Fear itself: a novel

by Jonathan Lewis Nasaw

“If you insist on wearing a brown beret with a plaid sport jacket, the least you can do is adjust it properly.”

  “I was going for jaunty.” Pender glanced at his drink and seemed surprised to find it half empty. “You know what doesn’t make sense?”

  “I can think of a few things. What did you have in mind?”

  “Your whole life, they tell you clean up after your mistakes. You break it, you fix it. Then you reach a certain age, you screw up, and now it’s ‘Get the hell outta here, pops. Go home, grab a nap, we’ll take it from here.’”

  “I believe that’s covered in the book of Ecclesiastes,” said Sid. “To everything there is a season. One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh. It’s the way of the world, Sparky—you might as well get used to it.”

  Pender made a well-I’ll-be-damned face. “Since when did you start reading the Bible?”

  “Since right after Esther died.”

  “Did it help?”

  “Turns out there’s a lot of good stuff in there—you ought to try it sometime.”

  “You know, I just might,” mused Pender, looking down at his glass, which had somehow emptied itself again. “I just goddamn might.”

  “Excuse me, sir?” It was the female flight attendant—all legs and smile.

  Sid took off his reading glasses and looked up from the in flight magazine; there were still five minutes remaining before takeoff and he’d already read everything in it that wasn’t about shopping. “Yes, dear?”

  “Your friend asked me to give you this.” A brown paper bag from the gift shop.

  “My friend?” As far as Sid knew, Pender had excused himself to use the terminal rest room before boarding—the airplane toilet was yet another modern invention that hadn’t been designed for men his size. “Are you sure you have the right guy?”

  The stewardess looked around the first-class compartment to see if there were any other little old men wearing blue blazers and gray toupees. Seeing none, she nodded. “He said he marked a passage for you. He also asked could you please pick up his clubs in baggage claim when we get to Dulles?”

  Sid reached into the paper bag and pulled out a leather-covered, pocket-sized Holy Bible. It was black, with gilt-edged pages and a gold silk ribbon sewn into the binding. He opened it to the page marked by the ribbon and saw that Pender had circled a passage in Ecclesiastes; the print, however, was too small for Sid to make out, even with his glasses on.

  “Would you mind reading that for me?” he asked, handing the Good Book back to the stewardess.

  “Of course.” This was first class, after all. “It’s Ecclesiastes…chapter, lemme see, looks like chapter nine, verse ten:

  “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.”

  5

  You lie in the dark long enough, you start to make your peace with loss, with loneliness, with pain and regret and the shame of having wet yourself and the fear of knowing you’re about to die. You make your peace with all that and it’s like a headache after a couple of aspirin: you know it’s in there, it just doesn’t hurt anymore.

  What Dorie missed most of all was her house. She wasn’t proud of that, and she definitely didn’t want to examine the meaning of it too closely, but that’s what it boiled down to for her. Not her friends, not her painting, and not even her on-again-off-again lover Rafael (a fine-looking Big Sur carpenter who would have made a great poster boy for Peter Pan syndrome), but rather a fifty-five-year-old frame house nestled under a live oak at least twice its age. In her mind, she went through it room by room, stood like a ghost in every doorway, looked out from every window in every season. It was hard to imagine a stranger living in it after she was gone. I should have made a will, she thought. Left it to some starving painter.

  It took a few seconds for her eyes to adjust when the lights finally came on. The room was obviously a basement; a tall man dressed all in black was padding across the cement floor. Dorie, still on her side, still hog-tied, avoided looking up at his face, instead keeping her eyes trained on his black-slippered feet as he approached. When her glance did begin traveling upward involuntarily, there was something disturbingly familiar in his easy, Clint Eastwood, backward-leaning slouching walk and the way his long-fingered hands dangled loosely at his sides.

  Who are you? was Dorie’s last thought before a glimpse of the Kabuki mask covering his face propelled her into an alternate universe where there were no thoughts, only wordless terror welling up from somewhere deep inside, in the dark region of the brain stem where the lizard-self still ruled, and the human mind never ventured.

  When it worked, when it all came together, there was a rare quality to the fear displayed by a phobic confronted with the object of his or her phobia, a purity and intensity to which your average Joe or Josie could never aspire. At such moments, the emotional closeness between Simon and his victim/partner made him feel the way other people seemed to feel when making love, even when his victim/partner was a male; when it was a naked female, any naked female, his sense of involvement was so acute as to be almost unbearable.

  With Dorie, however, the relationship was both enhanced and skewed by the unfamiliar presence of a third party—the lurid Kabuki mask. Wearing it took Simon outside himself, somehow. It was as if he were seeing himself approach through her eyes and hearing the whispery rasp of his slippers on the rough cement, the buzz of the overhead fluorescents, and her own shallow panting through her ears. He felt the shock down to his bones when she saw the mask; when her terror peaked, when her thoughts shut down, he knew, and understood.

  He was even glad for her when her vasovagal reflex kicked in, causing her to lose consciousness. He was glad for himself as well—the connection was too intense to be endured for extended periods, and it wasn’t until it had been broken that Simon realized he was in a state of extreme arousal.

  And with that realization came the release. As always, the premature climax was unsatisfying and anticlimactic—a shameful, irrelevant spasm, a dribble and a blush instead of a gush and a roar.

  Simon’s shame quickly transmuted itself into anger. Dorie was awakened by a series of open-handed slaps. Hog-tied, all she could do was tuck her chin tight into her chest and wait it out. It didn’t hurt much, anyway—or at any rate, it didn’t hurt any worse than the pain from the broken nose, cramped limbs, and parched lips that it had supplanted.

  The mild beating also helped take her mind off the mask—that seemed important. And afterward he was gentle. He loosened her bonds, rolled her onto her back, and retied her wrists in front of her. Her legs were left free; it wasn’t until he slipped his hands between her knees and urged them open that she realized he hadn’t left her ankles untied as a mercy.

  But her captor apparently changed his mind about molesting her sexually when he caught the scent of urine.

  “I think somebody needs a bath,” he said, patiently but firmly. It was the first time he’d spoken in her presence.

  Simon Childs, thought Dorie. Our founder. Of course, of course: the fox starts a support group for the geese. Which makes me the biggest goose of all.

  Though her eyes were closed again, she sensed that he had moved away; then she heard water running. Not a gentle plashing, but loud and violent, the sound of water falling from a height into a big, empty, metal tub. It made her want to pee again, but she decided to save it up this time. Having a name to put to the monster, and even more important, a face to put behind the mask, had sent Dorie back into survivor mode: she had remembered the anti-rape measures she and her girlfriends used to recommend to each other. Act crazy. Laugh, don’t cry. Howl, gibber. If you can pee, pee; if you can shit, shit your pants; and if you can’t do either, stick your finger down your throat and puke all over him. Anything to kill desire, buy time, stay alive. Where there’s life, there’s hope—isn’t that what everybody always said?

  Then Dorie remembered something
else, a parable her father once told her when she hadn’t sold a painting in a year and was thinking about giving up and taking a straight job. It was about a man sentenced to death who promised the king that if his life was spared, within a year he would teach the king’s favorite horse to talk. His friends told him he was crazy, that he’d set himself an impossible task. But a year is a long time, he told them. A lot of things can happen in a year. The king could die. The horse could die. Or maybe—who knows?—maybe the horse will actually learn to talk.

  Stranger things have happened, thought Dorie. Miracles have happened—you just have to stay alive long enough to be there when they do.

  6

  According to the Karma Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism, a Down syndrome reincarnation is meant to be a reward, in the form of a short, restful, and relatively stress-free lifetime, for good karma accrued during a meritorious previous incarnation. DSers, or at least well cared for DSers, tend to have loving, caring natures and sunny dispositions, and for the most part spend less time worrying about matters beyond their control than the more able-minded general public—not a bad description of an enlightened being, according to the Tibetans.

  From that point of view, Missy Childs, sheltered, pampered, and privately tutored, must have been a veritable saint in her previous lifetime. Saintliness, however, is not exactly a survival skill in the Berkeley flats, and enlightened or not, as a mentally disabled white female, Missy could be said to have been on borrowed time, statistically, from the moment she stepped through Ganny’s front door.

  The boys had probably seen her coming a block away. There were three of them, hanging out in front of a mom-and-pop liquor store, decked out in Blood summer wear in honor of the unseasonably warm weather: backward Raiders caps, oversize black polo shirts, baggy-saggy black Ben Davis cutoffs, high black socks, red-trimmed Airs; they also wore red bandannas tucked discreetly into their back pockets—any more obvious gang styling might have gotten them picked up by the Berkeley cops on a loitering-with-intent-to-associate rap.

  The two twelve-year-old baby gangstas were cutting school; the thirteen-year-old had already been expelled. They were bored, they were broke, and Missy must have looked like a godsend, waddling up the street in her pigeon-toed gait, with her pink plastic purse over one arm and a birdcage dangling from the other. Simultaneously, as if at some undiscernible signal, the three boys hopped off the low concrete retaining wall next to the sidewalk outside the mom-and-pop (the entrance to which was not only barred, but protected by a pair of concrete pylons to prevent drive-through break-ins) and fell into step behind Missy. “Hey, you a retard?”

  “Sticks and stones,” said Missy, without turning around. She was dog-tired already, her feet hurt, she had sweated through her T-shirt, and the cage weighed a ton (she knew by now that it had been a mistake to bring it along—all the water had already sloshed out of the little dish clipped to the bars, and Tweety herself was clinging desperately to her little trapeze as it swung to and fro), but Missy’s instinct told her to keep walking. “Go away. Leave me alone.”

  “Hoo hoo ha ha.” The oldest boy mocked her speech. “And what you doin’ wearin’ ’Didas ’round here?” Only Crips and Crip satellites wore Adidas.

  The maneuver, when it came, was so slickly executed that to an observer—and fortunately for Missy, there had been an observer—it looked like one of those nature documentaries where a pack of wolves cut off a lame caribou from the herd. As they passed a boarded-up vacant lot, one of the boys darted around to get in front of Missy, slowing his pace to block her way, while the second closed up behind her and the boy to her left eased her to the right, through a gap in the board fence.

  And before Missy could even call out, one boy was behind her with one hand pinning both wrists against the small of her back and the other hand across her mouth, the second boy had her purse, and the third had begun twirling the birdcage over his head, preparing to launch it across the weed-strewn lot like an Olympic hammer thrower.

  Afterward, she would remember everything about that moment: the heat, the distant traffic, the weeds, the broken glass, the sunbaked earth of the vacant lot, the whirling cage, the crows on the telephone line, the buzzing blue sky, the sweat running down her face, the boy’s tense little body pressing up against her from behind, the salt taste of his hot little hand covering her mouth—it all seemed terribly real and so terribly important that she almost forgot to be afraid.

  “Stall it out right there, youngbloods.” A man’s voice, from the other side of the fence.

  “Oh, shit, it’s Obie,” whispered the boy holding Missy. The boy holding her purse quickly shifted it behind his back, while the boy swinging Tweety’s cage over his head lurched comically around the lot trying to arrest its momentum as the biggest, second-handsomest black man Missy had ever seen squeezed himself sideways through the gap in the fence.

  “Let her go, Jerome.” He was wearing a black sweat suit, his gray hair was cut short and curly like Dennis Richmond’s, and his skin was a deep chocolate brown.

  “Yeah, lemme go, you brat,” said Missy, when the hand came off her mouth; her arms were still pinned behind her.

  “Naw, Obie, naw, we—”

  “Answer up, blood.” The way the man said it—patiently, without raising his voice—reminded Missy of Simon: the quieter he said something, the quicker you’d better mind.

  And sure enough, the boy released her. Missy tugged angrily at the neck of her T-shirt, which was all rucked up and twisted around. “Gimme.”

  The boys started laughing as she reached for the cage; the man silenced them with a glare. “You heard the lady.”

  “I heard humma humma,” said the boy holding the cage. “Thass what I heard.”

  A moment later the cage was on the ground and the soles of the boy’s Airs were dangling a foot above the weeds and the dirt and the broken glass.

  “Work the mind before you work the mouth, baby g.” The old lion gave the cub an admonitory shake, then set him down gently.

  “We was just—”

  “I know what you was just. You a got-damn disgrace to the race, all a you.” He handed the cage to Missy. “You okay, honey?”

  Dazed by all the sudden twists and turns her day had been taking, Missy managed a nod. She didn’t feel very okay, though. She couldn’t catch her breath and her heart was beating fast and fluttery in her chest, like Tweety’s heart.

  “Okay, you run along, then,” said the man. “I’ll watch your back.”

  Missy wasn’t sure why he’d want to watch her back, but she didn’t wait around to ask. She ducked through the hole in the fence and started walking. She walked and walked and walked, and by the time she realized that the nasty little boys had taken her purse—the purse containing not just her twenty-dollar bill and her lucky penny from Cannery Row that Dorie had given her, the one with the otter stamped on it, but also the card she was supposed to show strangers if she was ever lost, the card with her address and her phone number, neither of which she had ever quite managed to commit to memory—she had no idea how to make it back to the vacant lot.

  Or to Ganny’s, for that matter. Missy had no idea how long she wandered with that heavy cage before she found herself passing a familiar-looking fence overgrown with purple morning glories. Two, three hours? Missy wasn’t real good with time—but then, she’d never had to be. There’d always been someone to tell her when it was time to do something, or stop doing it. All she knew was that she was tired and sunburned and hungry and thirsty and her feet hurt, but she couldn’t bring herself to go inside that house again and be all alone with Ganny.

  She did make it as far as the kitchen, where she leaned over the sink and tilted her head and drank water directly out of the faucet until her tummy felt as if it were going to burst. But when she turned the water off, she heard, or thought she could hear, the flies buzzing in the bedroom, and decided it would be better to take Tweety, who’d been lying motionless on the paper in the bottom of the
cage ever since the vacant lot, and go back outside to wait for Simon in the garden. She’d fallen asleep in the shade of the fence, under the sunflowers, and awakened to find Simon kneeling over her, crying with joy.

  “I knew you’d come,” she’d whispered through her cracked lips.

  And now, she was home again, with sunlight pouring in like gold through the tall windows of the living room. From her nifty new hospital bed she could see most all of Berkeley and, beyond it, the dark, sparkling waters of the bay; that city of white towers gleaming in the distance was San Francisco. It looked like a toy city from way up here; it looked like a whole toy world.

  As for the new day nurse, Missy could take her or leave her. She was pretty and she had a funny name—Missy liked that about her—but she was mean about food. When Missy wanted an after-lunch snack, Nurse Apple said she’d already had lunch. Well, duh!

  Something else Nurse Apple was mean about: she wanted to get rid of poor Tweety’s empty cage—she said it was full of germs. And because of Missy’s speech problems it would have been impossible for Missy to explain to her why she wanted the cage nearby for a while, even if she’d fully understood it herself. As it was, all she knew was that when things die, you have to have something to remember them by, something to touch and smell, or else they disappear and you can’t remember what they were like even if you have a picture—you can only remember the picture.

  Like with her mother: all Missy had of her was her hairbrush. It was slender and dainty and had a few silky-soft hairs caught in the bristles, and when Missy held it next to her cheek, even though Simon said it was impossible because she was too little when their mother went away, she remembered not just that Mommy looked like Audrey Hepburn, but that she smelled like powder and her hair was soft and her touch so gentle that when she held Missy in her arms, Missy felt as if she were floating.