Watch Your Mouth

by Daniel Handler

  Help was easy. “There aren’t organized twelve-step programs for absolutely everything,” the book said, “but the twelve steps are blueprints. Use them for an odyssey of recovery,” an odyssey, I decided, which could counterpoint the Iliad I had already experienced. Breaking the SPELL laid out twelve neat steps like a strip mall: one-stop shopping, bing bing bing. I submitted to the twelve-step universe, perfectly devised, here in surburbia, also perfectly devised.

  So far, this has been a book about pain. Now I will describe how I healed myself, how I broke my own SPELL and pulled myself out of CRISIS with the help of a twelve-step program. What next? I’d make next. When you’re stuck in a story, a famous writer of detective fiction once said, have two guys come through the door with guns. And the funny thing is, that’s exactly what happened.

  Step 1

  One morning, after knocking, two guys came through my door with guns. I looked through my little peephole and saw them: two suburban cops, wired with morning coffee from the new Queequeg Coffee Shop down the highway and the prospect of action. Outside of the sullen teenagers throwing beer bottles against the dumpsters behind the twelve-screen movie theater, there wasn’t much going down, crimewise. It must have been cool to get the order to open the screen door, watch Santa’s face swing by in a creaky, grinning arc and knock sharply.

  “Joseph?” the officer asked, and then he said my last name, which has been changed to protect the innocent.

  “Yes,” I said. I had my pants on but not a shirt. They’d interrupted me as I stood in the shower, the water off but still dripping, as I’d been stroking myself remembering something I couldn’t quite remember, and I’d thrown pants over my eager object on the way to the door. My heart was pounding from a denied orgasm, and from the arrival of two guys with guns. “Is something wrong?”

  “You used to live in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with the Glass family?”

  “Well, I didn’t live with them. For a summer. I stayed with them for a summer.” My carpet was all crabgrass beneath my nervous feet. “What is it?”

  The two cops looked at one another like they couldn’t remember whose line it was. “There’s been a death,” the first one said, his hand travelling down to his waist toward his gun. My unfired equivalent throbbed briefly, and then I heard what he said and stepped back. I sat on the unmade bed. The cops stepped into my apartment and the one who hadn’t talked yet slammed Santa behind him, a little too hard. They approached me warily and from different angles.

  “Who—” I asked, and swallowed. “Who could be dead?”

  The quiet one rolled his eyes. The talker looked at me like I knew the answer already. “Simon Glass,” he said.

  I’ll pause for a minute while you dig out that old playbill, from that opera you attended a while ago, and check the character list.

  The talking cop took my silence for shock, which maybe it was. He took out a small notepad, the kind you could get in pre-wrapped packets of notebooks two stores down from the job I was late for. “Now, your primary relationship was with Cynthia Glass?”

  It took me a few seconds: primary, relationship, Cynthia. “Yes. She was my girlfriend.”

  “When did you break up?”

  I blinked.

  “Hey,” the quiet one suddenly snarled, and rapped on the wall of my apartment. “He asked you a question. When did you break up with Ann?”

  “Cyn,” I said.

  The talking one looked at us both, and then down at his notebook. “It’s Cynthia,” he said tiredly, like he’d been the one whose tongue had made her cry out, up in an attic somewhere. “Simon’s sister. Now, Joseph, when did you and Cynthia break up?”

  “It’s Stephen,” I said. “Stephen. How did he—what happened?”

  The quiet one pounded on the wall again. “We’ll ask the questions, Stephen,” he snapped, and it all became clear to me: It was Good Cop, Bad Cop, also the title of a thriller we were pushing this week at Bindings.

  “You’re not Joseph Last Name Changed to Protect the Innocent?” he asked.

  “Yes I am,” I said. “But Cyn’s—Cynthia’s—brother’s name was Stephen.”

  Good Cop looked at the notebook. “Yes that’s true,” he said soberly. Bad Cop pounded the wall again, halfheartedly, and looked over at Good. Clearly they wished they could just start over, back at the Santa face.

  “He’s dead?” I asked.

  “We’re asking the questions here,” Bad Cop said. “Now when did you break up with—”

  “Cyn’s dead,” I said. My hand, spiderlike, clutched the unmade sheet. It was true.

  “When did you break up?”

  “Around the end of the summer,” I said. “I guess. She was—she was killed. I don’t want to talk about it. Now, if you will excuse me, I have to go to work.” You don’t have to read the thriller to know what happened next. What always happens when the suspect tries to brush off the police. Bad Cop shoved me by the shoulders, hard, and I was back down on the saggy mattress.

  “I don’t know anything!” I shouted. I looked at Good Cop for sympathy. “I’m just trying to—leave me alone, please. I just—I want to get away from that whole family.”

  “Which is why you moved here to Pittsburg?” Good Cop said skeptically.

  I looked down at my bare feet. How in the world did I think I was going to work half-dressed? “It could have been called anything. It just happened,” I said, “to be called Pittsburg.”

  “That just happened,” Good Cop said, “to—”

  “It’s a different spelling. One letter and everything—”

  “And just happened to be the place where Simon was working,” Good Cop said. “I’m finding this hard to believe, Stephen.”

  “Joseph,” I said. “Stephen. What happened?”

  “You’re not making a lot of sense,” Bad Cop said.

  “I’m confused,” I said. “I’m in recovery. I’m not even at Step One.”

  “Drugs?”

  “The Glasses.” The perfect grey of suburban morning was turning my bare feet paler and paler. I was late for work. “Can I get dressed?”

  “Just keep your hands where we can see them,” Bad Cop said. Cyn had said something like that to me once. In silence I unrolled socks, buttoned a shirt, tied a tie.

  “Where do you work?” Good Cop asked, his eye on his notepad. Was he testing me? Was it already written down?

  “Bindings,” I said. “New Age.” I took Breaking the SPELL from my bedstand and held it up for them. Good and Bad exchanged a look. They always do. “Where does Stephen work?” I asked. “What happened?”

  By now I had my keys. Good Cop led the way, then me and then Bad Cop, with Santa bringing up the rear in a dull thud. My fingers were trembling around my keys, so much that I couldn’t lock my door, and with a tired, superior glare, Bad Cop took the keys from me and finished the job. I think I was being arrested, which was scary but brought a solid, clear calm. I could not go to work. I was sandwiched between two policemen; I could not escape. I knew I had the right to remain silent but I asked it again anyway. “Where does Stephen work?”

  Good Cop looked at me like he wished I’d stop pretending to be so dumb, so powerless. But it wasn’t an act: It was the first step. “Right in your backyard,” he said, and pointed at the rising sun.

  I took one step out to the railing. I looked out at the landscape and couldn’t imagine what he was telling me. “What?” I pointed, too, but I couldn’t see anything. As you can see, the parking lot said, the strip malls, the cylinder of the lab on top of the hill and the dry sun, rising over Pittsburg and making me late, as you can see, the universe is perfect. “What?”

  With disgusted patience he grabbed my wrist and moved my arm over until I was pointing at the Morrison Lab, which had been there all along, like an alphabetized book. I had come three thousand miles to live in the shadow of the lab where Stephen worked, and I still couldn’t find it until he helped me. It was the first step, all right: I admitted I was power
less, and that my life had become unmanageable.

  “O.K.,” I said hollowly, one hand clutching my book and the other still pointing at what had been there all along, and I went with them.

  Step 2

  “There are two things in the world,” Breaking the SPELL says simply. “Nothing and semantics.”

  “I have to go to work,” I said from my meek and sweaty place in the backseat of the cop car. It was filthy.

  “You don’t have to go anywhere,” Bad Cop said, “until we say so.” He had a point. I only had my book. Outside the strip malls descended, as if on freight elevators, as we took the mellow grade up to the Morrison Lab where Stephen worked before he died. The windows of the cop car were grimy and thick, giving Pittsburg a pale pollution, but even when we pulled up to the curb, already littered with cop cars, and Good Cop unlocked the door and primly beckoned me out, the sky still looked filthy.

  The lobby of the Morrison Lab was evenly split between two costumes: white lab coats and police uniforms. Experts on what went on in the building, and experts on what had gone wrong in it: “Everyone,” Breaking the SPELL encourages, “is an expert on something.” Everyone was all bunched up in groups, muttering; the groups parted for Good Cop, Bad Cop and me like one of us was Moses. It seemed to take forty years to trundle down the arched hallways to the scene of the crime.

  The lab was sputtered in brown. Surprisingly stagey equipment—colored liquids in shapely coed bottles, clear plastic tubing, metal boxes pimpled with dials and portholes for electric-green blips, Bunsen burners, mounds of computer printouts, like a mad-scientist opera set—was caked in something brown. The equations on the blackboards were splotched with it, in thick gobs of galaxy formations which extended up two walls. One of the other walls was draped in a big black plastic sheet, like a garbage bag, like everything was garbage. The floor was entirely brown. Even the cops were getting dirty, just from moving around in there, and a small circle of white lab coats were less white, and more worried, than those in the lobby. The only thing that wasn’t slapped brown was a blank white sheet, draped over something in a corner, something tenting the sheet in four places. Something with four limbs.

  “Recognize something?” Good Cop said, after I’d taken it all in. I turned to look at his face, slightly brown from the stained light fixtures.

  “What?” I asked. “Ask the questions,” Breaking the SPELL says, “and you might get the answers.”

  “He said,” Bad Cop said, “recognize something?”

  “Well, it looks like a lab.”

  Bad Cop spat, and it crackled on the drying brown floor. “You learn that at your fancypants school?”

  I thought of Mather and couldn’t think of a thing I’d learned there. “No,” I said. “I just—I don’t recognize anything. I’ve never been here.”

  Bad Cop stalked over to the sheet and pulled it back like we were going to bed. “What about this?” he shouted, and the worried lab coats looked up and glared at him. “Do you recognize this, by any chance?”

  Stephen’s mouth was gaping open at an unnatural angle, too wide, and off. Something had pulled his chin down like it was a stuck drawer. Inside it was filled with mud, filled to the teeth. There was a long cat-scratch down his right cheek, red in the brown minstrel show of his face, streaked with tears or water or something. His eyes were either closed or out—there was so much dirt in the sockets I couldn’t see anything. His hands were half-clenched like knobby winter trees, one of them clasping nothing and the other pointing at nothing. For a second I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with his arms, and then I knew: everything. They were folded and refolded like a map in the glove compartment, bent at places that weren’t joints, accordioned in and out like someone had tried to force them to fit somewhere. His legs weren’t bent anywhere but the knee, but the wrong way, either that or his whole torso had been wrung out like a rag, it was impossible to tell in all the mud which had hardened along his body in mid-tide. The brown wave tapered down his body like a landing strip, a blossom of crags under his broken neck down to a drained swamp where I assumed his sexual organs were still, somewhere. Stephen was naked except for a small tatter of white—the last of a lab coat, I assume—and the sheet which Bad Cop had flung back from him.

  “I assume,” he said, in best Bad Cop sarcasm, “that you’ll recognize Simon Glass.”

  “Stephen,” I whispered. Too dirty for even my dirty mind, and too splayed out for the geometrics of the suburbs where it lived, the sight pinned my head to the wall and stuffed it with clay, kept stuffing it even when it fell thrashing to the floor, broke my brain’s arms in a dozen places and left its legs bent the wrong way, all wrong. Everything was all wrong. Breaking the SPELL, which I dropped in the mud as I stumbled backward, says this is a common feeling for people in recovery—“remember,” it says, “everything is as likely to be right as it is to be wrong”—but they don’t tell you how it feels. It feels awful. Good Cop caught my arm on my way back, and guided me to an immense lab table that rose like an altar from the floor. I couldn’t sit on it but at least I could lean, my hand leaving a print in the mud tableclothed all over it. “It’s Stephen,” I said again. “What happened to him?”

  The sheet went down. “Why don’t you tell us?” Bad Cop said.

  I swallowed, my throat empty and wet. “Do you think I—”

  Good Cop leaned next to me. “We need your help,” he said simply, gesturing around the room with an unstained hand. “We don’t know what to make of this, and you’re the closest thing we have right now to talking to Stephen.”

  I looked around the room again, the overturned equipment, the garbage bag. I swallowed. The mud, the sheet. “I’m not very close,” I said.

  “Close enough.” Bad Cop walked over to me so I was between Good and Bad. “I understand the same exact thing happened to your girlfriend. His sister.”

  “What?”

  “We’ve been on the phone with your rabbi,” Good Cop said plainly.

  What?

  “What?” I said.

  “Your—”

  “I don’t have a rabbi,” I said.

  Good Cop sighed and opened his notepad. “In Pittsburgh,” he said. “Pennsylvania Pittsburgh. Rabbi Sour—Soar—Rabbi T-S-O-U-R-I-S.”

  “Tsouris,” I said. One quick lesson. “He’s not my rabbi.”

  Bad Cop looked like he wanted to make him be my rabbi. Good Cop looked like he didn’t care whose rabbi he was. He glanced at his notepad again. “He told us what happened at the funeral.”

  “What happened to your girlfriend,” Bad Cop sneered.

  I started to put my face in my hands, except one of them was smeared with mud. “Nobody ,” I said quietly, “nobody knows what happened at the funeral.”

  “Cynthia Glass was killed,” Good Cop said quietly. “We know that.”

  “And?” I said.

  “And Tsouris isn’t entirely sure you didn’t do it.”

  “That I—?”

  “That you attacked her.” Good Cop shrugged slightly. “Look, that’s a closed book. It was raining, and nobody seems to have seen anything clearly. The Pittsburgh police said that Miss Glass was hit too hard for it to have been you. They told you that. You know that. Nobody’s accusing you of anything.”

  “I have a theory, though,” Bad Cop said in a kindly tone that was mean around the edges. “That hit-too-hard thing doesn’t mean anything. People have superhuman strength in stressful situations. Strength they didn’t know they had. Like that babysitter who dug herself out of the muddy house.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You must have read about it,” Bad Cop said tiredly. “The big mudslide, while the parents were at the opera? The babysitter, a skinny little thing, dug herself out of a ton and a half of mud, all because of a panic reaction or something. She saved herself when nobody else could.”

  “So she’s alive?” I said. All my dreams of that girl dying. Don’t they fact-check the Bee?

  �
��You could have killed her,” Bad Cop said. “You probably did. I mean, now there’s her brother, dead of the same thing, it looks like. And you just happen to live in town. Look, we’re checking out your alibi now, but why don’t you just give it up? There have only been two deaths like this in the universe, and you were poking around both of them!”

  “What—” I said. “What—” My hand moved on the lab table and brushed up against something hairy which turned out to be tinsel—some Christmas decoration lost in the fray. I couldn’t choose a question. “What—what alibi? There’s no—I haven’t given you an alibi.”

  “Lauren did,” Good Cop said. “Bindings.” Sometime, while skipping ahead, I’d picked up a girlfriend along with my job: one-stop shopping. “Like my partner said, you’re in the clear. We just want to ask you a few questions.”

  “You want to ask me—?”

  “Down at the station,” he said, and held out a hand to me like we were going to walk hand-in-hand, the end of a romance movie.