Fear itself: a novel

by Jonathan Lewis Nasaw

  “Subsequent phobias, including the fear of heights, spiders, and mirrors, were cured along similar homeopathic principles, until by the time he reached puberty, Simon told me, he wasn’t afraid of anything. He was equally in denial about his feelings toward his sister, whom his grandfather obviously adored—or indulged, at any rate. But Simon had so internalized his sibling rivalry that he had, in a sense, internalized his sister. It’s a syndrome that’s seen more often with identical twins—not at all healthy, needless to say.”

  “Is that why he was in therapy?”

  “No—apparently he and a neighbor boy had been caught in flagrante, so to speak, by the grandfather. According to Simon, the two boys had formed something they called the Horror Club. Obviously it was related to the entire gestalt of Simon’s polyphobia and compensatory counterphobia. The boys used to watch horror movies on late-night television, then masturbate together. Of all the reasons for Simon Childs to go into treatment, this adolescent experimentation with homosexuality was about the least important. Except of course to the grandfather. Who killed himself a few weeks after Simon began therapy—I never saw young Childs again after that.”

  “Do you happen to remember the other boy’s name? From the Horror Club?”

  “I’m afraid not—why?”

  “Childs has probably gone to ground somewhere in the Bay Area. We want to cover all the bases.”

  “All I can tell you is that his family lived next door to the Childs house in the autumn of 1963, and…No, wait—it’s coming to me. Simon called him—there’s an expression for a timid soul…nervous something? Nervous Norman?”

  “Nervous Nellie.”

  “Yes, that’s it—Nervous Nellie. Short for Nelson, if memory serves.”

  “I don’t suppose you have a last name for me?”

  The old psychiatrist sighed. “Now I know how Jesus felt. The more miracles you perform, the more they want.”

  7

  For the first Tuesday evening in nearly a month, Jim and Gloria Gee had their house, and equally important, their computer, to themselves.

  Inviting her old college roommate to stay with them had been a mistake—Gloria admitted that freely. (Gloria and Linda had roomed together as undergraduates at Stony Brook, before going on to different law schools, Linda to Fordham, Gloria to Georgetown.) But by the time the Gees realized how much the sessions of the Swingin’ Tuesdays Club had come to mean to them, Linda was already installed in the spare room. Although they considered themselves quite the liberated couple—flat-out wild, by Chinese-American standards—neither of them felt liberated enough to participate in a cyber-orgy with Linda just down the hall.

  So this evening, they were eager to make up for lost time. Gloria, an attorney for a consortium of Taiwanese exporters, was already out of the shower by ten, squeaky clean, oiled and depilated, when Jim, who was well advanced on the partner track at a powerhouse D.C. law firm, arrived with the tabs of Ecstasy he’d picked up from one of the mail-room boys. While they waited in their living room for it to take effect, Gloria brushed the glossy, ass-length black hair that was her pride and joy; Jim, already stripped down to his red bikini briefs, set up the web-cam and logged on to the STC web site.

  The session was already well under way. Five of the six segments of the split screen displayed photo-icons of the five couples logged on (including a promising pair of newbies who went by the screen names Hot and Hotter). As the Gees’ own photo-icon appeared in the upper left portion of the split screen, the bottom portion of the screen filled with welcoming chatter.

  Hi our friends of the mysterious Orient, typed Plumpie, of Piers and Plumpie, the dedicated fiftyish couple who hosted the site—they had to be dedicated: it was three in the morning in Amsterdam. We missed you.

  We missed you too, typed Gloria, aka Dragon-Girl—for some reason, it always seemed to be the women who did the typing.

  How touching, typed the female half of the couple known as Wolfman and Wolfwoman. Let the games begin.

  Like many other cyber-sexuals, the Gees were a predominantly male-voyeur–female-exhibitionist couple. Gloria was turned on by the presence of the camera and often made love with her eyes closed, while Jim usually kept one eye on the screen, even when he was having an orgasm. Gloria didn’t mind—it made her extra hot to think of other men watching Jim making love to her with the same hunger that Jim felt, watching them screwing their wives.

  Tonight was good for both of them. Not only had they built up a head of steam during their three-week hiatus, but the new kids were indeed hot and hotter—mixed race, he hung, she stacked. The sense of connection between the two couples was immediate and undeniable; each couple had selected the other’s video stream for viewing—it was almost like a private four-way, especially under the influence of the Ecstasy.

  Around one in the morning, however, just as two couples, presumably from the West Coast, were logging on to fill the slots vacated by the easterners and Europeans, Jim froze in mid-hump.

  “No,” Gloria ordered him, thinking he was about to ejaculate prematurely—or at least prematurely as far as she was concerned. “Not yet, I’m not there yet.”

  “Did you hear that?” he whispered into her ear, shrinking inside her.

  “What?”

  “I think somebody’s breaking in. You call nine-one-one; I’m going to get the gun.” He rolled off her, sprang to his feet, stuffed himself back into his red bikini briefs, adjusted his package self-importantly, then dashed out of the living room, bent double in a ridiculous commando crouch.

  A moment later he was back with his hands in the air and the front of his trunks flat as a Ken doll; behind him, a tall skinheaded white man with a long-barreled revolver had stopped in the doorway, out of range of the camera.

  “Turn it off,” the stranger said quietly.

  Gloria, tripping on Ecstasy, dazed by the sudden turn of events, her system flooded with dozens, maybe hundreds, of conflicting hormones and neurotransmitters, was too bewildered to respond at first. On screen, Hot and Hotter were laughing. Looks like somebody dropped in unexpectedly, Hotter typed with one finger. Gloria rose, fumbling at her see-through peignoir, and with her eyes trained on the computer screen, she watched herself crossing to the desk in an awkward modesty crouch, covering her breasts with one hand and her crotch with the other. It was disorienting, watching herself cut obliquely across the screen while walking straight ahead, but she couldn’t tear her eyes from the screen, or bring herself to switch the computer off once she reached it—it was as if she wanted to see how the show was going to come out.

  “I said, turn it off!”

  Gloria was still frozen. Jim stumbled into the picture on the computer screen; an instant later he appeared bodily at the edge of her vision, crawling on his hands and knees toward the surge protector strip. There was a popping, staticky sound; the screen flared white, then black; reluctantly, Gloria turned back to the room.

  “If you want money…” Jim was saying. Having unplugged the computer, he’d climbed out from under the desk and positioned himself in front of Gloria, shielding her with his body as he crossed the living room toward the man, who took one long stride toward him, grabbed his arm, spun him around, and clubbed him over the top of the head with the barrel of the revolver.

  “Sorry about that, Skairdykat,” said the intruder, stepping over Jim’s twitching body. “But you shouldn’t have lied about living alone.”

  8

  Stoked on Mexican crosstops and anticipation, Simon had driven straight from Allenwood to Georgetown with only a single stop to gas up and purchase a street guide for the District of Columbia and a cheap canvas travel bag, into which he transferred the snakes. He’d parked the Volvo down on M Street and walked up to Conroy Circle, effecting an entry by the simple expedient of using the leather snake gauntlet to punch through a pane of glass in the back door.

  As soon as he had the woman secured—Simon was operating on the assumption that the female was Skairdykat—he
went off to explore the premises, with mixed results.

  On the one hand, the house was hideously furnished. American Moderne in a neo-Georgian brownstone: oh, please! On the other hand Simon was extremely gratified not to find any little Chinese Rugrats tucked into their beddy-byes. In the thirty-odd years he’d been playing the game, it was a point of pride for Simon that he had never harmed or even frightened a child. Tempting as it might have been to taste that fruit, Simon had taken his self-imposed stricture to such extremes that the only thing his victims had in common was that they were all childless. Having been deprived of both his parents, he just couldn’t bring himself to do that to a kid.

  When he returned to the living room, Skairdykat was wriggling around on the chrome and leather couch, rolling her eyes, and making those mmmff, mmmff sounds that meant she was ready for him to take the gag out.

  “Are you sure?” he asked her, stroking her forehead, smoothing back that glorious head of jet-black hair.

  An eager nod.

  “Because if I take it off and then you try to scream again, you’re going to regret it deeply.”

  She nodded that she understood. He walked around behind the couch and untied the gag—a terry-cloth bathrobe belt. She spat it out, turned, and followed him with her eyes as he came back around the couch and sat beside her. “Now, is there something you wanted to tell me, Skairdykat?”

  “Why do you keep calling me that?”

  “Skairdykat? You chose the name, not me.”

  “I don’t…Please, I don’t—I have no idea what you’re talking about. You have to believe me; there’s been some kind of mistake.”

  He held her face lightly by the chin, tilted her head up toward him, looked into her eyes. She was his first Oriental—there was something particularly appealing, almost childlike, about the smooth curve of the upper eyelid. They weren’t slanted at all, these brown eyes, but sweetly elliptical, like Missy’s. And he could finally see the fear in them, now that the shock and anger had passed. “You’re telling the truth, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I believe you, but I want to run a little test, a little experiment, just to be on the safe side,” Simon explained, gagging her again.

  “I’ll be right back.”

  He stepped over the man’s body and strolled down the hall to the back door. He brushed the glittering glass dust off the leather gauntlet, unzipped the canvas travel bag lying next to the getaway satchel, and used the pencil flashlight to peer inside. The snakes were asleep again. Simon recited to himself the mnemonic used to distinguish between the venomous coral and its various look-alikes (if red touches yellow, it kills a fellow; snout of black, bad for Jack) as he reached into the bag and grabbed the scarlet king (that was the one with the red snout and the black rings intervening between the red and yellow ones) just behind the head.

  When Simon returned to the living room with the scarlet king, he knew within seconds that Skairdykat, or rather, Gloria, had been telling the truth. She was frightened half to death—who wouldn’t be?—but she was no ophidiophobe. He couldn’t provoke a syncope, or anything resembling a true panic attack, even when he jabbed the king’s head directly toward her eyes, though the terrified snake did its part by baring its harmless teeth and flicking its narrow forked tongue out to smell her.

  He left the room, returned the king to the travel bag; the coral glanced up disinterestedly. Simon tiptoed back, stuck his head around the archway. Gloria was staring at the man on the floor. When she saw Simon, she quickly looked away, but it was too late. Simon had followed her glance, seen the smeared blood trail on the carpet, realized that the man was feigning unconsciousness: he had managed to drag himself a few inches closer to the desk, to the telephone. Simon wasn’t worried—he still had a long way to go. And the poor fellow might even come in handier, awake.

  “Is it him?” he asked Gloria, sitting down beside her. “Is he the one who’s afraid of snakes?”

  “Not so far as I know.”

  He knew she was telling him the truth. Most of them did, once they’d gotten past their resentment and realized that in addition to being the man who was going to kill them, Simon was also the only one who could spare them. He liked this phase of the game.

  “Think real hard then, Gloria. Think as if your life depended on it. Is there anyone else who had access to your computer last week?”

  She didn’t have to say anything—he could read the answer in her eyes. “Who was it, Gloria?” he asked gently.

  “Linda.”

  “Linda who?”

  “Linda Abruzzi.”

  “And who’s Linda Abruzzi.”

  “An FBI agent.”

  A decoy, then—Skairdykat was only a decoy, Simon realized with a start. Which meant this was all a trap. Was it about to snap shut on him? “You’re not, are you?”

  “What?”

  “An FBI agent.”

  “No. No, I swear. I swear to God. She was my roommate at college. She was staying with us until she found her own place. I told her—goddammit, God damn the bitch, I told her not to—”

  Simon cuffed her lightly across the side of the head. “Watch your language.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re forgiven.” He never felt more magnanimous than when he was totally in control. “Go on.”

  “Just, I told her not to use the computer. She moved out last Thursday. That’s all.”

  “I bet she left a forwarding address, though, your old roomie?”

  Gloria didn’t hesitate. “There’s a yellow Post-it on the side of the computer hutch.”

  On his way across the room, Simon stopped briefly to check on the superfluous Mr. Gee; he seemed to be coming around a little. Have to remember to tie that puppy down, thought Simon as he glanced at the address on the Post-it: “Care of E. L. Pender” was as far as he got.

  “Well, I’ll be blessed,” he murmured, thunderstruck, as he slipped the yellow square of paper into his trouser pocket.

  Not that he needed it—he already had Pender’s address on Zap’s printout, along with driving instructions Pender had so thoughtfully provided to the invaluable Mr. Bellcock.

  9

  Okay, so Gloria wasn’t Skairdykat—Simon hadn’t always restricted himself to pure phobics. But try as he might, he couldn’t seem to get the game off the ground—there was something wrong, something missing. Then he spotted the pill bottle on the floor beside the couch, next to the goody box of sex toys and lubricants. The label had been removed from the bottle, which was a red flag for an old doper such as himself, and an X drawn on the lid; inside were two hand-milled tablets. Simon knew the code.

  “X for Ecstasy,” he said aloud. “Why, Gloria, you raver, you. And you haven’t even offered one to your guest.”

  “Please—they’re yours.”

  “As are you, Mrs. Gee—as are you.”

  It was true, however, that without a pure phobic at its center, the game could never be at its best. But Simon, who took another crosstop while waiting for the Ecstasy to kick in, was happy to improvise. When he wasn’t able to provoke a satisfactory reaction by threatening Gloria directly, he tried to reach her through her husband, using him as a sort of dress rehearsal for the upcoming game with Pender.

  But just about the time things were starting to go purple around the edges from the Ecstasy, Gloria turned away in horror—maybe even disgust. That had given Simon the clue he needed. Her hair alone should have told me, he thought. All the time and trouble it must cost her. A grown woman with hair down to her ass has to be vain. And the flip side of vanity is…? Fear of disfigurement. But of course.

  In order to get Gloria away from the mess he’d made of her husband, Simon brought her, along with his luggage, up to the second-floor bedroom. Leaving Gloria bound and gagged on the bed, he went into the bathroom to answer nature’s call, which, probably due to the speed, turned out to be what Missy used to call a stinky. And the whole time he was in there, Simon found himself
unable to shake the feeling that he was not alone.

  That kind of paranoia, he told himself, had to stem from an imbalance—too much speed or not enough Ecstasy. So since he couldn’t take less speed, he popped the last tablet from the bottle marked X, and was at the sink filling the bathroom glass with tap water when he happened to glance up, and suddenly the mystery about not feeling alone was solved.

  “It’s you,” he said to the grim-visaged old man in the mirror.

  “It’s you,” Grandfather Childs replied.

  It shouldn’t have jarred Simon as badly as it did—after all, he’d been seeing the creepy old face in the mirror for four days now. But not on a double dose of crosstops and phenylethylamine-based psychedelics: this time the entity on the far side of the looking glass seemed to have taken on a life of its own. It wasn’t exactly a hallucination, more like the little girl old Senor Wences used to paint on the side of his hand: you knew she wasn’t real, but you couldn’t help suspending your disbelief anyway.

  Simon decided to have some fun with it.

  “S’awright,” said Simon, just like Senor Wences.

  “S’awright,” said Grandfather Childs simultaneously.

  “Shitfuckpisscuntsuck,” said Simon, who never swore.

  “Shitfuckpisscuntsuck,” said Grandfather Childs, who never swore either.

  “You deserved it, you know,” said Simon.

  “You deserved it, you know,” said Grandfather Childs.

  “I hate you.”

  “I hate you.”

  “I love you.”

  “I love you.”

  “You’re not capable of love.”

  “You’re not capable of love.”

  “I loved Missy,” said Simon.

  “I loved Missy,” said Grandfather Childs. “You k—”