Agnes Among the Gargoyles

by Patrick Flynn

  Sally's husband Art scoops cornmeal out of a barrel. He already knows about the filming. Wayne was always kind to him when he was the silent, awkward member of Sal's enormously clever circle. Art wears his gray hair in a shag cut. He hugs Wayne and points the film crew to the walk-in refrigerator, where Sally is rotating the meat.

  Camera, recorder and lights go on.

  The door to the meat cooler is ajar.

  "Sally?" says Wayne. "Yoo-hoo, Sally!"

  Sally steps out of the meat box. She shields her eyes from the glare of the lights, but only for a second, because Agnes is so shocked by the figure before her that her arms drop and the lights point to the floor.

  "Agnes!" Sarah barks.

  "Sorry."

  Agnes had envisioned a run-of-the-mill transsexual, a grotesque with a beehive hairdo and a voice that sounded like a 45 RPM record played at 33. Sally isn't like that at all. She wears a black dress to her shins and woolen stockings and, because it's chilly in the meat box, a green shawl draped over her shoulders. Her hair is in a tight bun. Her face is deeply creased.

  She cradles Wayne's face in her hands. "Wayne. Wayne. Bambino."

  "Hi, Sally."

  Sally makes a fist and bites it. "I knew you were coming. I had a dream."

  "Sally, I have AIDS."

  "I know," says Sally. She takes Wayne's hand. "The lesion, Wayne. The lesion."

  Wayne looks carefully at the small purple blotch on the back of his hand.

  "Actually, it's a burn," he says.

  Agnes's heart breaks for him.

  "Sure it is, Wayne," says Sally. "Whatever you say."

  "It really is. A fondue fork slipped out of my hand."

  Sally crosses herself. She covers her head with the shawl. She drops to her knees and fumbles for her rosary beads.

  Ivan pulls Agnes aside.

  "Things are looking up," he tells her. "Don't you think?"

  Agnes agrees. "She's warming up to you. She doesn't want to kill you by slow torture anymore."

  "Sure she does," says Ivan. "But now she needs me for something. Isn't it wondrous? She's as shallow and ruthless as ever, and she's being civil to me. I can't contain my excitement. I have to steal a piece of her clothing or something."

  "If you want her to stay civil, that's the sort of thing you should keep in check," says Agnes. "You need a cooler approach, my boy. Try a little aloofness. It can work miracles. What you need is more self-respect."

  "I hate self-respect. All the world's troubles come from people with loads of self-respect."

  Sarah bounds over to Ivan. "How's your arm doing?"

  "That's sweet of you to ask," he says. "It's a little stiff, but I think it'll be okay."

  "Can you help us load the truck?"

  "Uh, I was just about to offer."

  A limo pulls up and out jumps Bob Syker. Wayne is discussing his lesion with Agnes when Syker bursts forth upon them. "It's gone," he says. "All of it. It's like you took a paper towel and sopped it up."

  Wayne raises his eyebrows questioningly.

  "My stomach acid! It's gone," says Syker.

  "Marvelous! Did you perform sarvangasana?"

  "Perform it? Yes I performed it and I was brilliant. Watch!"

  He hands his Giorgio Buto topcoat to his driver and performs the yogic shoulder-stand on the sidewalk. His voice is a choked little squeak. "I could do this for hours."

  "I'm so happy for you," says Wayne.

  Syker gets back on his feet. "Don't duck the credit. You did it."

  "If you think it's as simple as that, you have a lot to learn. Guru Arjuna says, 'Don't follow leaders, read Bhagavad Gita.'"

  "I want to do that thing where you hear the waters of eternity ringing in your ears," says Syker. Agnes thinks he's getting a little carried away. "What's that called again?"

  "Cincin nadam. I'll tell you this: it took me five years of intense study before I even achieved basic yoganidra."

  "And does yoganidra come before cincin nadam?"

  "Yes."

  "Well that just sucks."

  Syker gives Wayne two folders containing stockholder's reports and legal briefs. He wants Wayne's opinion. Is there any way he can continue working in his present capacity for Ronald Wegeman and still attain spiritual fulfillment?

  Wayne looks at the folders. "But I don't understand any of this."

  Now it's Syker's turn for a crack at Eastern thought. "Good and evil—do they need to be understood? They just are. You may not understand, but you'll know. You'll know and you'll tell me."

  As they are loading the equipment into the truck, Sarah plucks a rolled-up issue of Swamp Thing out of Ivan's back pocket.

  "Someone planted that on me," he says.

  "I think it's time you gave up the things of childhood," she says sternly. "Get out and do something for someone else. Do some charity work."

  "I'm a pathetic soul," says Ivan. "I'm still a virgin. I have lots of problems. I consider myself exempt from doing good."

  Sarah hands him a business card.

  "What's this?"

  "It's a soup kitchen," she says. "It's on the Bowery. Have you ever heard of the Feeney sisters?"

  "You're deranged. You can't expect me to go there and spoon out chicken stew."

  "You're not an accountant," she says merrily. "You're hardly qualified to do the books."

  "I don't see you volunteering," he says gloomily.

  "This film is my good work. I'm trying to show the world that AIDS patients are human beings. I'm trying to clear up the myths. The disease isn't their fault. God isn't visiting a plague on them."

  Agnes thinks that perhaps there is a single mountain man in Tennessee who's been living in a cave and eating bats for the past few years who may actually still believe that stuff. She hopes Sarah airlifts him a print of the film.

  "She's so mediocre," Ivan whispers to Agnes. "Such a product of her time. Charity! It's all the rage, isn't it? Why couldn't I have known her in the Sixties, when free love was the fashion?"

  Ivan wants Sarah to come out after the filming, but she begs off, claiming a date for breakfast with her parents. He has to settle for a distant second-best: Agnes goes with him to the loft where he is staying.

  In no time Agnes is smoking opium from a waterpipe with Ivan's friend Neal, the owner of the loft. Neal clerks at Tower Records during the day, and at night does the sound for a bunch of different bands. The loft is cluttered with recording equipment, guitars and keyboards, computers. The loft itself is unimproved. There is a time clock near the elevator gate. The floor could use a good sanding. There is not much furniture, and what there is sits arranged in a circle in one corner of the loft so that they might as well be sitting in a studio apartment.

  "It's all bullshit," says Ivan. He puffs out his cheeks and takes a deep hit of opium. The bubbling waterpipe reminds Agnes of a set of Christmas lights once owned by the Travertines. "The things we do for love. The fucking Feeney sisters. The fucking Staff of Life kitchen."

  "That's a tough place," says Neal, making a conspiratorial face at Agnes. "They're dykes. They yell at you and shit."

  Ivan asks Agnes what he should do.

  "Follow your heart."

  "Thanks, Julie Andrews."

  "Don't put on attitudes for someone else. Be truthful. Be yourself."

  "Obviously that hasn't worked," says Ivan. "I think it's clear I have to be someone else."

  "Why don't you be me?" says Neal giddily.

  "You're too weird. Look at you! Feasting on your own toenail clippings, your bones brittle from lack of sunlight—that big yellow orb in the sky won't hurt you, you know."

  "At least I've done the deed," says Neal triumphantly.

  "I have no answer to that."

  "You have no balls, my friend."

  Ivan frowns. "Please, Neal. The grownups are talking."

  "I don't even understand why you're so attracted to her," Agnes comments. "You've got nothing but bad things to say about her
."

  Agnes's words seem to reverberate around the loft. The drugs are taking effect.

  "I don't even think she's all that bright," he says. "I'm sure I have 200 SAT points on her. But I can't stop thinking about her."

  "I like people less once I see their bad qualities," says Agnes airily. "And if they don't like me—forget about it. I'm incapable of unrequited love."

  "There's that thing again," says Ivan. "Self-respect."

  Agnes is suddenly stoned. Neal unlaces his hightops and sits with his toes curled under, like a monkey.

  "You've got to have lines that people can't cross," says Agnes. "I have them with Tommy."

  "Like what?" says Ivan.

  "The details aren't important."

  "I think I know what she's saying," says Neal.

  "The details are everything," says Ivan.

  "All right," says Agnes. "I won't have sex with Tommy for six months. I want to make sure he doesn't have AIDS."

  "Boy that's depressing," says Ivan. "Is there anything to eat around here?"

  "What's so depressing about it?" says Agnes.

  "I thought Sarah was the weirdest woman around, but you're just as bad. God, probably everybody's just as bad when you get to know them."

  "That's a stoned insight," says Neal.

  "You just enjoy torturing people," Ivan tells Agnes. "Does that poor cop know what he's getting into?"

  The quiet is broken by an ear-splitting bell, the sort that goes off when someone catches a limb in a drill press. Agnes screams. Ivan and Neal fall on each other, laughing.

  "It's only the doorbell," says Ivan with much superiority.

  Neal brings in a young kid, the drummer for a band called Chalk & Cheese. He drops off some master tapes and disks. Chalk & Cheese's record label won't put out the live album the band has recorded, and so they have hired Neal to bootleg them.

  The drummer leaves, and Neal demonstrates his record pressing machine. He mounts the master disks, then heats latex in the tank until it liquefies. An acrid, fluorocarbonish, toxic smell fills the loft. Agnes's eyes water. The machine hums and vibrates, and Agnes, being stoned, fixates on the rumbling in the floor. She feels like she's on one of those foot massagers at Coney Island. Neal squeezes a lever, releasing some latex, and with a great mechanical grinding yawp! the two halves of the mother stamper come together. There is a hissing sound, and the molds separate, and Neal lifts out the latest Chalk & Cheese waxing. The record is pressed off-center.

  "Like the first pancake, it's never right," says Ivan.

  "Isn't bootlegging romantic?" Neal asks Agnes.

  "Not like it used to be," she says.

  "In your time, there was music to be liberated," says Neal wistfully. He seems suddenly tired. "Now there's probably too much music. Ah, it's all bullshit anyway."

  Ivan brings over the waterpipe. He pretends to read a warning printed on the side of the bowl. "Being stoned may impair judgment. Do not operate heavy machinery while smoking opium. We may be the only assholes who've ever actually done that."

  The three of them smoke more opium and drink heavily.

  At three o'clock in the morning, Ivan moans, "I'm going to the Feeneys."

  "It's all bullshit anyway," Neal replies.

  "I'm so horny I could fuck Criz. Did you notice, Agnes, that when I kissed her good-bye I slipped her the tongue?"

  "I'm getting sick," says Agnes.

  Ivan crashes. Neal cuddles up next to Agnes. They watch I Love Lucy together. Neal thinks it will impress Agnes that he has the script committed to memory. Lucy reads the book Making Your First Million in Antiques and buys an urn she thinks is worth a fortune. Agnes can't focus on the plot. The episode passes in a blur. Urns shatter; Lucy cries; Ricky curses his wife. "Me cago en la leche de tu puta madre! Red-headed whore!" Neal has gone to sleep, his hand twitching spasmodically on Agnes's thigh.

  Agnes lets herself out of the loft. Rush hour has begun. Foot traffic moves at an incredible pace. Agnes gets a running start and merges. Unkempt and blearyeyed, she feels proudly conspicuous. She stops to call in sick to work. She is sure that people are staring at her. She imagines what they must be saying.

  "Look at that woman."

  "Who is she?"

  "A rock star? A Go-Go?"

  "She's one of those club people. What lives they lead!"

  "She's someone, I know it, but I just can't place her."

  "She is somebody. She's somebody who just watched the 'Meager Urnings' episode of I Love Lucy with two social-outcast pud-pullers."

  "I think you're right."

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  MINOTAUR CLAIMS TWO MORE VICTIMS

  Tally of Death Stands At Six

  The owner of a fashionable Soho shop, who was recently described in a magazine article as "one of the ten most stylish women in New York," and her roommate, a nightclub chanteuse, were found brutally murdered in their Upper East Side townhouse early Saturday morning. A note found at the scene attributed the slayings to the "Minotaur of the Labyrinth." Police have verified that the note matches those previously written by the Minotaur.

  The Minotaur, a serial killer who preys on women in pairs, has claimed two other victims, two in Brooklyn and two in Washington Heights.

  The bodies of Morganna Ripkin, 40, and Beatrice Slade, 42, of 20 East 75th Street, were found on the floor of Ms. Ripkin's bedroom. As in the other slayings, the killer employed two different methods of execution. Ms. Ripkin was asphyxiated with a decorative pillow. Ms. Slade was hanged from a light fixture. Police say that both corpses were "dismembered" but would not elaborate.

  It is not known at this time whether either woman had been sexually molested.

  The bodies were discovered at approximately 3 AM by James Hull, a friend of the women. Mr. Hull had a key to the apartment, and was in the habit of spending nights there. He is not currently under suspicion.

  According to Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Michael Prawl, the women had been dead less than an hour at the time of the discovery.

  Police theorize that the Minotaur may have gained access to the apartment through a window leading onto a fire escape.

  "They both hated window gates," a neighbor commented. "They said they didn't want to live in a prison."

  Morganna Ripkin was the owner of Redolent Memories, an exclusive shop specializing in restored antique clothing. Her customers included such luminaries as Madelaine Wegeman. Ms. Ripkin was recently profiled in an article published in New York magazine, "Fifty Celebrities You've Never Heard Of."

  Beatrice Slade was in the midst of an open-ended engagement at Arnoldo's, a supper club on East 63rd Street. Her show, Songs Sondheim Wishes He Wrote, received generally favorable notices.

  When questioned about the progress of the investigation, chief Inspector Patrick Razumovsky was optimistic. "I'm confident that good, solid police work will be the undoing of this maniac."

  Chief of Detectives Larry Codd grew prickly at the suggestion that his department wasn't moving quickly enough. "These serial killers are tough to catch. Some of them get thirty or forty victims under their belts."

  A reporter piped up, "So you've got time, right, Chief?"

  "You know what I mean," said the Chief.

  Chapter Fifty

  SIX DOWN—TWENTY-FOUR TO GO?????

  CODD: "THIRTY, FORTY VICTIMS" A POSSIBILITY

  VIOLENCE OF THE MINOTAUR GROWING IN INTENSITY!!!!

  Special to the Graphic

  With the slayings of Beatrice Slade and Morganna Ripkin, the violence displayed by the Minotaur has taken a "quantum jump" in the words of a detective close to the investigation. "He's getting angrier," said our source. "The Chesser killing was more violent than Bloch/Foucault. Slade/Ripkin has taken the violence to a new level of depravity."

  In order to avoid panic, the public is being shielded from the horrifying details of the latest slaughterfest. The details are not for the squeamish.

  Morganna Ripkin was killed first. She was smot
hered with a pillow that says I LOVE MY WIFE BUT OH YOU KID. Beatrice Slade was then beaten and hung from the ceiling. Ripkin had been asleep; police theorize that Slade arrived home during the Ripkin killing, as she had a late set at Arnoldo's. Once the women were dead, the Minotaur hacked off Ripkin's head and limbs. He placed her head on the pillow with which he had smothered her. He put her arms and legs, along with a plumber's helper, in the toilet. Slade's arms and legs were cut off and stacked with some logs next to the fireplace.