Zod Wallop

by William Browning Spencer

  When she pushed open the door, the old woman was on the phone shouting, “Harry? Hello. Harry?”

  The woman, whose name was Helen, turned and saw Gabriel and said, “He had to hang up.” Gabriel walked to the couch and sat down. She fished in her purse, found the inhaler, and brought it to her mouth.

  With a sigh, Helen Kurtis hung up the phone and walked over to her visitor.

  Gabriel replaced the inhaler in her purse and leaned her head back so that she stared for a moment at the ceiling. She sighed.

  “Poor dear,” Helen said.

  Gabriel looked at her hostess and smiled wanly, thinking, God, one of these good aunt types. Gabriel hated their take-charge sympathy, as though the world were a pillow that you could fluff into shape. The world was a concrete pillow, and you had better not fluff it if you had just done your nails.

  “Feeling a little better?” Helen said. “Why don’t I make us some tea?” Without waiting for an answer, she went to the sink and began running water. “I did tell Harry that you were here. I’m sure they will all be along shortly.”

  “I hope,” Gabriel said, “you cautioned him against telling Allan.”

  “I’m afraid I didn’t have an opportunity. But I think Harry might come to that conclusion on his own. He’s a very intuitive man, very sweet.”

  “I’m so glad to hear that,” Gabriel said. “I wish I had more intuition myself. I have no idea what my own son thinks, you know. He’s a complete mystery. Perhaps he communicates with that crazy boy who has him in thrall, but he certainly doesn’t tell his own mother a thing. Not a thing.” Shockingly, a sob escaped Gabriel’s lips and she thrust her face into her hands as tears darted from her eyes.

  Helen came around to the couch, sat down, and put an arm on Gabriel’s shoulder.

  “I’m sure it will be all right. You’ve had a hard day.”

  “I can’t tell you,” Gabriel said.

  And that was the truth of it. It had been a harrowing day. The long drive down had been the final straw; she was no night driver and found the rush of those big, belligerent trucks a life-threatening, adrenaline-spilling ordeal. And of course, the morning had been no lark. While she could not call it the worst experience of her life—in fact, to be perfectly honest she had found it somewhat exhilarating—it had been stressful and, yes, frightening.

  That morning she had killed her psychiatrist.

  Dr. Theodore Lavin was an unpleasant, even a revolting man, and so, by Gabriel Allan-Tate’s reasoning, he was the perfect man to confide in. You do not want to tell the grotesque and outlandish details of your personal life to someone you like. You do not want to repel a friend with disgusting—or, worse, boring—histories of aberrant behavior.

  What Theo Lavin thought of Gabriel’s obsessions was of no consequence to Gabriel. He was a pompous old fool, his great bulk squeezed into pathetic three-piece suits, his red face throbbing like a boil.

  He had called her that morning.

  “Gabriel,” he said. “I’ve got to come over.”

  His call had awakened her, and as was often the case in the morning, she was confused. The big room was filled with sunlight which splashed over the satin sheets and cut a wide, golden highway in the plush white carpet. Her eyes moved over the room wildly, and when she found the mirror and the image of the pretty, slim woman in the vast, canopied bed, she felt reassured.

  She was a widow, a lovely, dark-haired widow as demure as a Victorian heroine. She was, most importantly, alone. Marlin Tate was dead, self-murdered when, finally, it all spun away from him. She had almost followed.

  The mirror showed her solitude, anchored her to the present, where she was visited by a throb of yearning for the only man she had ever loved, followed by a flash of rage. He had no right to kill himself.

  Theo Lavin was telling her that her son had left the hospital again, an escape engineered by the infamous Raymond Story.

  “Your incompetence might almost be called inspired,” Gabriel told the man.

  Theo explained why it was not his fault. Psychiatrists, Gabriel thought, were much like God, accepting none of the blame and all of the praise.

  She interrupted him. “Find my son,” she said, preparing to hang up.

  He told her again that he had to come over.

  And what, she wanted to know, would be accomplished by a visit?

  He could show her the book.

  What book?

  The book her son had dropped in making good his escape.

  And what book was that?

  It had to be seen. It could not, really could not, be described.

  She had agreed to see him.

  And so he had come over, brought the horrid book with him, made her look at it.

  “That’s you,” he had said, thumping the page till it seemed to writhe. “And this, this is supposed to be a wicked likeness of me.”

  It was a good likeness, Gabriel thought. The artist had captured Harwood’s director with photographic clarity, right down to the mottled teeth, the pendulous lower lip, and the sly, calculating gleam in the eyes. The artist had, however, taken liberties with Theo’s attire. At no time in his life—to Gabriel’s knowledge, in any event—had Theo ever worn a gray cloak made from what appeared to be entwined lizards (biting each other or, perhaps, goodness, copulating). In the book he was called Lord Lepskin.

  “Well, it’s a book, and a very nasty one, the product, obviously, of a diseased mind, but I don’t think it warrants all this fuss,” Gabriel said, with undisguised irritation. It didn’t sit well with her, consoling her own psychiatrist. It felt—well, it felt very perverse.

  Then Theo Lavin had said an odd thing. “It changes,” he said.

  “What?”

  “The book,” he said, “the book changes. The pictures change. Oh, not when you are looking at them but…” His voice lowered. He was obviously unhappy with this thought. “It’s hard to stop looking at. I think it’s…it’s changing me.”

  Gabriel laughed, one sharp, brittle bark that made the man look up sharply.

  “My son has run off, God knows where, and you are worried about a children’s book that contains an unflattering portrait of you. I think you have lost track of your priorities, Theodore. Perhaps, subconsciously, you desire a different career. No telling what your subconscious is up to. I’ve never thought of it before, but a psychiatrist’s subconscious must be quite a swamp, a sort of public restroom. Well, I don’t care to think about that either. As long as you are here, I think a session is in order.”

  Gabriel walked swiftly across the thick carpet, threw herself with acrobatic grace onto a low white sofa that curved like drifted snow against a wide window. The window offered a vision of springtime industry, the long driveway filled with gardeners toiling over colored banks of flowers.

  Gabriel was dressed casually, in old jeans and a gray sweatshirt, but she had turned the air on high, feeling a need to deny the season, and she had donned the voluminous white mink coat that Marlin Tate had given her on the first anniversary of their marriage.

  Now she snuggled in the coat and regarded the crystal chandelier that dominated the room like some cold, transcendent spaceship.

  “I was an unhappy child,” Gabriel said. “My emotional needs were not met. I never had a real dog, you know. Only puppies my father borrowed from an uncle who owned a kennel. I’d cry and cry when they came for the puppies. ‘Getting too big,’ my father would say. ‘Getting too big.’ Do you think, Theodore, that I might have developed a fear of getting too big, of just being shuttled off one day?”

  “I don’t think it’s a good day for a session,” Dr. Lavin said.

  “I’m upset,” Gabriel said. “I need to talk. You don’t even know what day it is, do you?”

  She turned her head quickly, like a schoolteacher hoping to catch an inattentive child in some perfidious act, and Theo Lavin blinked. “What day?”

  “Today is the day Marlin killed himself. Four years ago today,” Gabriel said
.

  “Ahhh,” Lavin said.

  Gabriel turned her back to Lavin, pulled her knees to her chest, and retreated further into the warmth of her fur coat. She spoke to the window and its shimmering vista of renewal.

  “I feel guilty, Theodore.”

  “You think you could have stopped him?”

  Gabriel sat up and stared out the window. “No. Nobody could stop him. He thought the drug would make him a god.”

  “Delusions of grandiosity. These are symptoms of drug addiction,” Theo said.

  Gabriel slid around on the sofa so that she faced Dr. Lavin. “Oh, I believed him. It was just a matter of time. But he lost his nerve, you see. He killed himself, destroyed all the research. It was a failure of nerve.”

  “He was a brilliant man destroyed by drugs,” Lavin said. “It is a sad story, but not an uncommon one, and you are not to blame.”

  “I should have been more supportive, should have been there to keep his courage up.”

  Gabriel stared at her psychiatrist as he shook his head, smiling that rueful, seen-it-all smile, and said, “Gabriel, Gabriel. You are saying that you should have encouraged him when, of course, that is precisely what—”

  Gabriel interrupted. “And, of course,” she said, “a court of law might find your involvement in the whole affair a little—well—unethical.”

  “I have done nothing unethical,” Lavin said.

  “You are such a hypocrite,” Gabriel said. “I don’t know how much money Marlin gave you, but I know the sum was a tidy one. You have too great a sense of your own dignity to go cheaply.”

  Lavin shook his head. “Really, Gabriel. Corwin-Smart is a perfectly reputable pharmaceutical house and my dealings with them have always been…”

  Gabriel was no longer listening. She saw, as though it were just yesterday, her husband, the distinguished Dr. Marlin Tate, crouched naked on the bathroom floor. She peered in at her husband, and he looked up at her. His face always looked vulnerable and naked without his glasses. He clutched the toilet bowl with his hands, elbows crooked, as though he might lift the bowl, and he grinned as he spoke. “You want to be very careful of your companions,” he said, his voice pontifical yet boyish, his child-prodigy history in every syllable. “You don’t share Ecknazine with just anyone because it tends to confuse ego boundaries. It has no…no respect for the envelope of self and so—”

  Her husband coughed, his shoulders rising, scapula flaring. “I…” He coughed again. And then he began to vomit.

  Gabriel pulled back from the bathroom door as her husband opened his mouth and showered silver coins into the toilet bowl. Some of the coins pinged against the rim and spilled out onto the tiled floor.

  They were silver dimes, a jackpot flood of silver dimes, and as Gabriel bent to pick one up, her husband’s laughter filled her ears.

  “I think,” Dr. Lavin was saying, “I had better be going.”

  “Two days before my husband died,” Gabriel said, “he vomited dimes, silver dimes. Quite a lot of them actually. Eighteen dollars and sixty cents worth. Or at least that’s what I recovered. That’s a lot of dimes.” Gabriel paused, her hands folded primly in her lap. “Quite a lot of dimes.”

  “You understand, of course,” Lavin said, “that your husband was almost certainly administering the drug, this Ecknazine, to you during those last months. Since it was taken orally, there are any number of ways he could have given it to you without your knowledge. That explains the hallucinations you experienced.”

  “When your husband vomits dimes,” Gabriel continued, “you ask him about it. If your marriage is not utterly dead, you try to keep the avenues of communication open. So I asked of course. You know what he told me?”

  “No,” Lavin said. “You have never described this incident to me before.”

  “Well, he was very pleased, very excited. He said that he had wanted a candy bar that afternoon, and he’d gone down to the vending machine but it wouldn’t take his dollar. The machine required exact change; there was a little blinking message to that effect. And my husband had no change. Not a dime. He yearned, briefly but intensely, for a pocket full of dimes.”

  “Delusional systems are often elaborate and possess an internal logic,” Lavin said.

  Gabriel stretched to her full length on the sofa and again regarded the chandelier. “My husband is dead. My son is psychotic. And my psychiatrist is as indifferent as an old whore.”

  “I am not indifferent, Gabriel. I am trying to help you. I would not be here if I were not.”

  “You are here,” Gabriel said, “because a children’s book has frightened you, Theo. That’s why you are here.”

  Theodore Lavin glanced nervously at the book that lay on the end table next to him.

  “I thought you might be able to tell me something about it. Your son dropped it when he fled the grounds. I thought you might have seen it before, might know something of its history.”

  “No.”

  “It’s not a published book,” Lavin said. “It’s a sort of mock-up. Actually, its author is famous, a writer named Harry Gainesborough who was a patient at Harwood. You must have met him. He has certainly seen you. This evil countess in the book is supposed to be you, Gabriel.”

  “I don’t recall meeting anyone named Harry. I suppose I might have. Perhaps at one of those picnics.”

  “Your son never spoke of the book? It’s called Zod Wallop, but it is not at all like the book in the stores. This is much different. This is not something any child should read, I can tell you that.” Dr. Lavin’s voice had grown louder, tremulous, modulated by anger—no fear, it was fear—and he reached out a hand toward the book, prepared, no doubt, to show Gabriel some proof of its vileness. But he stopped, pulled back his hand, as though remembering the serpent was poisonous. This seemed to require some act of will, and he closed his eyes and exhaled. His jowls quivered like a curdled pudding.

  “What was this man doing at Harwood?” Gabriel asked.

  “He had lost a daughter. She drowned in the ocean. He began drinking heavily, became suicidal. Dr. Moore was his doctor.”

  “When I was eight years old,” Gabriel said, “I had a dread of swallowing my teeth. I thought I would probably swallow them in my sleep, and, consequently, I couldn’t sleep. My mother knew I wasn’t sleeping, but I refused to tell her why. Perhaps I was afraid she would have them removed.”

  The phone rang and Gabriel answered it. She handed it to Dr. Lavin.

  “It’s for you,” she said.

  Gabriel walked into the kitchen while Dr. Lavin spoke on the phone. He had adopted his official bullying voice.

  When she came back, carrying a bottle of wine, Dr. Lavin was replacing the receiver and folding a piece of paper.

  “We think we know where they are,” Lavin said.

  “You know where my son is?”

  Lavin shrugged. “We think he is with Raymond Story, and it seems Raymond Story has gone off in pursuit of this writer of children’s books, this Gainesborough fellow.”

  “Why?”

  “Gainesborough somehow figures in the boy’s delusional system. Apparently Story was almost drowned as a child, so he feels a bond to this man whose daughter drowned. Schizophrenic systems are not, by definition, rational, and since Story’s problems are not amenable to interactional therapy, I’ve never been much interested in his case. I have very little time for any individual therapy these days—I make an exception in your case, Gabriel—and speaking of time, I’ve got to go.”

  Dr. Lavin stood up, swept the book from the table, and strode toward the door.

  “I can remember my father licking my kneecap!” Gabriel screamed at her psychiatrist’s retreating back. “I once grew sexually excited while fondling a kitten. When I was in the third grade, I bit a boy on the ankle, clean through his sock, made him bleed. I didn’t even know him.”

  Dr. Lavin had his hand on the door.

  “I am terrified of ants. I think, I think it is their smallne
ss that frightens me. They shouldn’t be so small, you see, and so busy at the same time. You understand me, Theo?” Gabriel shouted, coming quickly across the lush carpet. “I need some answers here!”

  “Come to my office tomorrow morning,” Lavin muttered. “We’ll discuss it then.”

  He opened the door, intent on doing what males did best, abandoning her, and Gabriel screamed.

  “You old whore!” she yelled, and she swung the full bottle of wine, clutching it by its thick neck, and it traveled proudly at the end of her arm, a heavy, aerodynamically confident instrument suddenly recognizing its purpose, and it struck the psychiatrist’s head, the back of his skull, eliciting the sort of sound you might get by hitting a waterbed with a baseball bat. Dr. Lavin rocketed forward, colliding with the opening door that instantly slammed shut and then bounced open again as the psychiatrist tottered backward. The door swung wide as Dr. Lavin fell straight back, a stiff cartoon of a fall, something a stuntman might execute with impunity but hardly the sort of thing a man of Dr. Lavin’s fifty-some years should have attempted. A cool, lilac-laden breeze tossed Gabriel’s hair as she caught the front door and quickly shut it.

  The next half hour was a fuzzy one. When it became clear that Dr. Lavin was dead, Gabriel called her hairdresser and canceled that day’s appointment. Then she found a corkscrew and drank some of the contents of what was, she supposed, the murder weapon. Then she saw the book lying next to Lavin, and she took it into the living room and sitting on the sofa she opened it and began leafing through its pages. They were dark, murky drawings, but they did have a certain power.

  The drawing of the woman named Lady Ermine did, Gabriel had to admit, seem a vicious caricature of Gabriel Allan-Tate herself.

  “I can't catch my breath,” Lady Ermine said. “My breath has outdistanced me. Ever since that beastly child tried to strangle me.”

  Lord Draining sighed. “There’s a lesson to be learned,” he said.