Hello, Handsome
Immediately after dropping Shelley off, Roman went round to unhitch the cart. Olivia emerged on the porch and watched him. She could see that someone was sitting in the car, but she was not wearing her sunglasses and the sun’s glare reflected from the window hit her eyes and she shielded them with her hand. Roman whistled an old Rodgers and Hart standard.
“Where are you going?” said Olivia, massaging her eyelids and causing a neon flare of blood vessels.
“Nowhere,” said Roman.
“Will we be returning again at five a.m.?”
“We’ll see.” He lowered the cart and resumed whistling.
She blinked through a haze of phantom color as her son pulled from the drive but through her own galled determination made out the passenger, slouched and superstitiously averting his face from her direct gaze: Peter Rumancek. Olivia lightly traced her finger along the rail and pressed down on a knot in the wood.
She turned and was startled to find Shelley standing in the foyer studying her. Looming with nervous sensitivity to climatic shifts in her mother’s mood. Olivia made an effort to slough off some of the tension the girl tended to absorb.
“And what,” she said, “have we been told about how bloody disconcerting we are when we sneak up on people?”
She made her hands into pincers and pinchedpinchedpinched at Shelley’s sides and the house shook with thunderous laughter.
* * *
On the parkway, Roman said, “So was that a nice little lunch date?”
“She pities me,” Peter said. He didn’t have to put his finger to the wind to know that extreme caution was required here.
“She’s all heart,” said Roman.
They entered a tunnel.
“Can I ask you something?” said Roman.
“Go ahead.”
“What do you do when you get horny? While you’re turned?”
Peter looked up at the lines of parallel lights extending into the white vanishing point at the tunnel’s far end. He didn’t answer.
They drove to the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Shadyside, making a detour at a health food store and then arriving at a crumbling yellow brick apartment building. Peter rang a unit on the second floor and they were buzzed in and Roman followed Peter upstairs. An elderly Italian woman passed by them and, making an educated guess of their destination, cast her eyes to the carpet and fished a crucifix from her breast, muttering “Strega.”
Peter stopped at the predicted door and knocked and they were greeted by a young woman in her late twenties. She was brown like all Rumanceks and had on a boy child’s G.I. Joe shirt stretched over an infelicitously modest chest, in a family of epic-bosomed women, and a small pair of cotton shorts. Her lean arms and legs and exposed abdomen were tight with springy muscle indicative of a stars-defying attitude toward exercise encountered in certain young women from closely knit ethnic enclaves who have witnessed too many members of their sex undergo the near universal ballooning of hips by thirty. She pulled Peter into a hug and kissed his cheek and gave his ponytail an annoyed jerk and harangued him didn’t he have a girlfriend to make him cut his hair.
Peter introduced her to Roman as his cousin Destiny Rumancek. Roman held out his hand, which instead of shaking she held firmly palm upward and inspected with knit eyebrows and grunted speculatively and released.
“Come in,” she said. “I’m finishing up with someone, but it won’t be a sec.”
They followed her into the apartment, which in contrast with the inauspicious conditions of the rest of the building was painted in welcoming primary colors with laminate flooring and appointed with attractive and ergonomic Scandinavian furniture and the sort of tranquillity fountain you see in an airplane catalog and wonder who besides massage parlors would buy such things. Destiny went into the bedroom, where Roman caught a brief glimpse of an overweight black man lying on the bed with his pants bunched around his knees, and over his genitals there was a washcloth damp with a substance that filled even the outer room with a bitter and pungent aroma. Destiny shut the door. Peter sat down and turned on the television, skimming for a sports station. Roman cocked an ear to the closed door.
“Let’s see how we’re doing over here,” said Destiny.
There was a pause and then a gasp and whimper. Roman looked at Peter, but he was disinterestedly watching a recap of the Steelers-Colts debacle.
“Now I need you to listen to my voice and keep breathing deep deep into your diaphragm,” she said.
The whimper modulated into long, trembling breaths.
“Look how good we’re doing!” she said. “Now I need you to imagine your solar plexus as a golf ball of pale, dim light. Feel the flow of the energy and love flowing in and nourishing it, and as it brightens I want you to draw energy down from your own Manipura, your city of jewels that also nourishes and loves, and would you look at that little ball—it’s so bright and happy to be here it can give you a suntan!”
The breathing increased in volume and tempo before cresting and falling into an infantesque burble.
“Yay!” said Destiny, clapping her hands.
Soon after, both emerged. The man had tears streaming down his cheeks. He did not acknowledge Peter and Roman, or did not even see them.
“Now,” said Destiny, “I want you to find time every day to be mindful of the love and nourishment flowing from your Manipura, and lay off the simple sugars. Only whole grains and starches. And if she still has the same complaint—well, there are plenty of fish in the sea.”
He thanked her, settled up, and left. Peter looked inquiringly at Destiny.
“I crushed up some Viagra in his tea,” she said. “But really he just needed to feel a pair of hands down there that don’t care if he unloaded the dishwasher.”
He nodded. It was understood among possessors of inherent magic that it is irrevocably corrupted when expended on the poor souls who try to buy it; as with love, its success on the open market was predicated on the consumer’s need to believe in its authenticity.
“And I made that up about the sugar,” she said confidentially. “I just thought his diet could stand to improve. Now, you gentlemen have something for me?”
First Peter handed her the bag from the health food store containing a box of her preferred brand of organic dark chocolate. The Rumanceks preferred trade to charity out of principle, and chocolate was Destiny’s Achilles’ heel.
“What a sweetie!” she said.
Second, Peter placed a mason jar filled with Lisa Willoughby’s entrails on a counter. Destiny crouched with her hands on her knees and eyeballed the jar.
“Do I want to know?” she said.
“No,” said Peter.
She rose.
“Look at me and tell me why this is better than running,” she said.
Peter exhaled. “By now it’s the difference between being fucked in the face and the ass,” he said.
Uncertain, she nodded, then picked up the jar and unscrewed the top. Roman and Peter covered their noses. She went to the window where a fern was sitting on the sill, dug her fingertips into the fern’s soil, and after a little rooting plucked out a pale worm as thin as but twice the length of a string bean.
“Hello, handsome,” she said. She crossed back and dropped the worm into the jar, screwing the lid back on.
“How long?” said Peter.
“Overnight for good measure,” she said, and she walked into the kitchen to wash her hands. Roman keenly watched the exit of her little shorts.
“I think my Manipura needs some nourishment,” said Roman.
Peter punched him in the chest.
* * *
Dr. Pryce stood looking out his office window. The light was dimming over the neighboring hilltops and the ghost of his own reflection made a palimpsest over it.
“He found himself back within the precinct of the perennial riddle of the American experiment colon,” he said, as was his habit in private moments of feigning dictation of the
biography he hadn’t the slightest intention of ever authorizing. “That its only native-grown philosophies of consequence were comma of course comma pragmatism and transcendentalism comma and the higher one esteemed the latter the more it indentured him to the former full stop. This dilemma embodied fully by the day’s earlier encounter comma of which he had not stopped thinking full stop. It was not that the woman posed a meaningful threat em dash it was if anything poignant how ignorant she was of the true stakes at play em dash but a pebble remained in the shoe nevertheless ellipses an all-too-human ambivalence over what she would find waiting for her once her inquiries inevitably took her to the door of Godfrey House full stop.”
He noticed the reflected flash of his computer screen and turned to his desk, regarding the message. He drummed his fingers on the desk blotter.
“Naturally it was absurd that both disruptions in a single day could be coincidence comma,” he said, “but it was only to be expected since the beginning of this phase of the project that the dike would rupture in unforeseeable ways comma and to that end rest assured there was a finger at the ready full stop.”
He pressed the intercom and told his assistant to inform Dr. Godfrey he’d be here all night.
Forty-five minutes later he admitted his second caller.
“Norman, it’s been too long,” he said. “Congratulations. As it were.”
Dr. Godfrey ignored the hand offered him. “What’s Ouroboros?” he said.
“Can I get you something to drink?” said Pryce. “Brandy? Diet Dr Pepper?”
“Johann,” said Godfrey.
Pryce regarded his nominal employer. The man had never looked worse in their two decades of acquaintance. There had always been a baldly adversarial quality in Pryce’s relationship with JR’s pricklier sibling, who had objected to his appointment from the first on moral grounds (his position being that the office should go to a candidate possessing morality), and after the Shelley incident considered him no less than a war criminal of science whose Hague someday somehow awaited. However, the antagonist who stood before him was less the lion of proud imperial hypocrisy than a version thereof that had been put through a paper shredder and Scotch-taped back together. It saddened Pryce to see him this way. This was why he hated the political exigencies of his position; left alone in his tower he didn’t have to expend these mental resources on something as capricious and fallible as empathy.
“Ouroboros,” said Pryce, “is a project we’re working on, and not a terribly significant one. Pit vipers possess heat-sensitive organs called thermoreceptors that more or less enable them to see in the dark, which we are studying with an eye as it were toward treating blindness. Christ, Norman, look at you. I’m getting you a brandy.”
“Why,” said Dr. Godfrey, “would a homeless man in my care be raving about pit vipers?”
Pryce produced a bottle of brandy from the cabinet and decanted a glass. Godfrey did not decline.
“This wouldn’t happen to be a Francis Pullman, would it?” said Pryce.
Godfrey said nothing.
“Mr. Pullman volunteered to participate in an experiment with us.”
“Volunteered.”
“Yes. We covertly recruit volunteers for certain studies. It’s not illegal, it’s simply unadvertised. You are, of course, entitled to verify this in our records, as a member of the board. This particular study involved a soporific we’re developing, with all the efficacy of a barbiturate but none of the side effects. We have yet, however, to perfect it, and in certain cases it has acted as a mild hallucinogenic. What soon became apparent in Mr. Pullman, however, was that despite his relatively clean psychological history, he suffers from an undiagnosed case of PTSD. But then, we’re not psychiatrists. At any rate, in Pullman’s case the drug was … contraindicated, so we cut him from the study. More than adequately compensated, I might add. But we may be confident that went straight into his veins.”
Godfrey nodded and looked at Pryce with blunt prosecution. “Not good enough. Why are both he and my niece referring to a paranormal entity called the Dragon?”
“If you’d like,” said Pryce, “I can show you.”
Rational Agents
Pryce and Godfrey stood before a long serpent after the Chinese fashion. Its scales were flaming red and orange and it had white eyebrows and a long mustache. On its torso was a Steelers jersey and it grasped in its talons chopsticks that in turn held the tip of its own tail. Its jaws were wide for the first bite and one eye was closed in a wink. The mural covered the double doors of the Herpetology Lab, with a quotation under it:
I cannot tell how it mounts on the winds through the clouds and flies through heaven. Today I have seen the Dragon.—Confucius
“The Sleep Lab is that way,” said Pryce, gesturing down the hall. “I also sometimes take Shelley there to monitor her REM activity.”
He turned back to the dragon and smiled as though in paternal affection at a child’s drawing. “I encourage little whimsies like this. It promotes group cohesion. And in the face of all we’re doing, reminds us we’re still human. Shall we?”
He stepped forward and the doors slid open. He gestured Godfrey inside. It was not immediately distinguished from any other laboratory in the Tower, except for a dozen dozen or so cages of transparent plastic containing what at first glance might seem to be dark, coiled tubing. But then: the eyes. Pryce approached a lab tech sitting at a monitor and thumped his shoulder.
“What’s the word?” said Pryce.
“Some interesting discrepancies between Trimeresurus trigonocephalus and Gloydius shedaoensis. Oh, wait, no. There’s the decimal.”
Godfrey was grudgingly impressed. He was aware that he was standing on a stage of plausible deniability, but to what end God only knew, and if he pursued it, it would only call into question his own objectivity with the balance of control between himself and Olivia precarious as it was. He could only stay the course he had had faith since day one would result one day in Pryce’s destruction: give him enough rope.
Godfrey looked into one of the cages and met the sensual gaze of a languid diamondback and to his surprise found himself nineteen years younger and in the basement of a rural Kentucky Pentecostal church one August morning. Nominally he had been researching the phenomenon of snake handling, but really he and Olivia had been looking for a plausible reason to get away for a night and had not even made it to the service itself but to a dark storage room in the basement where Olivia sat on a metal locker and he slid his hand up her skirt and the sweat rolled down them in sheets when there was a sudden thump as though the metal on which she was seated had been struck by a fist. They stopped, unsure what to think—Could a person be in there? Another thump followed, and then another. And it came to them both at the same moment. It was a snake. It “saw” their heat and was instinctively striking for it, their sheer physical need exciting the umbrage of primordial beasts.
“Norman?” said Dr. Pryce.
Godfrey had seen enough.
They returned to Pryce’s office, where he refreshed his visitor’s glass. Godfrey held it between his thumb and index finger and brooded.
“These would hardly be isolated examples of minds within these walls taking certain flights of fancy,” said Pryce. “It’s not dissimilar to a cathedral in its tendency to collaborate somewhat spiritedly with the imaginations of our guests. But really, Norman, you look like misery in Dockers. How are you sleeping?”
“If you have some pills you want to give me, I’ll pass.”
Pryce smiled. “You just look like you need someone to talk to.”
“We’re not friends, Johann.”
“Well heavens, who’s contesting that? But it doesn’t mean I can’t see when a person is under too much stress. If you were working for me, I’d make you take a vacation.”
“But you work for me,” said Godfrey, more resigned than reprising.
“Speaking of,” said Pryce. “You can expect to be contacted by an organization called Lod L
LC with a bid to buy you out.”
Godfrey was not surprised; it was not the first time Pryce had conspired with enigmatic third parties for his emancipation.
“And how many layers of this onion would my lawyer have to peel to find out whose interest Lod LLC actually represents?” he said.
“Too many to be worth the time of a person who would just as soon disavow the whole institute. Simplify things for everyone. You can buy yourself the highest horse in the land and self-flagellate to your heart’s content just in case anyone hasn’t gotten the memo on your feelings about having been born into the House of Godfrey.”
“I have yet to resolve to my professional satisfaction whether you’re evil or just autistic,” said Dr. Godfrey. “But for your proposal to make any sense there would have to be a sum of money in the world more valuable to me than sending you to prison, a moment I have been awaiting with profound anticipation from the day you first got your hooks into my niece.”
Pryce leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers. “Would you have rather she died?” he said.
“She did die. I would rather you had been honest with my brother about the procedure.”
“I don’t believe there was a great deal of ambiguity. He knew the ramifications.”
“He was grief-stricken. You knew he wasn’t emotionally competent to make that kind of choice and you exploited it.”
“I knew waiting wasn’t a luxury available to us. And would you care to tell our girl you see her conception as the result of emotional incompetence?”
“Well, it’s the only goddamn thing about her that’s normal!” said Godfrey.
They looked at each other and smiled with the ease of old enemies. Godfrey slugged his drink and replenished it himself, now reminiscent.
“The first time we met,” he said, “I pulled JR aside and said, ‘You can’t be serious about hiring that sociopath.’ And he told me that sociopath was going to do for medicine what Bessemer did for steel. He said you were a genius. I said, So was Mengele.” He ran his finger down the petal of a potted orchid.
Hemlock Grove Page 10
