Gerald's Party

by Robert Coover

  ‘When I go to sleep, it gets dark.’

  ‘I only meant that truth, when it is no longer pertinent, is not in the same sense truth any longer, do you follow, m’um? I may solve the crime, you see, only to discover that its very definition has moved on to another plane.’ The Inspector seemed not to want to be interrupted, so I set the ice pick on the emptied shelves near him, where he could find it later. My mother-in-law frowned at it, glanced sharply up at me. I shrugged. ‘It’s as if that prince of yours were to hack his way through his thicket of briars and brambles, only to arouse a creature suffering from a fatal disease, as it were, or one who’s lost her wits.’

  ‘Or perhaps to find a host of competing Beauties,’ she suggested, turning back to the Inspector, her face dark with consternation, ‘each seemingly fairer than the rest, and then what’s he to do? Awaken only one and condemn the rest to death in life? No, yet if he should kiss them all, their multitudinous awakenings would reduce his own life to chaos and madness …’

  ‘Yes! Strange! I – I was just thinking the same … !’

  ‘I know,’ she sighed and stroked his head.

  ‘It all goes round and round,’ the Inspector said, his voice quavering slightly. ‘Sometimes I … I don’t know where I am!’

  ‘Yes, yes … it’s all right …’

  I turned to leave, but I heard a lot of people outside the door – Wilma, Patrick, Vachel, Kitty, Cyril perhaps (‘Fiona—?’ someone asked), Teresa, others – and I didn’t feel up to facing them. Anyway, Mark was settling down at last, his eyelids fluttering, it seemed best not to let anything or anyone disturb that.

  ‘May I … may I tell you a story, m’um? It’s been bothering me and I—’

  ‘Certainly.’ My mother-in-law had stacked some dirty plates and glasses on the chest of drawers near the door – I found half a warm old-fashioned and something else with ice and mixed them.

  ‘Well, many years ago, you see, when I was just getting started in the force, I was called in to assist on a strange case that had utterly baffled the shrewdest and most experienced minds in our division. A famous historian – his field was actually prehistory, I believe: would that have made him a prehistorian? no, it doesn’t sound right – at any rate, this historian was found in his library one morning, bound hand and foot, and strangled to death with a garrote believed to have been of ancient Iberian origin. At first it had seemed a case of simple robbery – several gold and silver artifacts were reported missing, the windows had been jimmied, there were footprints in the garden – but in fact it had seemed too simple, too self-referential, if you take my meaning. A careful examination of the impression made in the window frame by the jimmy revealed it to have been an exotic Iron Age relic, and that plus the murder weapon itself pointed to someone familiar with the victim’s scholarly field. This suspicion was soon confirmed by a laboratory analysis of certain fibers the dead man was clutching in one closed fist and a lone fingerprint on the garrote itself, which turned out in both cases to belong to the historian’s young assistant, a man known for his adventurism and unbridled ambition. But before the arrest could be made, the suspect died suddenly of a rare subtropical disease. Poetic justice, one might say. Some of the missing artifacts were found in the young man’s quarters and – even more damning – the exotic jimmy. The case seemed closed – until a meticulous autopsy revealed, about three inches inside the young man’s rectum, the remains of a suppository containing traces of a deadly bacterial toxin. Intimacy with his assailant was assumed, needless to say, leading the Inspector on the case to suspect the historian’s daughter, who, according to the family butler, had once been ravished by the young man and had subsequently become, though engaged to another man, his slave and paramour – I quote the butler, of course, m’um, who, as a native of the Andes, spoke with a certain quaint frankness. It is true, other suppositories of a more innocent nature were found in the man’s medicine cabinet, such that theoretically the murder weapon could have been, as it were, self-administered, but there were other reasons that the daughter fell under the strong shadow of suspicion, not only for his murder, but for her father’s as well. With the young assistant out of the way, she was now the sole heiress to her father’s works, published and unpublished, together with all the research materials gathered by both of them. Her public rivalry with the young man was well known, as well as her violent amatory relationship, which no doubt exacerbated what hostile feelings she might have harbored, and it was also no secret that she bore no natural affection for her father, a man so hermetically enclosed in his work, he had paid her, throughout her life, scant attention. I hardly need point out to you, m’um, the dismal consequences that so often attend the negligence of one’s paternal duties. Morever, it was she who had found her father’s body, in all crimes a suspicious circumstance, and it was now remembered that she had been wearing white gloves at the time, the sort worn by museum personnel when moving valuable displays, or by technicians handling film. It was altogether possible that the butler had surprised her at the conclusion of her murderous act such that she had had to, quote, discover the body sooner than she had intended, if you follow my drift. When, finally, one of her personal hairs was found embedded in the, admittedly, minuscule remains of the suppository inside the young man’s lower anatomy, the evidence against her, as you can imagine, was irresistible. Of course, it was possible the young man might somehow have swallowed the hair, but the means of doing so, in those days anyway and in such august circles, seemed quite beyond the imagination – as perhaps it is beyond your imagination now, m’um, in spite of the depraved times in which we live. At any rate, the Inspector gathered all the suspects together in the father’s library, scene of the prior and, as it were, primal murder, and – with the appropriate dramaturgical preliminaries – announced his suspicions. The young woman looked shocked, pained – but it was real pain as it happened, for in fact she was dying, poisoned it would seem by someone in that very room, her glass of cascarilla, as we soon discovered, having been laced with deadly aconite. It was at this point that I was brought into the case, a young lieutenant with a specialization at that time in forensic anthropology. I needn’t go into the details. The butler, who had been near the scene of the crime on all three occasions and who, by virtue of his service, had left traces of himself everywhere, including, as it turned out, his telltale footprints in the garden, seemed clearly to have been the ingenious perpetrator of this baffling triple murder, motivated evidently by a desire to revenge the ruthless pillaging of his nation’s treasures by these foreign intellectuals and perhaps to create thereby the legend of a curse upon these artifacts in order to encourage their eventual return to his people – but no sooner did we seem to have the goods on him than he too was suddenly done away with, in this instance by particularly brutal means: he was savaged, m’um, by the family’s pet lynx, believed to have been crazed by a fagot of rare tropical herbs tossed into its pen. And so it went, from one suspect to another – the historian’s semi-invalid wife, the young creole maid, a former student of the historian suspected of ties with an unfriendly foreign government, an elder colleague at the historical society – each in his turn found, a suspected murderer, murdered.’ The Inspector paused in his story. Mark, snuggled up around Peedie, was asleep at last and the traffic outside the door had subsided. It was a good moment to slip away, but I really didn’t know where to go – like Mark, I was feeling lulled by all this genteel violence and hesitated to make any move that might break the spell. ‘It was my first challenge, m’um, and I was failing. I’d … I’d even begun to wonder if our efforts were, in some bizarre way … well … I mean, it was almost as if we were selecting the victims …’ His voice broke slightly.

  ‘It was like a trial,’ she said. ‘You were being tested.’

  ‘That’s true … those were dark days, m’um …’

  ‘But you won through in the end …’

  ‘Well, I did. But not as I might have foreseen. As a young criminalisti
cian, I was committed to the classical empirical tradition, to pure scientific analysis and the deductive enterprise. But, in the end, the solution came to me, I must tell you … in a dream …’ He heaved a tremulous sigh that shook his chest. ‘A … a young woman …’

  ‘I see …’

  ‘She was so … so …’ He clutched his face in his hands, his shoulders quaking.

  ‘There, there,’ my mother-in-law said, patting his pate.

  There was a pause. His trembling subsided. When he took up his story again, he had regained his composure, but there was a quaver yet in his voice, the cords tensed. ‘She … she came to me across a vast expanse of what in the dream seemed more like time than space. A barren wasteland – like truth itself, I thought when I awoke.’

  ‘Yes …’

  ‘There was something before this about a city, or more than one perhaps – I’d been traveling, I think, through ancient iniquitous realms, dream representations no doubt of those deplorable consequences of man’s incorrigible nature which it had become my lot to study, to live among – but now we were alone together in this infinite desolation. She wore a pure white tunic, a girdle at her waist, her head and shoulders bare, her feet too perhaps, I don’t remember. A common stereotype, you will say, a storybook cliché – and it is true, as I watched her glide toward me across the flats with a grace that was itself archetypal, I felt reduced to a certain helpless innocence, simplified, stripped of all my pretensions, my professional habits, my learning – literally stripped perhaps, for I felt a certain unwonted vulnerability, not unlike nakedness, though of a spiritual sort, I’m sure you’ll appreciate …’

  ‘I know …’

  ‘But she was not as she seemed. Oh no! It was as though she had dressed herself up as a commonplace, the more to set off her very uniqueness, her extraordinary, her special – what can I say? – her profound selfness. Instinctively, I understood: she was the truth. The rest of my life seemed like those ruined cities I had just visited, teeming with congested activity and feverish aspirations, but inwardly empty and aimless. And utterly condemned. So you can imagine how I felt, standing transfixed there in that boundless space – or time – feeling naked and unworthy, yet flushed with a kind of bewildered awe that I should have been singled out, chosen among all men, to receive her. Nothing like this had ever happened to me, in or out of dreams. I was struck dumb with wonder. As she drew near, the very barrenness around me seemed to glow, to pulsate with an inner frenzy. And then she stopped. Not near enough to touch, but I wouldn’t have touched her had I been able, m’um, I couldn’t even move. She smiled – or rather, the serene smile she bore by nature deepened – and she spoke. What she said was: “The victim is the killer.” ’ He paused as though redigesting this news. The hand clutching the scarf at his throat trembled slightly. ‘Even now I can hear her voice …’

  ‘A riddle …’

  ‘So I thought, though later I was to learn otherwise. Now, in fear and trembling, I asked her to repeat herself, but she would not, she only smiled. I begged for another word, some understanding, had I heard her right? But she only continued to smile. Or rather, the smile seemed locked onto her face, for she no longer seemed quite real, an image rather, a kind of statue, but slowly fading – my heart leaped to my throat! I was about to lose her, lose everything! I reached out at last toward that silvery presence – but into nothing, she was turning into thin air! In fact, she was thin air – I was sitting up in my bed, groping in the dawn light, and staring at a pale frozen figure across the room: myself in the floor-length mirror on the far wall.’ So he stared now, his face drawn, his moustaches hanging heavy as anchors, seeming to drag the flesh down after them.

  My mother-in-law drew his head into her lap once more, caressed his temples. ‘It was not a riddle?’

  ‘No.’ His voice was muffled now, shaken, but, when he resumed, resigned. ‘I wrestled with it as though it were, alone of course, reluctant to mention it to my dour and earnest colleagues – they would have thought me mad, as I thought myself at times. But then another suspect died – a former lover of the historian, a teacher of Hellenic romances who fell, or was pushed, down a pothole in the Pindus Mountains where-to she’d evidently fled – and suddenly the whole sinister pattern of this bizarre case became clear to me. Without explaining myself but hinting at my suspicions, I asked that the historian’s private diaries be unlocked. My colleagues scoffed – “Audacity don’t win no medals around here, son,” the Inspector on the case said, being as he was from the old school, you see – but I warned them that if we didn’t act quickly other victims would almost certainly be caught up in this deadly chain. Reluctantly, they let me have my way – and sure enough, hidden away in the more recent entries, encoded to appear nothing more than notations on an ancient Mayan calendric stela, lay the historian’s ingenious plan to set into motion, with his own suicide, an infinite and ineluctable series of murders. Some he had merely foreseen, others he had himself committed – the poisoning of his daughter, for example: with his profound knowledge of historical – and prehistorical – theatrics, he had foreseen our gathering there in his library that night, known of his daughter’s singular weakness for cascarilla, and so on, obtaining in advance the unsuspecting butler’s fingerprints on the decanter. The lover in the pothole had been found clutching what looked like an old-fashioned treasure map drawn with vegetable inks, and these too were found in the historian’s safe. The elder colleague at the historical society had sat on a poisoned tack in the very room in which the police interviewed him, a room kept locked except for occasions, as the prehistorian was well aware, when extreme privacy was required. On the other hand, it was fairly likely the former student had shot the creole maid, a necessary link in the chain, but hardly less inevitable than the others.’

  ‘It’s quite extraordinary!’

  ‘Yes, m’um, the fatal series might have run on forever had we not, upon deciphering the encoded plot, stopped the historian’s brother-in-law from taking the late daughter’s fiancé out hunting. And in the nick of time. It was a celebrated case, the turning point of my career. With it I won advancement, fame, the respect of my colleagues.’ He sighed. ‘But …’

  ‘It’s not why you’ve told me the story.’

  ‘No …’ The Inspector withdrew one of Ginger’s kerchiefs and blew his nose in it. ‘Are you sure you want to hear all this?’

  ‘Of course …’

  ‘I … I’m not married, you see …’

  ‘The young woman in the dream …’

  ‘Yes. I thought you’d … you’d understand. I’ve needed to tell someone about it for a very long time. I’ve kept it … kept it bottled up all these years. It was a very strange period in my life …’ He lay his head back again. ‘An intermingling of life and dream that was very much like madness …’

  ‘Was that the only time—?’

  ‘No, over the next few years, she reappeared every now and then in my dreams, often to assist me in a case, sometimes to bring me consolation or courage, once to provide, if you’ll pardon my opening my heart to you in this way, m’um, a kind of pleasure – the only pleasure of, well, that sort I’ve ever known or wish to know, unless it should come from her lips, her hands … and so forth.’

  ‘It’s very rare. To fall in love in a dream, I mean …’

  ‘I know. And you can take my word for it, it’s a very dangerous sort of love. A kind of possession, really. Like all lovers everywhere, I was given to violent extremes of passion and desire, but they had no living object. Though my beloved was less even than a phantom, I loved her more than life itself, which without her was unbearable, and more phantasmal than my dreams. My appetite declined, I was easily distracted, easily enraged. Never more so than when awakened from sleep. It was, at that time, all I longed for: the chance – the only chance – to be with her again. I spent more and more of my life in bed, forcing sleep, searching for her through half-real, half-nightmarish landscapes, begging her to reappear. She did so on
ly rarely but often with a certain timeliness: without her insights I probably would have failed utterly at my neglected work and lost my position on the force. She rescued me from that. But not from my mad passion, as boundless and ultimately as barren as that vast plain where first we met. I once asked her whence she came. “From far away, in another place,” she replied, and again I was sure she meant “time.” I never dared to try to touch her after what had happened that first time, though once she …’ Again a racking sigh broke from the Inspector’s chest, and his face seemed momentarily flushed and swollen, his eyes feverish.

  ‘I understand …’

  ‘Finally, fearing for my sanity, I consulted a specialist, a psychiatrist who had often assisted us in cases requiring the interpretation of dreams. He convinced me that my original insight had been the correct one: she was indeed the truth. Only not an abstract external truth, mysteriously turning up from nowhere, but the more complex and profound truths I carried within. I had to admit that everything she had said I had probably intuited myself, in some form or another, but, through timidity or professional caution, or even fear or shame perhaps, I had hidden these thoughts away in some deep recess of my inner self: she was the figurative representation of the beauty, the serenity, that attends their release from what he in his profession called repression. Once I had been able to accept that, though I loved her still and would never love another, she at least and at last disappeared from my dreams, allowing me to return to the waking world, and I never … saw her … again.’ He was beginning to choke up. He pressed his trembling fingers to his brows, as though trying to stop his head from splitting open there, took a deep rasping breath. ‘Until … until tonight … !’