Fear Itself

by Jonathan Nasaw

  “There you go.” He rubbed her scalp affectionately—the black stubble was surprisingly soft, like one of Missy’s stuffed animals—and tenderly dabbed away the tears trickling down her cheeks. Or at least, he felt affectionate and tender, but when the old man in the mirror did the same for his gal, it looked smirky, and insincere as all get out.

  “It’ll grow back,” Simon whispered, helping Gloria to her feet and leading her over to the bed—to tell the truth, he was getting a little tired of seeing his dead grandfather in the looking glass. “Hair grows back.”

  Then he’d repeated it, with a slight change of emphasis. “Hair grows back.”

  Still no reaction—so much for subtlety. “As opposed to lips or noses, that is.”

  Bingo. There was no need to disfigure Gloria beyond a few shallow scratches for effect—Simon soon discovered that he had only to bring the single-edged blade of the box cutter he’d found in a kitchen drawer anywhere near Gloria to provoke the fear he craved.

  Once he realized that, all that remained was the fine tuning: finding the perfect rhythm, knowing when to press and how hard, when to back off and for how long, learning when a mere threat or feint would suffice to get her attention and when an actual thrust was required: the game might not be about sex, thought Simon, but when it was good, it was an awful lot like making love—or the way making love was supposed to be, for those who didn’t suffer from ejaculatio praecox.

  X

  Lhermitte’s Sign

  1

  When she found herself feeling kind of punk at breakfast on Wednesday morning, Linda decided to blame it on the Betaseron. Flu-like symptoms were not an uncommon side effect. And if it was more than a Betaseron reaction, if her T-cells had decided to go off on another myelin-munching spree, there wasn’t much she could do about it anyway. In the multiple sclerosis sweepstakes, Linda Abruzzi had drawn the booby prize. Unlike relapsing-remitting MS, in which the effects of each episode are only temporary, or secondary progressive MS, in which the symptoms are permanent, but which typically doesn’t develop until a good fifteen years after the onset of the relapsing-remitting course, in the primary-progressive course of the disease, with which she had been diagnosed, the effects of each attack are permanent from the get-go.

  Linda’s first episode, nearly six months earlier, had been presaged by a weird, electric tingling in her lower extremities, followed by near-paralytic weakness in her calves and ankles. Still, she knew she was one of the lucky ones. Thanks to an early diagnosis by her doctor in San Antonio, she had been put on a course of Betaseron almost immediately, and to date had suffered no subsequent attacks. Her vision was good, her mind and memory sharp as ever, her pain was bearable, her fatigue generally surmountable, and now that she had her cane to lean on, she was getting around like shit on a wheel—no sense giving in to the bastard now.

  Unless—What if—

  She tried to stop her mind from finishing the thought, but it was already formed: What if she had an attack while she was driving? Or in the office, or at lunch? Wouldn’t it be better to stay home, make sure of what she was dealing with, rather than risk—

  Then it struck her: this was what classic agoraphobia was like, this was what her poor phobics (and she thought of them as hers now, a week and a half into the investigation) went through every day of their lives. It wasn’t going out to the market or the mall or the office that they feared, it was having an anxiety attack while they were out there. Isn’t it better to stay home than risk public humiliation?

  The answer, of course, was no. You said no—fuck no, if you were from Linda’s neighborhood—and you dragged yourself out into the arena. Because if you said yes, if you gave in to the fear, there would be no going back. The excuse, the cop-out, would be there again tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow, and the day after the day after tomorrow.

  Something else they used to say in Linda’s old neighborhood: I shoulda stood in bed. At first, it seemed as if she might as well have, for all the progress being made in the Childs manhunt. Save for one lonely red pin in San Francisco, representing Zap Strum’s apartment, the map on the wall was still embarrassingly blank—no valid Childs sightings to date, though a highway patrolman near Flagstaff had chased and braced a gray-haired attorney driving a silver Mercedes convertible with California plates, who had in turn threatened to hit the state of Arizona with a lawsuit so punishing that its unborn children would die broke.

  But a few minutes after ten, Pender called from the coast. “You’re up early,” she told him.

  “Your FBI never sleeps, kiddo. I was down in Big Sur yesterday—Dorie and I stopped in to see her old friend Dr. Luka.”

  “That’d be the Dr. Luka you promised you weren’t going to try to interview yourself.”

  “No interview—just an informal chat.” He gave her the gist of it.

  “So where does that leave us?” she asked, when he had finished.

  “With a first name and an approximate address for the year1963. How would you go about nailing that down a little more concretely?”

  Swell, a pop quiz. “I guess I’d have somebody check the property records. City of Berkeley or Alameda County.”

  “That’ll give you the owner’s name. Nelson was a kid.”

  “Call me a dreamer, Ed, but I’m guessing he’ll have the same last name as his parents.”

  “Good point. But if you do run into trouble—”

  “I’m not a total rookie, Chief. In the words of one of my favorite T-shirts, ‘quit yanking my ears,’ I know what I’m doing.”

  Pender laughed.

  “Call me on my cell when you’ve got it—I’m going back to bed.”

  “I thought my FBI never sleeps.”

  “Who said anything about sleeping?”

  2

  Drained, energized, empty, full of himself—Simon never knew how he was going to feel after a game.

  This morning it was all of the above, plus a polypharmaceutical hangover. He awoke alone in Gloria’s shiny bed—the headboard was constructed of stacked, polished aluminum rails—after an hour or two of sleep so unrestful that it was only the act of awakening that told him he’d been asleep in the first place. The satin pillowcase next to him was spattered with blood; when he rolled onto his back, he saw Grandfather Childs staring down at him from the mirror on the ceiling over the bed, and when he sat up, the old monstrosity was looking out from the elliptical mirror of that monstrous Moderne vanity table where he’d given Gloria her haircut last night.

  Naked, he tottered into the bathroom to empty his bladder. He had to close the shower curtain to block out the sight of Gloria sitting upright in the tub like Marat in his bath—something about the puffy features and the slanted eyes with their drooping lids reminded him uncomfortably of Missy.

  But he couldn’t block out the triptych of mirrors set at oblique angles just inside the bathroom door, presumably so the formerly vain Mrs. Gee could view herself from all sides. Spooky as it was to look directly into a mirror and see Grandfather Childs looking back at you, it was spooky cubed to see him out of the corner of your eye, or sense him behind you, then wheel around and see him wheeling around as if to catch you in the act.

  Simon hurried out of the bathroom without stopping to wash his hands or brush his teeth at the sink, which in any event was still littered with shards of broken mirror from the night before. Badly rattled—not frightened but rattled (there was a difference, he reminded himself)—he tossed a bedsheet over the oval mirror of the vanity table, brushed Gloria’s hair from the chair with his fingers, hauled his getaway satchel onto the chromed steel counter of the vanity, and began going through his pharmacopoeia in search of remedies both for his jangled nerves and his hangover.

  The latter was easy—there wasn’t a hangover in the world couldn’t be cured with a five-hundred milligram Percodan—but the heebie-jeebies, which often presaged a visit by the blind rat, presented more of a challenge. There was Valium of course, in five-, ten-, and fiftee
n-milligram sizes—on top of the Percodan, though, it might knock him out. There was Xanax—but that sometimes gave him the runs, which after last night’s stinky was something he definitely didn’t need.

  Or perhaps he could go in another direction entirely, he told himself. He had certainly enjoyed Gloria’s Ecstasy last night. Surprisingly, it was the first time he’d ever played a game on X—surprising because, now that he thought about it, the empathy drug seemed like a natural fit. The game was all about empathy—fear and empathy.

  Ecstasy, then, but at what dosage? He’d taken two last night, and he didn’t remember his own X, which came in pink capsules stamped with little hearts, as being any stronger: he decided to start with two. While waiting for the medication to take effect, with trembling fingers he tore two rolling papers to shreds trying to roll a joint at the vanity, and ended up with one of those lumpy, python-digesting-a-gopher numbers, which he smoked down to the roach before going downstairs in search of a more congenial bathroom in which to shower.

  When he saw the contorted figure in the red bikini briefs lying in full rigor mortis on the living room couch, Simon was surprised at its savaged condition—he couldn’t remember having inflicted that much damage. He hurried past it into the guest bedroom. No bodies here, and no American Moderne—just a single bed, a garage-sale dresser, and a few amateurish still lifes on the walls.

  So this austere little maid’s room was where the real Skairdykat had slept, according to Gloria. And this little closet of a bathroom was where she had showered. And her name is Linda, and now she lives with Pender. Which means another first for the game: a doubleheader. How convenient, thought Simon. How very…bloody…convenient.

  3

  “Not bad for a one-armed old fat man,” declared an exultant, if exhausted, Pender, after a morning of extended lovemaking punctuated by endorphin-drenched naps.

  “One-eyed,” Dorie murmured, equally satisfied, but less inclined to crow about it. She did think it was sort of sweet, how boyishly proud Pender was to have collaborated with her on that last, noisy multiple O.

  “Hunh?”

  “One-eyed old fat man—it’s a line from True Grit.”

  Pender shuddered—small wonder he’d misremembered the quote: the thought of losing even one eye filled him with horror. Once that happened, he knew, you were only a sharpened pencil away from total blindness.

  Linda called back while Dorie was in the shower. “Nelson Carpenter,” she announced.

  Pender checked his watch. “Just a little over three hours—couldn’t have done better myself. I don’t suppose you also came up with a current address?”

  “You know where Concord is?”

  “Massachusetts.”

  “Concord, California. North of San Francisco—Contra Costa County, I think. The subdivision’s named Rancho del Vista.”

  “Just give me the street address; I’ll find it.”

  Here we go again, thought Linda. “Ed, sooner or later, McDougal is gonna—”

  “—be very, very proud of his little Liaison Support Unit. But I give you my word of honor, if Nervous Nellie has anything at all to tell us about Childs’s whereabouts, I will pass the information along to the appropriate authorities.”

  Linda gave him the address, reminded him of his promise, and wished him luck; it wasn’t until another hour had passed that she realized their agreement could have been more precisely worded. She called him back and got his message box.

  “Ed, this is Linda. Just to clarify: the term ‘appropriate authorities’ does not, repeat not, include yourself. Talk to you soon.”

  “How far is Concord?” Pender called through the bathroom door, when Dorie had finished her shower.

  “Two, three hours. Depends on the traffic and the time of day. You can pretty much bypass San Fran and Oakland entirely, if you swing around on six-eighty. Why?”

  “That’s where Nervous Nellie lives.”

  “All right! We should probably leave now, avoid both commutes.”

  “Whoa. To paraphrase Tonto, what you mean ‘we,’ white woman?”

  “What you mean, what I mean?” Dorie came out wrapped in a bath towel, winding a second towel around her wet hair. “You’re not leaving me alone here, buster.”

  “Luka practically tore me a new one for bringing you along yesterday. Said I could be doing you untold psychological damage.”

  “In the first place: you didn’t bring me, I brought you. In the second place: Luka is at least ninety, and rumor has it he takes LSD once a month. In the third place: the psychological damage has already been done—by Simon. I dream about him, I imagine him popping up every time I turn a corner, and if you’re not in the room with me, I can’t even bring myself to look at the window, in case his face pops up there. In the fourth place: you’re the one who keeps saying he’s probably within driving distance of Berkeley, and in case you’ve forgotten, this house, my home, which he’s already invaded once, is very much within driving distance. Is that enough places for you yet? ’Cause if it’s not, I can come up with a whole lot more.”

  He raised both hands, palms out. “Okay, okay, I surrender.” But half an hour later he sneaked out of the house via the studio door while Dorie was on the phone with one of her girlfriends—better to ask forgiveness than permission was as effective a strategy with women as it was with the Bureau.

  Some women, anyway: when Pender reached the driveway, he stuck his hand into his pants pocket for his keys and came up empty. He told himself they must have fallen out of his pocket when he took his pants off last night. As he tiptoed into the house and past the kitchen on his way up to the bedroom, though, Pender heard a familiar jingling sound and backed up to see Dorie seated at the kitchen table, telephone in one hand, his key ring dangling from the thumb and forefinger of the other.

  “Be with you in a minute there, Lone Ranger,” she said, and jingled the keys merrily again.

  Just as well, thought Pender—he’d forgotten that he couldn’t work the damn shift anyway.

  4

  Conventional wisdom would argue that Simon Childs’s use of powerful pharmaceuticals, on top of all the other stress he was under, could only have served to accelerate the inevitable deterioration of an already unstable personality.

  Simon would have disagreed—and a case could well be made that the serotonin-reuptake-inhibiting effects of 3,4-methylene-dioxy-N-methylamphetamine, also known as MDMA, Adam, or Ecstasy, in addition to the weed and the Percodan, were indeed having a pacifying effect on him.

  But Simon was no pharmacologist. All he knew was that he’d stepped into the little stall shower in the guest bathroom half a jump ahead of the blind rat, and emerged feeling as giddy as a schoolboy and so full of fellow-feeling that on his way upstairs, he took the time to rearrange the body on the chrome and leather couch into as comfortable a position as rigor mortis would allow and cover it with a striped Hudson’s Bay blanket from the spare bedroom.

  Simon was feeling so mellow, in fact, that upon his return to the bedroom, before sitting down at the vanity to roll another doob, he removed the sheet he’d draped over the mirror earlier, and played a quick round of Senor Wences—”S’awright? S’awright! S’okay? S’okay!”—with Grandfather Childs.

  That was pushing it, though: once the joint—a better effort than the last one—was rolled, tempting as it would have been to watch his grandfather toke up, Simon turned his back on the old man. He took a deep drag—his glance fell upon the canvas travel bag on the floor next to him. He unzipped it a few inches to peek in on the king and the coral, sleeping peacefully in the bottom, entwined in each other’s arms like an old married couple.

  “Except you don’t have any arms, do you?” giggled Simon, zipping the bag, then unzipping it again. “S’awright…?” “S’awright!” he called in two different voices.

  But why this sudden obsession with Senor Wences? he asked himself. Hadn’t thought of the old ventriloquist from the Ed Sullivan Show in years, and now he was
practically channeling him. Eventually it came to him: he missed his sister. Missy had been so taken with Senor Wences that she’d spent most of 1959 with a little face painted on the thumb side of her fist. “Eassy for you, deefeecul’ for meee,” she used to croon to her hand. Not that anybody but me ever understood her, Simon thought sadly.

  But it was a good sadness, a sweet, loving sadness welling up inside him, filling the emptiness like a big warm golden marshmallow. Then he caught a blur of movement in his lower peripheral vision and looked down in time to see a banded snake slithering out of the canvas bag—God bless it, he’d left it slightly open. A second serpentine head emerged from the bag, testing the air with its tongue. This second snout was black, thank goodness—Simon snatched up a hairbrush and forced the coral back into the bag.

  “No big deal,” he muttered to himself, zipping up the bag again—the scarlet king snake was only an enhancement. He’d planned to use it to deliver a few practice bites first—something that was not, of course, feasible with the coral—so he could watch Skairdykat’s panic slowly build as she waited for the venom to take effect. And as soon as it began to dawn on her that the king snake was harmless, it would be time to bring out the real deal.

  That had been the plan, anyway. But as long as he still had the coral, he reminded himself, Skairdykat’s game would not be seriously compromised. And after Skairdykat, Pender: the plans for that game had been hatching ever since La Farge, as the eyeless corpse on the living room couch mutely attested.

  And yet, under the enforced calm of the Ecstasy, Simon was vaguely aware of a budding anxiety. Somehow it seemed that the closer he got to Pender’s game, the less anxious he was to have it over with. That was probably why he’d driven east after La Farge, instead of south to Maryland, he was beginning to understand, why he’d detoured through Allenwood and Georgetown, risking life and liberty for a game with Skairdykat. It had been Pender’s game that had been driving him ever since Missy died, but thinking about what came after Pender was like speculating on what came after infinity, what lay beyond the borders of the universe.