by Sean Stewart
A honey-ginger genie steamed up over the table as Mother took the lid off the carrots. "That's like saying he's not a good enough shot to blow his own head off," she said tartly.
"Thanks for the vote of confidence, Mom."
"Point and set to Mother," said Sarah, who kept score of such things.
After soup and vegetables came a tray of roasted peppers stuffed with spiced beef and rice. In the middle of the table, proud as the head of John the Baptist on its silver platter, a mountain of wienerschnitzel loomed: veal on one side and pork chops on the other, breaded and fried in lard, golden-brown and glistening.
"The American Medical Association estimates that each schnitzel takes five minutes off your life," Sarah remarked, helping herself to two of the veal.
"Not if you don't inhale," Jet countered. "And don't believe everything you read about the dangers of secondhand schnitzel either."
"More self-serving lies from the lackeys of the schnitzel industry," Sarah retorted, shaking her head. She looked appealingly to Father at the head of the table. "Tell him, Doctor!"
A piece of veal impaled on his fork, Dr. Ratkay paused. "Tragic," he said solemnly. "The arteries harden, the belt line disappears. The human waste of it!"
They groaned as he patted his waist, where a small pot belly distended his shirt-front.
"I could quit any time I wanted," Dante said, mouth half full. "Look—I'm under a lot of stress at the lab. A couple of schnitzels calm me down. Is that so wrong?"
Jet cut his schnitzel from the bone, cut the fat from the schnitzel, dissected out a precise, bite-sized morsel and placed it in his mouth. "Oh, hey," he said. "Menthol."
"Pfeh! When I was young, every day we eat for breakfast a slab of bacon fat between two slices of lard," Aunt Sophie said, in a strong Hungarian accent. She pointed proudly to her own arms, still sturdy after seventy years. "You think I get from bran flakes and skim milk so strong?"
Aunt Sophie hadn't lived in Hungary since 1929, though she visited when she could. She spoke perfect English, and swore perfect American.
She lifted a slab of schnitzel, golden and gleaming, and snorted, scoffing at her little brother and his medical degree. "To hell with you," she said.
* * *
Aunt Sophie's Hell was a very definite place. Growing up, Dante was sure that she remembered each thing she had consigned there, why she sent it and where it lay.
Aunt Sophie was odd, even for a grown-up. Two packs of Virginia Slims a day had turned her eyes the color of cigarette smoke; as a boy, Dante always felt their fire in her, smoldering. She cooked strange things, like bread fried in lard, and ate them at strange times, like five in the morning or three in the afternoon. Dante once found her at the kitchen table at two A.M., still dressed, frowning at a pattern her magic silver dollars had made while she sipped a mug of fennel-seed tea and ate tiny pickled onions, one after another. She had lived with them forever, and loved Dante dearly, but she never came to his birthday parties, not even once.
She was also the first grown-up he could remember hearing swear. He was seven at the time; her hair was still long and straight and black, her fingers thin and yellow at the tips.
The City had not crept up to the edges of their community then; the kids still went to a country school that served all grades. It was early spring, and Dante had trudged home from the bus stop half a mile through the slush, carrying a strange truth inside himself. A Grade 11 named Jason Babych had died. Something to do with a girl, Jet said. Got up before dawn and shot himself behind the family barn. His dad had found him there.
How Jet knew these things Dante never understood, or even questioned. Jet was awake in a way other kids were not. He understood the grown-ups' codes and ciphers; he read the secrets behind their looks and hesitations as Dr. Ratkay read Parkinson's in the tremor of an old man's hand, or heard the rot in people's lungs when they coughed.
What Jet found out he told Dante, forcing him to share the unclean knowledge. One of Dante's clearest childhood memories was the feel of the secrets Jet thrust on him: sinister things, heavy with obscure adult meanings.
The Grade 11 dead, slumped against his father's barn. Something to do with a girl.
Knowing about it made Dante feel dirty. He wanted to talk to someone, someone who wasn't Jet.
Mother would be angry that he knew. She worked at the school. She probably knew Jason Babych, Dante realized.
They would have called Father. He might already have cut into Jason's dead body with one of his scalpels, only it wouldn't hurt, because Jason was dead.
So Dante found Aunt Sophie and moped, and let her make him a piece of toast, and told her, and waited for her to do a magic trick or tell a funny story that would make him feel better.
She didn't. "Bloody fool," she said angrily. "Hah! ...I bet Jet told you that, didn't he?"
Dante didn't answer.
"Of course he did. Little spy." Angrily she filled the kettle for tea and banged into the stove. She was still strong then, very strong. "I'll tell you what, that boy was a fool, a coward and a fool. To kill yourself—that's the one most contemptible thing you can do. Remember that! It's stupid and it's disrespectful. He's a coward that does that. Can't stomach the hard going, that's all it is.... A coward and a traitor, that's what he was, the bastard," she finished, so fiercely Dante started to cry.
She wasn't seeing him, though; Aunt Sophie was staring at something far in the distance, or the past. "To hell with him," she said at last. "To hell with him."
THINGS THAT ARE HOLY ARE REVEALED ONLY TO MEN WHO ARE HOLY. &8212;HIPPOCRATES
CHAPTER
THREE
The spider that had crawled from Dante's neck was gone. Swimming back to consciousness, he found himself sitting on an overturned bait pail. Jet was squatting next to him, propping him up, with one hand on his shoulder. Something was hanging just over Dante's head. He realized it was his own dead foot, sticking out beyond the end of the rowboat.
This right here is a pretty good approximation of Hell, Dante reflected. He glanced over at Jet: bastard Jet who had found the damn body beneath the bureau mirror. "Little spy" was right.
Sarah brought him a mug of water from the boathouse sink. It tasted cool and metallic. "Are you going to be able to do this? Because I can try—"
Dante shook his head. He frowned at his slacks, brushing off imaginary lint to steady his nerves. "Mine to do."
"You sure?"
Slowly Dante stood. He picked up the butcher knife and gave Sarah his best wry smile. "Cross my heart and hope to die."
With death, the blood had pooled on the underside of his body, giving a heavy, bruised look to the backs of his knees, thighs, back and neck.
Dante cut, and cut again.
The dead look nothing like the sleeping, he thought. Many times he had been moved by the vulnerability of a sleeping lover, the fragile innocence of a woman's mouth half-open like a child's. There was nothing innocent about death. The body that split heavily around his knife wasn't him anymore. It had become a thing: nothing more than what his godless father saw, a blind and purposeless machine, now broken and useless. There could be no more complete degradation.
Jet read on from Miller's Practical Pathology. " 'The next step in the process is the dissection of the skin and muscles of the chest from sternum, cartilages, and ribs, and, at the same time, of the skin of the neck from the subjacent tissue. This should be done by grasping the skin, et cetera, with the left hand—' "
"The skin, et cetera," Dante murmured. "Dear God."
Jet's thick black eyebrows rose in reproof. Still doing his unnervingly good imitation of Dr. Ratkay's Demonstration Voice, he resumed reading, " '—grasping the skin, et cetera, with the left hand and steadily pulling away from the sternum or ribs. The areolar tissues are then touched here and there with the edge of the knife as they are put upon the stretch.' " Jet glanced up. "Just like filleting a fish," he said.
" 'Commencing at the second costal cartilage c
lose to its attachment to the rib, and cutting obliquely outwards, so as to avoid injuring the underlying lung, one divides the cartilages on either side.' "
Dante's hands were sweating inside their rubber gloves. Carefully he sawed through his own cartilage.
" 'Great care should be taken not to splinter the ribs in any way, so as to avoid puncture wounds of the hands in subsequent manipulations. An excellent way to avoid such wounds is to fold the skin which has been dissected from sternum and ribs in over the severed ends of the ribs,' " Jet read.
Dante felt like crying. Why had he gone fishing with the accursed lure? (Could that only have been this morning? It seemed like a lifetime ago—which it was, he thought, with a quick flash of bitter humor.) Was he meant to find the strange square ring? What did it signify? Clearly Aunt Sophie recognized it, or thought she did.
Why, why had he ever let Jet near the mirror?
* * *
Dante was twenty-one when the mirror overmastered him. He was home from college for Christmas, and hating it. In the City he was still a stranger to his impersonal apartment, living on the surface of things. He liked it that way.
But at home... The old house crawled with his childhood secrets, and he had lost the trick of ignoring them.
The mirror was the worst of all. The antique bureau it ornamented was a long mahogany monster that drank Aker's Lemon Furniture Oil by the quart. It had a facing of white Italian marble with black streaks through it, like fudge-ripple ice cream. A three-foot-high oval mirror rose from its center. The glass around the mirror's edges had been frosted, like ice ringing a pond in winter.
This was the mirror that had stood in judgment over Dante the day he poisoned Duane the bully with unclean secrets. He had watched spiders crawl from his mouth in its remorseless depths. Over the years the dread of it had grown in him. One night he heard its icy surface creak; felt it shift under the weight of his eyes. He snatched up an old bedspread and flung it over the mirror before he fell through the cracking glass into whatever black river waited below.
Since that time Dante had not dared to touch the bureau, letting it go dry and parched for lack of oil. He hated looking at it, and seldom came home anymore, because it meant spending a night in the same room as the cursed thing. And every time he did come back, he could not help noticing a shape growing beneath the bedspread.
Something solid was growing under the blanket. Something was waiting for him in the mirror's depths.
* * *
It finally caught him after dinner that night. He had snuck back to his room; Jet and Sarah found him sitting on the edge of his bed, staring at the strange square ring and trying to think up some excuse for spending the night on the couch in the parlor.
"What happened with Aunt Sophie?" Sarah asked.
"She's bolted the door to her room. From the smell of it, she's trying to fumigate the place with a carton of Virginia Slims Queen-size."
"Dante wants to earn his wings and halo," Jet drawled. "Going to try his hand at angeling at last."
"To hell with you. Aunt Sophie can have her secrets; I don't want any part of them."
"What do you suppose happened to her husband?" Jet mused. "Or the baby?"
"He died a long time— Baby?" Dante's gingery eyebrows flared up in surprise. "What baby?"
"I... found a picture of them, Aunt Sophie and your mother. Both very pregnant."
"Found a picture? Where?"
"Can't remember."
"You remember everything," Dante said suspiciously.
"What happened to Aunt Sophie's baby, Dante?"
"How should I know? Miscarried, I suppose, or stillborn. That's enough reason not to talk about it." Dante shrugged, pushing away another one of Jet's unpleasant secrets. "What are you digging for? That should be horrible enough."
"Why doesn't she come to your birthday parties? Hey?" Jet grinned, and the butterfly trembled on his cheek. "What's that little ring you found, that least of rings? What did Aunt Sophie see in the depths of its golden eye, eh?" He steepled his fingers in monkish solemnity. "You cannot hide from Fate, my son."
Sarah grunted. "People don't have fates."
"No: fates have people," Jet said, suddenly serious. "It's quite, quite different."
Dante blinked, caught by Jet's stare. Unbidden, the thought popped into his mind: Jet. Jet is my fate. He has me.
"What happened to the father?" Sarah asked, not noticing the long look that hung between her brothers. "Aunt Sophie's husband, that is. She would never have a baby without being married, but she never wears a ring."
"A ring," Dante whispered, reaching into his pocket. It was still there, a thick, square gold band. Unornamented. Like a man's wedding ring.
"We'll get you your crystal ball license yet," Jet purred.
Sarah frowned. "If you found her husband's wedding ring in the river, maybe he drowned. Maybe he and the baby were drowned on the same day—on your birthday, Dante! That would explain why she never comes to your parties. She's at a cemetery or something."
"What's the first thing you remember?" Jet murmured. "The very earliest memory you have?"
"I don't know. Grandfather Clock, I guess. I could see my reflection in his front. I remember the ticking." Dante turned the ring over in his hand. The gold was a heavy, metallic yellow, the same color as his cuff links.
Jet said, "I remember everything." Sarah snorted but he ignored her, looking only at Dante, his black eyes fierce above a thin smile. "The first time I woke, you were seven days old. I know; I heard Aunt Sophie and your mother talking about it in the next room. I understood them perfectly."
Dante believed him.
"It was your crying that woke me," Jet continued, sitting on the bureau, his legs idly swinging. His hand rested on a lump under the bedspread. "I was lying in a basket on the kitchen table, beside an open window. You were lying beside me. They must have heard your whimpers; Mother sighed and came into the room. Her footsteps were slow and painful. Aunt Sophie followed her.
"Your mother picked you up and held you, singing, looking out the window to the river. She was young then, younger than Sarah is now." Jet grinned. "Prettier too."
Was it Jet who told you that? Aunt Sophie had asked. Of course it was, the little spy.... The most contemptible thing there is. He was a coward and a traitor, Aunt Sophie had said. Who? Who was the traitor she had been thinking of that day, as her eyes stared back into the past?
Dante fingered the ring. A man's wedding ring.
Jet's voice was soft. "Then Mother looked at me, and the singing died in her throat. 'Sophie,' she whispered. The next thing I saw was Aunt Sophie's face bending down. Do you understand? I was the baby, Dante. I was Aunt Sophie's child."
Sarah shook her head. "We would have known."
Jet ignored her, looking only at Dante, always at Dante. "She saw me and she screamed. She screamed and screamed and wouldn't stop screaming.... She has never stopped screaming. I hear it all day long between the ticks of Grandfather Clock, Dante. The whole house rings with it. The walls shudder."
Jet closed his eyes. "What happened to the baby, eh?" When he opened them again, Dante's heart stopped beating, so naked was Jet's rage. "What happened to me? You were Mother's child and I was Aunt Sophie's, only something happened to me when I was one week old. Something put this on me," he said, reaching up to finger the butterfly birthmark. "Something made me inhuman, Dante. Something took me out of the sunlight to be your god damn shadow.
"For years I didn't care, that's just the way it was, I grew up the outsider, who ever thought different? But that's not enough anymore. Now I want to know, Dante. I want to know what happened."
Dante said, "I can't tell you that."
Jet jumped off the bureau with a tight laugh, tense with fury. "You're an angel, damn it! You can find out."
"I can't. I don't know how."
"Well learn!" And with a savage jerk, Jet yanked the bedspread off Dante's bureau to leave the white marble top bare.
/> Dante's body lay under the mirror's cold unblinking eye. He was dead.
Dante couldn't scream. He couldn't move.
Helpless, he stared into the mirror. Helpless, he saw himself bending over the corpse. Only he was wearing his father's face, and he held a scalpel in his hand.
* * *
"The autopsy is like the third movement of a sonata," his father once said. "The Body; the Life; the Body Reconsidered."
* * *
Dante reconsidered himself, lying dead and mutilated in the boathouse. An autopsy is all about time, he thought. Alive we stand against the stream and hold our shape; dead, we drift with the current, carried from the land of the living and lost at last even to memory.
Holding the tissue apart with the thumb and index finger of his left hand, he peered down into his own dead abdomen at a white, fibrous sac, of the sort spiders fill with their eggs. It was half the size of a football, engulfing most of his liver and half a kidney.
"Dear God," Sarah whispered. She grabbed for a bait pail and retched.
Standing beside Dante, Jet reached down with one finger to touch the sac, ever so gently. "Still warm," he said.
* * *
Hands shaking, Dante stripped off his rubber gloves and looked away from the white sac growing in his body cavity. He conld feel the growth inside him now, a sticky alien mass webbed around his vital organs. Threads of it like cobweb tangling his heart.
He didn't want to die. Not yet. Please, God.
The sudden blank uselessness of his life yawned under him like a pit. Thirty-one years old and what had he done? Nothing. Never finished his degree, never fell in love.
Oh, he had felt affection for women—lots of women. But love? Love was something else again. What he felt for Jet and Sarah, Mom and Dad and Aunt Sophie, was not an emotion, but a fact: something as real as a stone.
He had never let a woman get that close to him. He had never made a family of his own. Never would.
