She thought about it. “It is hard for a person, especially a man perhaps, to admit to being in pain. But I think for you it has always been even harder to admit stupidity. I think you got that from me.”
At the last sentence he sat up straighter. He remembered for the first time that upon her arrival she had tacitly admitted to being in pain herself. “I could certainly have used you, these ten years past,” he said suddenly. “You’re a good sister, Madeleine. And after thirty years I think it is past time I became your friend. You’ve helped me to see clearer. Perhaps it’s time I looked past my own nose. What brings you to Halifax?”
It was not quite a bodily flinch. Her face acquired the expression of one suppressing a sneeze. “Norman…” She paused. “Look, the bare outline is easy. I loved—I love—a man. I’ve given him half a year of my life. And then I found out…things that make me suspect he is not…not who I thought him to be, not what I thought him to be. I found out that I had been closing my eyes too, like you. I think I have. It’s hard to be certain. But if I’m right, I’ve been giving my love to—to a—to someone unworthy.” She hesitated. “But that’s just the bare outline. And I’m afraid it’s all I can tell you now, Norman.” She held up a hand. “Wait. I’m not trying to cheat you, honestly I’m not. I’m not too proud to swap stupidity stories with you—and if what I fear is true, I’ve made you look like a genius. But I mustn’t speak about it yet. Will you trust me, brother? For perhaps as long as a week or two?”
But maybe I can help! was what he started to say, but something in her face stopped him. “Are you sure that’s what you want?”
“I’m sure.”
“You know,” he said cheerfully and at once, “ever since you got here I’ve been trying to put my finger on exactly what the hell the ‘continental look’ is. Because you’ve got it—I’d never have taken you for an American. It’s more than just the accent. Something about the way you carry yourself.”
It was her first smile of its kind, unplanned and soft at the edges; it destroyed temporarily the “look” to which he had just alluded. For the first time she reminded him powerfully of the Maddy he had known as a child. “A friend of mine said something very like that once,” she murmured wistfully. “His theory was that Americans make a fetish of appearing strong, and Europeans just naturally are.” Norman saw her pursue that line of thought and find something that made her hastily retrace her steps. “I’m not sure about Canadians.”
“Oh, Canadians are insecure and don’t care who knows about it,” Norman said with a grin. “Look at Halifax, capital of this great province. No Sunday news programming, no Saturday postal service, and within fifteen minutes’ drive you can find whole communities with outdoor plumbing, sound-only phones, and one communal terminal in the general store. There’s no opera, next to no dance, a shocking amount of fake country music, and from one end of the city to the other there might be two hundred people who have ever heard of Miles Davis. You can draw a blank with Ray Charles.
“And do you know what? I love this town. I’ve been walking the streets unarmed for over five years, and tonight was only the second time I’ve been hit on—it almost made me homesick for New York, but not quite. Ordinary glass is good enough for windows here, and you can drink tap water with the right filter. Police service is still voluntary; you can enter a mall without having to go through a god damned metal detector. You never have to wait for computer time. Even though a goodly amount of North America’s heroin enters at this port, none of it stays—you could fit all the junkies in town into three or four squad cars. For a city it’s pretty pleasant, in other words.”
“Compared to Zurich, it sounds like paradise. I can live without opera.”
“Well, at least we’ve got good music here—thanks to you. What say we heat up the old turntable, if the drive band hasn’t rotted by now? I keep having this feeling that I should get that record on tape before lightning strikes it.”
“That sounds wonderful. They are the ones who wrote ‘Shiny Stockings,’ aren’t they?”
“Jon Hendricks did, yes,” he said, getting up and retrieving both their empties. “With a guy named…” He stopped. He stood as if listening for a moment, then cleared his throat and met her eyes. “Madeleine, I know I said this already, but it’s awfully good to have you here.”
“It’s good to have here to be.”
It was 4:00 A.M. for him, and 9:00 A.M. for her, when they finally broke it up and went to bed; fortunately it was Saturday. That set the pattern for the next week: every hour not occupied by mundane necessities they spent talking together. Some of the talk was catching up on the ten years they had spent apart, essentially a swapping of accumulated anecdotes. Another, perhaps larger part of the talk involved reliving their respective childhoods, each giving their own perspective on the formative years of the other, and comparing their memories of shared experiences. By the end of the week, Norman felt that he knew himself better than he ever had, and knew that Madeleine felt something similar. A kind of tension went out of both of them as they talked, to be replaced by something like peace.
This mutual spiritual progression was not accomplished smoothly in tandem, but more the way a tractor operator works his way out of deep mud, feeding power to alternate wheels in fits and starts. It was their firm connection that made any progress possible.
By the second week, conversation had achieved about all it could on its own. He began introducing her, carefully and thoughtfully, to certain of his friends, and was satisfied with the results. The end-of-term madness was beginning to snowball at the University, and he was startled to discover how little it troubled him. Dr. MacLeod, the department chairman, actually paid him a grudging compliment. Norman met an attractive and interesting woman, a single parent who had come to his office to discuss her son’s prospects of passing his course, and saw small signs that his interest was returned. One night he dug out the half-forgotten, half-finished manuscript of The Book and read it through; he threw out half the chapters and made extensive notes for their replacement.
Madeleine fit right into the rhythms of his home life, enhancing it in many small ways and disrupting nothing he cared about. She had a fanatic neatness learned in a country where living space was at a premium, and an easy tolerance of his own looser standards. She was seriously impressed by parts of his music library, which flattered him, and one day she came home with an armful of tapes that startled him just as pleasurably. They swapped favorite books and videotapes, favorite recipes and jokes. She displayed no inclination to look for work, but she used her free time to do household maintenance chores he had been forced to neglect. And she did not appear to lack for money—indeed, he had to be quite firm before she would let him reimburse her for half of the groceries and staples she bought. She respected his privacy and welcomed his company, cleaned up her own messes and left his the hell alone.
The only thing that bothered him was concern for the private pain of which she still would not tell him, and which she could not altogether hide. She did not tantalize him with it; he acquired only by accident some idea of the depth and extent of her hurt, when he woke quite late one rainy night and heard her weeping in the next room. He nearly went to her then, but something told him that it was the wrong thing to do. He waited, listening. He heard her moan, in a voice softer than her sobs but still plainly audible: “Jacques, who are you? What are you?” Then her weeping became wordless again, and after a time it was over and they both slept. In the morning she was so relaxed and jolly that he wondered if he had been dreaming.
He noted certain subtle signs that she was becoming attracted to his good friend Charlie, who lived eight blocks away with three male roommates. Norman gave the chemistry careful thought, and decided that he approved. On the twenty-first day of her residence he saw to it that they were both invited to a party at Charlie’s, and that night when it was time to go he announced that a whole day of processing final exams had tired him out, why didn’t she go along without
him? He was going to turn in at once and sleep the night away, would doubtless be sound asleep whenever she might return, early or late. He smiled to himself at how she tried to keep the pleasantness of her surprise from showing, bundled her out the door, and retired at once to his bed in the den, where he lay with the lights out. In point of fact he was wide awake, but he resolved to lie there in the dark till sleep did come. Charlie, he knew, was not a slow worker, and Madeleine seemed to have a European directness of her own.
Nonetheless, they had not showed up by the time he finally fell genuinely asleep at midnight.
In the morning he tiptoed about, trying to make breakfast as quietly as possible so as not to wake them…until he noticed that the bedroom door was open. He found that she had not come home the night before, and went off to work wondering what the hell Charlie had done with his three roommates and the party.
She was not home when he returned, which did not surprise him inordinately, but she had left no message in the phone, which did. He swallowed his prurient curiosity and a solitary dinner and put his attention on the work he had brought home for the weekend. To his credit, it was eleven-thirty before he broke down and phoned Charlie’s place.
Charlie answered the phone. The screen showed him in bed with a pleasant-looking Oriental woman whom Norman vaguely recognized. Charlie was quite certain of his facts. Madeleine had arrived at the party, had not been overly depressed at finding Charlie already paired off with Mei-Ling, had stayed and drunk and smoked and laughed and danced with several men without settling on any of them. She had sung them all a devastating impromptu parody of the new Mindfuckers single. She had left the party, unquestionably alone, cheerful and not overly stoned, at about one in the morning.
In his guts, Norman knew before he had hung up the phone. But it was a full three days before he could get it through his head as well that Madeleine was never going to come back.
2
1999 I smelled her before I saw her. Even so, the first sight was shocking.
She was sitting in a tan plastic-surfaced armchair, the kind where the front comes up as the back goes down. It was back as far as it would go. It was placed beside the large living room window, which was transparent. A plastic block table next to it held a digital clock, a dozen unopened packages of self-lighting Peter Jackson cigarettes, an empty ashtray, a full vial of cocaine, and a lamp with a bulb of at least a hundred and fifty watts. It illuminated her with brutal clarity.
She was naked. Her skin was the color of vanilla pudding. Her hair was in rats, her nails unpainted and untended, some overlong and some broken. There was dust on her. She sat in a ghastly sludge of feces and urine. Dried vomit was caked on her chin and between her breasts, and down her ribs to the chair.
These were only part of what I had smelled. The predominant odor was of fresh-baked bread. It is the smell of a person who is starving to death. The combined effluvia had prepared me to find a senior citizen, paralyzed by a stroke or some such crisis.
I judged her to be about twenty-five years old.
I moved to where she could see me, and she did not see me. That was probably just as well, because I had just seen the two most horrible things. The first was the smile. They say that when the bomb went off at Hiroshima, some people’s shadows were baked onto walls by it. I think that smile got baked on the surface of my brain in much the same way. I don’t want to talk about that smile.
The second horrible thing was the one that explained all the rest. From where I now stood, I could see a triple socket in the wall beneath the window. Into it were plugged the lamp, the clock, and her.
I knew about wireheading, of course—I had lost a couple of acquaintances and one friend to the juice. But I had never seen a wirehead. It is by definition a solitary vice, and all the public usually gets to see is a sheeted figure being carried out to the wagon.
The transformer lay on the floor beside the chair, where it had been dropped. The switch was on, and the timer had been jiggered so that instead of providing one five- or ten- or fifteen-second jolt per hour, it allowed continuous flow. That timer is required by law on all juice rigs sold, and you need special tools to defeat it. Say, a nail file. The input cord was long, and fell in crazy coils from the wall socket. The output cord disappeared beneath the chair, but I knew where it ended. It ended in the tangled snarl of her hair, at the crown of her head, in a miniplug. The plug was snapped into a jack surgically implanted in her skull, and from the jack tiny wires snaked their way through the wet jelly to the hypothalamus, to the specific place in the medial forebrain bundle where the major pleasure center of her brain was located. She had sat there in total transcendent ecstasy for at least five days.
I moved finally. I moved closer, which surprised me. She saw me now, and impossibly the smile became a bit wider. I was marvelous. I was captivating. I was her perfect lover. I could not look at the smile; a small plastic tube ran from one corner of the smile and my eyes followed it gratefully. It was held in place by small bits of surgical tape at her jaw, neck, and shoulder, and from there it ran in a lazy curve to the big fifty-liter water-cooler bottle on the floor. She had plainly meant her suicide to last: she had arranged to die of hunger rather than thirst, which would have been quicker. She could take a drink when she happened to think of it; and if she forgot, well, what the hell.
My intention must have shown on my face, and I think she even understood it—the smile began to fade. That decided me. I moved before she could force her neglected body to react, whipped the plug out of the wall, and stepped back warily.
Her body did not go rigid as if galvanized. It had already been so for many days. What it did was the exact opposite, and the effect was just as striking. She seemed to shrink. Her eyes slammed shut. She slumped. Well, I thought, it’ll be a long day and a night before she can move a voluntary muscle again, and then she hit me before I knew she had left the chair, breaking my nose with the heel of one fist and bouncing the other off the side of my head. We cannoned off each other and I managed to keep my feet; she whirled and grabbed the lamp. Its cord was stapled to the floor and would not yield, so she set her feet and yanked and it snapped off clean at the base. In near-total darkness she raised the lamp on high and came at me and I lunged inside the arc of her swing and punched her in the solar plexus. She said guff! and went down.
I staggered to a couch and sat down and felt my nose and fainted.
I don’t think I was out very long. The blood tasted fresh. I woke with a sense of terrible urgency. It took me a while to work out why. When someone has been simultaneously starved and unceasingly stimulated for days on end, it is not the best idea in the world to depress their respiratory center. I lurched to my feet.
It was not completely dark, there was a moon somewhere out there. She lay on her back, arms at her sides, perfectly relaxed. Her ribs rose and fell in great slow swells. A pulse showed strongly at her throat. As I knelt beside her she began to snore, deeply and rhythmically.
I had time for second thoughts now. It seemed incredible that my impulsive action had not killed her. Perhaps that had been my subconscious intent. Five days of wireheading alone should have killed her, never mind sudden cold turkey.
I probed in the tangle of hair, found the empty jack. The hair around it was dry. If she hadn’t torn the skin in yanking herself loose, it was unlikely that she had sustained any more serious damage within. I continued probing, found no soft places on the skull. Her forehead felt cool and sticky to my hand. The fecal smell was overpowering the baking bread now.
There was no pain in my nose yet, but it felt immense and pulsing. I did not want to touch it, or to think about it. My shirt was soaked with blood; I wiped my face with it and tossed it into a corner. It took everything I had to lift her. She was unreasonably heavy, and I say that having carried drunks and corpses. There was a hall off the living room, and all halls lead to a bathroom. I headed that way in a clumsy staggering trot, and just as I reached the deeper darkness, with my puls
e at its maximum, my nose woke up and began screaming. I nearly dropped her then and clapped my hands to my face; the temptation was overwhelming. Instead I whimpered like a dog and kept going. Childhood feeling: runny nose you can’t wipe. At each door I came to, I teetered on one leg and kicked it open, and the third one gave the right small-room, acoustic-tile echo. The light switch was where they almost always are; I rubbed it on with my shoulder and the room flooded with light.
Large aquamarine tub, styrofoam recliner pillow at the head end, nonslip bottom. Aquamarine sink with ornate handles, cluttered with toiletries and cigarette butts and broken shards of mirror from the medicine cabinet above. Aquamarine commode, lid up and seat down. Brown throw rug, expensive. Scale shoved back into a corner, covered with dust in which two footprints showed. I made a massive effort and managed to set her reasonably gently in the tub. I rinsed my face and hands of blood at the sink, ignoring the broken glass, and stuffed the bleeding nostril with toilet paper. I adjusted her head, fixed the chin strap. I held both feet away from the faucet until I had the water adjusted, and then left with one hand on my nose and the other beating against my hip, in search of her liquor.
There was plenty to choose from. I found some Metaxa in the kitchen. I took great care not to bring it near my nose, sneaking it up on my mouth from below. It tasted like burning lighter fluid, and made sweat spring out on my forehead. I found a roll of paper towels, and on my way back to the bathroom I used a great wad of them to swab most of the sludge off the chair and rug. There was a growing pool of water siphoning from the plastic tube, and I stopped that. When I got back to the bathroom the water was lapping over her bloated belly, and horrible tendrils were weaving up from beneath her. It took three rinses before I was satisfied with the body. I found a hose-and-spray under the sink that mated with the tub’s faucet, and that made the hair easy.
Mindkiller Page 3
