The four of us ran toward the guests as the golem reached the middle of the dance floor, and now, bathed in the pink light of the lanterns, everyone could see it was real. A full ten feet of clay, wet but solid, was swiveling slowly toward me, and you could see it wasn’t anybody in an outfit, not moving like that, not built like that. Not with a thin slit of unmoving mouth, or with those deep-set eyes, larvae-white and without pupils, blank in their sockets. Not with those enormous arms, raised overhead and toppling the lanterns from their wires. Some of the debris fell onto the table, which folded in on its spindly legs and tipped the punch bowl, a cascade of sugary blood on the floor. Now everyone was screaming. Panicked but frozen, we were screaming and huddling together, and the golem swung an arm and caught the oldest ballerina, sending her careening to the ground, rolling away, her limbs in fourth position, fifth position, unconscious. Nobody had ever been thrown like that, not by a person. This was something bigger, scarier, a monster, a force beyond our control, a Higher Power.
Towering over us, the golem swung at other people who were in the way, the cowboys tossed together, Zhivago punched to the ground, Al hurled amidst a flurry of clipboard paper. And then it reached me—the eleventh step. I closed my eyes tight, seeking through prayer and meditation to improve my conscious contact with the Higher Power as I understood it—I felt the damp hands clenched on the scruff of my neck—praying only for knowledge of the Higher Power’s will for me and the power to carry it out. “What do you want? What do you want from me? What do you want from me?”
The hands went gentle, briefly, and in the pause I opened my eyes. I was slid to the side; I heard Mimi and Mike whimper behind me. The golem’s head was tilted toward me, a polite angle, almost deferential, quizzical. “What do you want from me?” I screamed again, and the slit of a mouth opened, slowly, the square jaw dropping like an unstuck drawer.
The golem leaned in close and the Word of God tumbled out: “Nothing,” he said. He leaned even further, further than you’d think a figure that size could lean, curving past me, over me, moving over me like something being poured from one place to another, dissolving onto Mimi in a wet and crumbly mess. It was magically instant, the golem curling over to suffocate Mimi in a last gesture before disintegration, all over in seconds, and all over Mimi. It wanted Mimi. The monster didn’t want me any more than I wanted the monster. One word and it was over, the weight pouring over her before anyone could move. Mrs. Glass gave one half-scream, and then the mud was upon her and she was mute and finished forever.
Step 12
The golem was done just as everyone else came to life: the groaning cowboys; Al, a sheet of paper in her hair; Marco emerging from underneath the table; the ballerina wailing; Mike wailing; everyone wailing. Dr. Zhivago crawled to the mass of clay and punched at it, his mouth open and mute, but you could hear from the sound of his blows there wasn’t any digging her out. The clay was hardened already, ceramic. Somebody dropped their trombone. The mother witch took off her hat, crying; the wig was attached and the whole thing fluttered to the ground. Sarah Hackett stared numbly at the clay, still clutching the microphone. The fat lady never got to sing.
Because it wasn’t over, of course. Still isn’t. It never is. Within hours some bemused local cops arrived on a tiny little boat but what could we tell them? There were so many versions of the story that eventually the two of them stopped even pretending to take notes. Dr. Zhivago couldn’t speak, or wouldn’t, just stayed wrapped in a blanket by the palm trees. The clay was absolutely impenetrable to the shovels we had lying around the Vast gardening shed, but after a few days the cops lost interest in digging through it anyway because they couldn’t find any record that Frank Zhivago even had a wife. I’m sure the mound of clay is still there, even though the brochures I receive—through some perverse twist I’m still on their mailing list, no matter how many times I call—there aren’t any photographs of it. But that’s hardly surprising. You take a bunch of pictures, but you only put the best ones in. Tiny women swimming. A deserted beach, the canoes lined up like surgical tools. Buffet. The Andersons demanded a refund and got one.
Stories like this happen all the time, and you read about them, but they just slip by in little strips of paragraph at the side of the bottom of the back page of the newspaper. Some town in South America reports a giant snake, swallowing children whole and cows; neither the snake nor the story appear again. They dig up an ancient, undisturbed tomb, and find stereo equipment in it, as inappropriate as a baby in a basket washing up outside the Pharoah’s palace. You blink and wait for the next story. A strange weather something is killing all the fish in a lake somewhere. Somebody died, far away, we don’t know why. A bored and ambitious reporter might link up the deaths someday, one in Pittsburgh, one in Pittsburg, one up in Oregon and one on an island, but the editor won’t O.K. the travel money to go check it out. Somebody might decide to write the biography of a big-shot in the men’s movement, and the Andersons will get that knock on the door they’ve been half-waiting for since that vacation they took a long time ago. But they’ll be wrong about where the resort was, and what year they went; the rest will sound untrustworthy, too. And it is untrustworthy; why, a reader would say, if it was so scary and everything, did Joseph manage to sleep with Allyson three more times before he left?
I don’t know why. One day your family is spinning around your head, blurring everything your eyes take in; the next day it’s all at rest and you just want to get laid, eat dinner, quit your job, get on with it. It turns out that your life is made of specifics, no matter what you learn at college about Tolstoy: Each family is different, whether happy or unhappy. Their influence melts into you like ghosts, untraceable, imaginary. You can formulate something out of it, if you must; you can force things into a structure like librettists do, telescoping months of action into a four-act-farce, or like therapists do, stuffing all you think into twelve little steps like folded clothes in a duffel. Call it the Old Testament and scribble it on lambskin. But why? The truth just flows under you like a river. You can float on it but you don’t know where it’s going. The investigation was over and I was free to leave.
They almost took my duffel back off the boat as it idled; I had loaded my stuff and myself onto it as the Vast boatmen unloaded supplies for the next round of guests and for a second my baggage got confused with somebody else’s. If I hadn’t noticed in time they would have left me with a large post office box, covered with stamps and the inkings of rerouting. The post office box had travelled everywhere, this baggage, looking for the right spot. If I wanted to fit everything in neatly I would say it was my box of books, finally; they’d caught up with me and I could write my paper, finish my education. But I just looked at Al, standing next to the box, as the boat started up. She wanted me to stay but we’d constructed some sort of truce. Even though she was mad at me, and scarcely said a word, she hugged me briefly and stood there watching as the boat pulled away.
If you need link it all up, you bored and ambitious reader, open the box, there on the shore. If you need it to end like a book let it be the books. It’s the books, then, there on the shore, just missing me like people who fall in love at the wrong time, in novels, and have to part from each other at a train station, an airport, a rickety wooden pier. You can imagine me where you want. I felt like my story wasn’t over, but you can pretend the twelfth step was already upon me, you can pretend I had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, and have vowed to carry this message to other addicts and practice these principles in all my affairs. I felt like the river was still uncharted, an unruly Nile, running all over the place the way water just will, but you can sit on its banks and read any story you devise.
About the Author
DANIEL HANDLER is based in San Francisco where he lives with his wife Lisa Brown. He is the author of one previous novel, The Basic Eight (also available from Allison & Busby) and a series of books under the pseudonym Lemony Snickett. He recently appeared on the front of a Ha
llmark greeting card – the inside of the card was blank.
By Daniel Handler
The Basic Eight
Watch Your Mouth
Copyright
Allison & Busby Limited
13 Charlotte Mews
London W1T 4EJ
www.allisonandbusby.com
First published in Great Britain by Allison & Busby in 2001.
This ebook edition first published in 2012.
Copyright © 2000 by DANIEL HANDLER
The right of DANIEL HANDLER to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All characters and events in this publication other than those clearly in the public domain are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent buyer.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-0-7490-1341-7
Watch Your Mouth Page 21
