"I told you it was none of your business," Nick says. "The lady is just going."
"If you're a social worker, you should know that old Nick is crazy and you can't believe nothing he says."
One of the other boys says, "She isn't a social worker. Social workers don't have dogs."
I step down the steps and walk to my car. The boys sit on their bikes and I have to walk around them to get to the Impreza. Hudson wants to see them, pulling against his leash, but I hold him in tight.
"You look nervous, lady," the tattooed boy says.
"Leave her alone, Ethan," Nick says.
"You shut up, Uncle Nick, or I'll kick your ass," the boy says absently, never taking his eyes off me.
Nick says nothing.
I say nothing. I just get my dogs in my car and drive away.
Our life settles into a new normal. I get a response from my dildo email. Nick in Montana is willing to let me sell on his sex site on commission. I make a couple of different models, including one that I paint just as realistically as I would one of the reborn dolls. This means a base coat, then I paint the veins in. Then I bake it. Then I paint an almost translucent layer of color and bake it again. Six layers. And then a clear over layer of silicon because I don't think the paint is approved for use this way. I put a pretty hefty price on it and call it a special. At the same time I am making my other special. The doll for the Chicago couple. I send the mold to Tony and have him do a third head from it. It, too, requires layers of paint, and sometimes the parts bake side by side.
Because my business is rather slow, I take more time than usual. I am always careful, especially with specials. I think if someone is going to spend the kind of money one of these costs, the doll should be made to the best of my ability. And maybe it is because I have done this doll before, it comes easily and well. I think of the doll that the man who broke into my house stole. I don't know if he sent it to his wife and daughter in Mexico, or if he even has a wife and daughter in Mexico. I rather suspect he sold it on eBay or some equivalent—although I have watched doll sales and never seen it come up.
This doll is my orphan doll. She is full of sadness. She is inhabited by the loss of so much. I remember my fear when Hudson was wandering the roads of the desert. I imagine Rachel Mazar, so haunted by the loss of her own child. The curves of the doll's tiny fists are porcelain pale. The blue veins at her temples are traceries of the palest of bruises.
When I am finished with her, I package her as carefully as I have ever packaged a doll and send her off.
My dildos go up on the website.
The realistic dildo sits in my workshop, upright, tumescent, a beautiful rosy plum color. It sits on a shelf like a prize, glistening in its topcoat as if it were wet. It was surprisingly fun to make, after years and years of doll parts. It sits there both as an object to admire and as an affront. But to be frank, I don't think it is any more immoral than the dolls. There is something straightforward about a dildo. Something much more clear than a doll made to look like a dead child. Something significantly less entangled.
There are no orders for dildos. I lie awake at night thinking about real estate taxes. My father is dead. My mother lives in subsidized housing for the elderly in Columbus. I haven't been to see her in years and years, not with the cost of a trip like that. My car wouldn't make it, and nobody I know can afford to fly anymore. I certainly couldn't live with her. She would lose her housing if I moved in.
If I lose my house to unpaid taxes, do I live in my car? It seems like the beginning of the long slide. Maybe Sherie and Ed would take the dogs.
I do get a reprieve when the money comes in for the special. Thank God for the Mazars in Chicago. However crazy their motives, they pay promptly and by internet, which allows me to put money against the equity line for the new tools.
I still can't sleep at night and instead of putting all of the money against my debt, I put the minimum and I buy a 9 millimeter handgun. Actually, Ed buys it for me. I don't even know where to get a gun.
Sherie picks me up in the truck and brings me over to the goat farm. Ed has several guns. He has an old gun safe that belonged to his father. When we get to their place, he is in back, putting creosote on new fence posts, but he is happy to come up to the house.
"So you've given in," he says, grinning. "You've joined the dark side."
"I have," I agree.
"Well, this is a decent defensive weapon," Ed says. Ed does not fit my pre-conceived notions of a gun owner. Ed fits my pre-conceived notions of the guy who sells you a cell phone at the local strip mall. His hair is short and graying. He doesn't look at all like the kind of guy who would either marry Sherie or raise goats. He told me one time that his degree is in anthropology. Which, he said, was a difficult field to get a job in.
"Offer her a cold drink!" Sherie yells from the bathroom. In her pregnant state, Sherie can't ride twenty minutes in the sprung-shocked truck without having to pee.
He offers me iced tea and then gets the gun, checks to see that it isn't loaded, and hands it to me. He explains to me that the first thing I should do is check to see if the gun is loaded.
"You just did," I say.
"Yeah," he says, "but I might be an idiot. It's a good thing to do."
He shows me how to check the gun.
It is not nearly so heavy in my hand as I thought it would be. But, truthfully, I have found that the thing you thought would be life changing so rarely is.
Later he takes me around to the side yard and shows me how to load and shoot it. I am not even remotely surprised that it is kind of fun. That is exactly what I expected.
Out of the blue, an email from Rachel Mazar of Chicago.
I am writing you to ask you if you have had any personal or business dealings with my husband, Ellam Mazar. If I do not get a response from you, your next correspondence will be from my attorney.
I don't quite know what to do. I dither. I make vegetarian chili. Oddly enough, I check my gun which I keep in the bedside drawer. I am not sure what I am going to do about the gun when Sherie has her baby. I have offered to baby-sit, and I'll have to lock it up, I think. But that seems to defeat the purpose of having it.
While I am dithering, my cell rings. It is, of course, Rachel Mazar.
"I need you to explain your relationship with my husband, Ellam Mazar," she says. She sounds educated, with that eradication of regional accent that signifies a decent college.
"My relationship?" I say.
"Your email was on his phone," she says, frostily.
I wonder if he is dead. The way she says it sounds so final. "I didn't know your husband," I say. "He just bought the dolls."
"Bought what?" she says.
"The dolls," I say.
"Dolls?" she says.
"Yes," I say.
"Like . . . sex dolls?"
"No," I say. "Dolls. Reborns. Handmade dolls."
She obviously has no idea what I am talking about, which opens a world of strange possibilities in my mind. The dolls don't have orifices. Fetish objects? I tell her my website and she looks it up.
"He ordered specials," I say.
"But these cost a couple of thousand dollars," she says.
A week's salary for someone like Ellam Mazar, I suspect. I envision him as a professional, although, frankly, for all I know he works in a dry cleaning shop or something.
"I thought they were for you," I say. "I assumed you had lost a child. Sometimes people who have lost a child order one."
"We don't have children," she says. "We never wanted them." I can hear how stunned she is in the silence. Then she says, "Oh my God."
Satanic rituals? Some weird abuse thing?
"That woman said he told her he had lost a child," she says.
I don't know what to say so I just wait.
"My husband . . . my soon to be ex-husband," she says. "He has apparently been having affairs. One of the women contacted me. She told me that he told her we had a child that died
and that now we were married in name only."
I hesitate. I don't know legally if I am allowed to tell her about transactions I had with her husband. On the other hand, the emails came with both their names on them. "He has bought three," I say.
"Three?"
"Not all at once. About once a year. But people who want a special send me a picture. He always sends the same picture."
"Oh," she says. "That's Ellam. He's orderly. He's used the same shampoo for fifteen years."
"I thought it was strange," I say. I can't bear not to ask. "What do you think he did with them?"
"I think the twisted bastard used them to make women feel sorry for him," she says through gritted teeth. "I think he got all sentimental about them. He probably has himself half-convinced that he really did have a daughter. Or that it's my fault that we didn't have children. He never wanted children. Never."
"I think a lot of my customers like the idea of having a child better than having one," I say.
"I'm sure," she says. "Thank you for your time and I'm sorry to have bothered you."
So banal. So strange and yet so banal. I try to imagine him giving the doll to a woman, telling her that it was the image of his dead child. How did that work?
Orders for dildos begin to trickle in. I get a couple of doll orders and make a payment on the credit line and put away some towards real estate taxes. I may not have to live in my car.
One evening, I am working in the garden when Abby and Hudson start barking at the back gate.
I get off my knees, aching, but lurch into the house and into the bedroom where I grab the 9 mm out of the bedside table. It isn't loaded, which now seems stupid. I try to think if I should stop and load it. My hands are shaking. It is undoubtedly just someone looking for a meal and a place to recharge. I decide I can't trust myself to load and, besides, the dogs are out there. I go to the back door, gun held stiffly at my side, pointed to the ground.
There are in fact two of them, alike as brothers, indian looking with a fringe of black hair cut in a straight line above their eyebrows.
"Lady," one says, "we can work for food?" First one, then the other sees the gun at my side and their faces go empty.
The dogs cavort.
"I will give you something to eat, and then you go," I say.
"We go," the one who spoke says.
"Someone robbed me," I say.
"We no rob you," he says. His eyes are on the gun. His companion takes a step back, glancing at the gate and then at me as if to gauge if I will shoot him if he bolts.
"I know," I say. "But someone came here, I gave him food, and he robbed me. You tell people not to come here, okay?"
"Okay," he says. "We go."
"Tell people not to come here," I say. I would give them something to eat, something to take with them. I hate this. They are two young men in a foreign country, hungry, looking for work. I could easily be sleeping in my car. I could be homeless. I could be wishing for someone to be nice to me.
But I am not. I'm just afraid.
"Hudson! Abby!" I yell, harsh, and the two men flinch. "Get in the house."
The dogs slink in behind me, not sure what they've done wrong.
"If you want some food, I will give you something," I say. "Tell people not to come here."
I don't think they understand me. Instead they back slowly away a handful of steps and then turn and walk quickly out the gate, closing it behind them.
I sit down where I am standing, knees shaking.
The moon is up in the blue early evening sky. Over my fence I can see scrub and desert, a fierce land where mountains breach like the petrified spines of apocalyptic animals. The kind of landscape that seems right for crazed gangs of mutants charging around in cobbled-together vehicles. Tribal remnants of America, their faces painted, their hair braided, wearing jewelry made from shiny CDs and cigarette lighters scrounged from the ruins of civilization. The desert is Byronic in its extremes.
I don't see the two men. There's no one out there in furs, their faces painted blue, driving a dune buggy built out of motorcycle parts and hung with the skulls of their enemies. There's just a couple of guys from Nicaragua or Guatemala, wearing t-shirts and jeans.
And me, sitting, watching the desert go dark, the moon rising, an empty handgun in my hand.
The Coral Heart
Jeffrey Ford
His sword's grip was polished blood coral, its branches perfect doubles for the aorta. They fed into a guard that was a thin silver crown, beyond which lay the blade (the heart); slightly curved with the inscription of a spell in a language no one could read. He was a devotee of the art of the cut, and when he wielded this weapon, the blade exactly parallel to the direction of motion, the blood groove caught the breeze and whistled like a bird of night. He'd learned his art from a hermit in the mountains where he'd practiced on human cadavers.
That sword had a history before it fell to Ismet Toler. How it came to him, he swore he would never tell. Legend had it that the blade belonged first to the ancient hero who'd beheaded the Gorgon: a creature whose gaze turned men to smooth marble. After he'd slain her, he punctured her eyeballs with the tip of his blade and then bathed the cutting edge in their ichor. The character of the weapon seized the magic of the Gorgon's stare and, ever after, if a victim's flesh was sliced or punctured to any extent where blood was drawn, that unlucky soul would be turned instantly to coral.
The statuary of Toler's skill could be found throughout the realm. Three hardened headless bodies lay atop the Lowbry Hill, and on the slopes three hardened heads. A woman crouching at the entrance to the Funeral Gardens. A score of soldiers at the center of the market at Camiar. A child missing an arm, twisting away with fear forever, resting perfectly on one heel, in the southeastern corner of the Summer Square. All deepest red and gleaming with reflection. There were those who believed that only insanity could account for the vast battlefields of coral warriors frozen in the kill, but none was brave enough to speak it.
The Valator of Camiar once said of The Coral Heart, "He serves the good because it is a minority, leaving the majority to slay in the name of Truth." The Valator is now, himself, red coral, his head cleaved like a roasted sausage. Ismet dispatched evil with dedication and stunning haste. It was said that the fate of the sword was tied to that of the world. When enough of its victims had been turned to coral, their accumulated weight would affect the spin of the planet and it would fly out of orbit into darkness.
There are countless stories about The Coral Heart, and nearly all of them are the same story. Tales about a man who shares a name and a spirit with his weapon. They're always filled with fallen ranks of coral men. Some he kicks and shatters in the mêlée. There is always betrayal and treachery. A few of these stories involve the hermit master with whom he'd studied. Most all of them mention his servant, Garone, a tulpa or thought-form creation physically coalesced from his focused imagination. The descriptions of killing in these classical tales are painstaking and brutal, encrusted with predictable glory.
There are a handful of stories about The Coral Heart, though, that do not end on a battlefield. You don't hear them often. Most find the exploits of the weapon more enchanting than those of the man. Your average citizen enjoys a tale of slaughter. You, though, if I'm not mistaken, understand as well the deadly nature of the human heart and would rather decipher the swordsman's dreams than the magic spell engraved upon his blade.
And so . . . in the last days of summer, in The Year of the Thistle, after transforming the army of the Igridots, upon the dunes of Weilawan, into a petrified forest, Ismet Toler wandered north in search of nothing more than a cold day. He rode upon Nod, his red steed of a rare archaic stock—toes instead of hooves and short, spiral horns, jutting out from either side of its forelock. Walking beside Toler, appearing and disappearing like the moon behind wind-driven clouds, was Garone, his tulpa. The servant, when visible, drifted along, hands clasped at his waist, slightly hunched, the hood of his brown
robe always obscuring any definitive view of his face. You might catch a glimpse of one of his yellow eyes, but never both at once.
As they followed a trail that wound beneath giant trees, leaves falling everywhere, Toler pulled the reins on Nod and was still. "Was that a breeze, Garone?"
The tulpa disappeared but was as quickly back. "I believe so," he said in a whisper only his master could hear.
Another, more perceptible gust came down the trail and washed over them. Toler sighed as it passed. "I'm weary of turning men to coral," he said.
"I hadn't noticed," said Garone.
The Coral Heart smiled and nodded slightly.
Eclipse Three Page 15
