough guy; it wasn’t a matter of bastardliness, like Rudy; there weren’t any fights, any bitter points of contention, or anything of the sort.
But he burned like Rudy. The memory made her shiver, as though she were standing over Glen’s open grave again, a chill wind blowing in her face. He was so sad, so strange, so obsessed with darkness. He took the whole weight of the world on his shoulders and let it crush him into the ground, a little deeper with every step.
She hadn’t been able to take the constant depression. That’s what it had come down to, finally. She’d had a lot of optimism in those days, a lot of faith, and she didn’t like the way he walked all over it without even trying. He was the kind of guy who couldn’t pass a flower in the field without dragging out the tortured metaphors: it would remind him of innocence lost, martyrs on crosses, butchered babies stacked through the war-torn ages. He would say it all offhandedly, as if those were the things you were supposed to be thinking every time you saw a fucking flower in a field.
It had finally become too much for Josalyn, and she had resolved to break off with Glen … gently, of course … on the very next day.
That was on April 26th, 1978. She remembered the night distinctly. That was the night that, at roughly the same time she arrived at her decision, Glen Burne quietly went up to his room and hung himself from the rafters, a seventeen-page suicide poem set neatly on his desk, immaculately printed on his mother’s flowered stationery …
Josalyn pulled herself out of her thoughts forcefully, returning to her kitchen in the present. Suddenly, the room seemed too stark, too white, as though she were having an acid flashback in a Stanley Kubrick film. She leaned against the counter dizzily, and a low, husky moan escaped her.
It’s been so long, she flashed. So long since I’ve thought about him. His face lingered on the big screen behind her eyes, larger than life and stronger than the grave. It smiled at her, full of woe, and turned to stare off into space. She shook her head to clear it, and Glen’s face disappeared …
… and suddenly it was Rudy’s face that she saw, his typical arrogant sneer plastered across it like the pancake makeup he used to make himself more ghastly white than even God, or whatever, had intended him to be. Rudy, with his cold eyes as black as the tips of his Magic Markers, mocking the world with every glance.
And in that moment, she knew that Stephen was right.
“Oh, shit!” she whined, slamming her fists down on the counter. “Why, God? Why does this always have to happen to me?” Once again, the anger overwhelmed the sorrow. “It’s not fair!” she yelled, not thinking about her two dead poets, though their faces ran together in her mind to form one perfect, grinning skull.
She was thinking about what a phenomenal guilt tripper God is, pointing his fat little finger, bringing sweat to palms that in no way deserved it. Was it her fault that Glen was too weak and self-absorbed to survive? Was it her fault that Rudy was too much of a bastard to put up with for one minute more? Was it her fault that they’d gone and purchased such nasty fates for themselves?
NO, God damn it! NO! her thoughts screamed, almost audibly. Her eyes snapped shut, squeezing out hot tears that she was barely aware of, she was so royally pissed.
Without thinking, she reached a trembling hand into the refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of Vola Bola Cella. She’d been saving it for a special occasion, and by God, this had to be it. After all, it wasn’t every day that your lousy ex-lover got eaten alive by rats, or whatever the hell happened to him. She let the door slide shut behind her absently, not even bothering with a glass, just popping the sucker open and taking a long, cold pull off of it.
The wine was sweet, strong. It went straight to her head like a helium balloon. She teetered slightly on her feet, steadied herself with effort, took another hefty swig, and waited for the second rush to tear through her system.
When it subsided, she felt much better. The shaking had quieted: the voices and pictures had backed off; the kitchen looked normal again. She smiled wanly at nothing in particular and moved back to the living room, where ol’ Dan Fogelberg might as well have been back in his record jacket, for all she’d heard of him.
“Oh, damn,” she said, shrugging. She took another hit, set the bottle down, and cued up the album again. This time, with a couple of belts in her, it was no problem. She giggled a little, mostly at how high she had suddenly become, and sauntered casually over to her desk.
Before her, the various facets of her project were arrayed in consummate order. To the left of the typewriter, the first nine pages of her thesis were facedown and neatly stacked; half of page ten was jutting out of the typewriter, awaiting completion; to the right sat an index-card file with more than a hundred entries, all clearly and sequentially catalogued. Next to that was the filing cabinet that held the lamp, the ashtray, the box of heavy white bond paper, and a host of reference books (philosophical tracts, Webster’s New Universal Dictionary, the current Writer’s Market, etc.). And on the bulletin board above the desk, an outline of the thesis and the book that should result from it … plus a check list of the myriad essays and articles that she planned to spin off from there, slanted toward everything from New Age magazine to Psychology Today.
Josalyn Horne was nothing if not methodical in her work; and though she was possessed suddenly with the devilish urge to just tear it all up and scatter it around the room like confetti, she knew that the next five hours would find her poring over it, refining it, and whipping it into shape, as methodical and orderly as ever.
“If I’m not too ripped,” she qualified aloud, then laughed and amended it: “I damn well better not be.” Still, she moved to retrieve the bottle from its place beside the stereo before sitting down at the desk, taking just a sip this time, and turning to the opening page of her manuscript.
NIHILISM, PUNK, AND THE DEATH OF THE FUTURE read the bold print at the center of the page. Catchy title, she kidded herself, and then lapsed into absolute seriousness. She stared at the title for almost a minute before taking another long pull from the bottle and lighting her first cigarette of the session.
This is the payoff, she told herself silently. My meal ticket. My baby. My rite of passage.
If I pull it off, I won’t have to worry about needing a good man … assuming, of course, that there is such a thing … to take care of me. Because I’ll be taking care of myself.
And if I ever actually do find a good man, she added, I’ll be able to do it on my own terms. Or at least be able to negotiate the terms. And, God, what a precious, rare commodity that is.
She raised the bottle in a one-way toast, glass clinking against thin Manhattan air, and took another short swig. Then she se
t it down, resolutely this time, and tried to focus on the words poised awkwardly in mid-sentence, halfway down the length of page ten.
After a while, she began to write. And kept it up, doggedly, for the specified five hours, before shutting off the old Smith-Corona and cashing in her chips for the night.
That night, she did not dream.
CHAPTER 4
In the tunnels …
The old Number 6 train rumbled away from the light of Union Square Station, dragging itself painfully into the darkness uptown. The usual number of passengers were on board, doing their midnight ride; atrocity tends to attract as many people as it scares away. Much to the disappointment of morbid thrill-seekers, nothing spectacular was going to happen to them. They would get where they were going, and that would be that.
A few of the more astute commuters would notice the abandoned station, smothered in darkness, that hung to either side of them as they rolled down the tracks between. If they were quick, or particularly observant, they’d notice the signs on the walls: EIGHTEENTH STREET, bold lettered in white against the long black rectangles. They’d notice the debris on the platforms, the general state of disrepair, the fact that nobody’s made a habit of getting on or off there for a long, long time.
They wouldn’t notice the figure that lay sprawled in the corner of the uptown platform, surrounded by rusting trash receptacles. They wouldn’t see it writhing in the grip of a nightmare, twitching like a man on a gas chamber floor. They wouldn’t see the rats that were gathered around it, caught between hunger and an almost religious awe.
They wouldn’t know that it dreamed.
Meanwhile, halfway across the Atlantic, something awakened in the cargo hold of a freighter bound for Europe. It smiled like an old man who’d just proved once again that his bowels still worked. It stretched. It sighed.
It climbed out of its coffin.
To its ears, the sound of the ocean was a beautiful thing. Such power. Such mystery. Such agelessness. It felt a kinship with those pounding waves; its life, too, was moved by the moon into patterns of endless recurrence.
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