No matter, they bustled upstairs, there was no elevator, so both septuagenarians were out of breath upon reaching the seventh floor.
They entered with Cordo’s key and found Hortense on the couch, caressing her stomach in the gray light, unabated for the apartment’s drabness.
The men gathered round her, crouching, stroking her arms in daft consolation, as though they were mildly autistic individuals who knew the customs of death regarding the surviving family but who didn’t, could not, attach any emotion to such motions.
Hortense looked at both of them in turn with a terror unusual in her eyes—not melancholy, not aversion to death, but in fact true terror—and then she tilted back her head, turned up her eyes above Tom’s head just before Camille rammed a kitchen knife through the back of his neck, cleanly severing the spinal cord from his brainstem.
Hortense screamed with blood speckled on her face as Camille jerked out the knife, turning to Cordo with it raised with her one arm above her head, the last of her green teeth appearing between her snarling lips, her naked body frail and paradoxically corded, straining, by the cancer treatment, while Tom collapsed onto the gray carpet, wound oozing blood as his body and his head, now made as two islands in the ocean, asynchronously depleted his last nonrenewable electrical impulses, forehead and wrists and knees and toes dully thudding on the floor, and before she could do more, Cordo grabbed Camille’s hand and seized the knife from her grasp and drove her backward with all the ease of a semi moving a grafted gingko tree and slammed her against the wall, denting the drywall with the back of her head, and he sank the knife into her diseased liver, pulled out, into her accursed lungs once, twice, the blade tip penetrating the drywall so that Cordo could keep Camille suspended at an equal height before him, blood filling her pierced lungs and making her speech sound as though she were somehow gurgling mouthwash and talking simultaneously, a Tuvan throat singer making the greatest sacrifice for the sanctity of her craft.
“Goddamn you!” she hissed. “I’ve been shooting the fucking moon for you and all you’ve been doing is fucking everything with a heartbeat!”
Behind them Tom still spasmed at Hortense’s feet while she looked on in horror at the whole scene.
Cordo pushed the knife deeper into Camille and the wall and she wailed hoarsely.
“So I die a third time—I’m getting the hang of it. And anyway I’m already alive again—with another one on the way!”
Cordo gritted his teeth, twisted the knife.
“The grave is calling for you, Cordo. In a few years, there will be freedom from death for all—except you. There will be no salvation for you, Cordo, no reprieve from the blackness wherein the trillions of history’s dead are packed tight as in a child’s coffin and they wail on an everlasting breath of air and your mother and father burn in black fire and scream for you to help them and their eternally broiling flesh smells of blood and amniotic fluid and my French lavender perfume!”
“SHUT THE FUCK UP!”
Cordo ripped out the knife and stabbed her in the heart and pulled out, ssshunk-ssshnk, ssshunk-ssshnk, ssshunk-ssshnk, over and over again until his hand burned and he heard his shoulder dislocate but he didn’t feel any pain, only couldn’t raise the knife anymore—a piece of machinery going out on him—and Camille the creature was dead and disfigured and there was blood everywhere and Tom had stopped spasming, he was dead, and Hortense was crying—how long had she been crying?—as she hugged herself and there was pounding on the front door and people yelling beyond and Cordo’s legs buckled, he fell onto the floor in a sit, as though he were preparing to meditate, but instead he covered his ears and shut his eyes and screamed above it all.
When the two police officers got there and broke through the door with guns leveled and found Hortense crying on the couch and Cordo sitting between the bodies and dripping blood with all the calm of a Zen monk, they both pulled back into the hallway and vomited into the wooden floorboards.
One kept his gun on Cordo, who had his back to the door, while the other officer radioed for ambulances. When it arrived the consensus between the officers and the rescue team was that it was the most gruesome crime scene they’d ever seen.
Cordo told investigators what had happened and Hortense corroborated everything, adding in that Camille had forced her to call Tom and Cordo and trick them into coming over with the knife at her throat.
Cordo followed Hortense’s recommendation that Camille be cremated and he subsequently threw away the urn. Tom was buried in Tacoma, Cordo going alone to stand over his grave, which sat in the shadow of Mount. Rainier.
It took about a month for things to return to normal—inasmuch as would pass for normal.
Hortense now lived with Cordo at the Everett house. Cordo hired a personal driver to take her back and forth to the university, where she carried on her classes and research without intermission, though surely all of Seattle must be talking about the murders and their perpetrators.
Cordo no longer watched movies nor TV nor worked nor went on the internet but his experience as a former media man surely told him things would not be easy for Hortense for a while, she would be the object of sidelong glances and whispers.
But not Cordo. He went out only once a week now, to get enough alcohol to sustain him week by week.
Truth be told that’s why he hired the personal driver, so that his drinking would not be interrupted. He sat in his vintage—just another way to say worn, flattened—papasan chair drinking and passing out and reawakening and drinking some more, day in and day out.
When Hortense started showing a month later, he took it as a given instead of the miracle he’d always heard it called. She never went to the doctor and Cordo never talked to her about it. Of course she had it all in order.
Three months in Hortense was enormous, as though she were in her ninth month. She came home one night and found Cordo in his chair, conscious but drifting, whiskey bottle in lap. Holding her stomach as though there were danger of her dropping it, she sat on the couch and turned on the TV and ignored him.
The light of television must have been nearly forgotten to Cordo. He blinked, dry eyes popping, and he sat up, stiff limbs bending with some resistance, like laundry left out in the cold and frozen on a clothesline.
He looked over at her, an old guard dog whose bark now is most certainly worse than his bite, and when she did not look back, he turned to watch the TV through bleary eyes, headlights on a dark road through a foggy windshield.
In an hour they hadn’t spoken one word and Cordo had finished the whiskey. Then with no overture:
“The only thing I can figure is I’m being punished.”
Hortense looked over at him, waiting for more.
“What could you be punished for?”
Cordo chuckled.
“Anything. You can be punished for the smallest things, all it takes is the right god. Just look at Stalin.”
He hung his head on his fist, still looking at the TV but not watching it.
“And why not?” he went on. “If you’re a god, be frivolous. Punish people for not recycling, for having dreadlocks just as severely as you would murderers and rapists. Punish the warmongers and the neutral, the active and the idle indiscriminately.”
He looked at Hortense as she gazed at him cluelessly.
“What are you gonna do when you get the cancer? Chemo or suicide?”
“Depends.”
“Always, always. Who do you think’s gonna die first between us?”
“You if you keep drinking.”
Cordo laughed.
“From your lips to God’s ears.”
He watched TV.
“Is there no limit to how maudlin you can be?” she asked.
“No.”
“Why? What do you have to be sad about—you have your wife again and if I can manage everything, you’ll have me forever.”
“You’re not my wife. She wasn’t a murderer.”
“Camille was the murd
erer.”
“Camille was you—you were Amelia—Hortense is Lourdes, you’re all killers!”
“The chemo drove Camille crazy—you and your dick. And you forced her to get the chemo.”
“You’re just like a politician—you say one thing while it works for your position but as soon as it doesn’t, you say the direct opposite.”
“We’ve had separate consciousnesses independently affected by each’s unique environmental interactions. If you have two keys to the same lock and give one to your wife and keep the other yourself, they’ll each go through different things throughout their lifetimes and one will inevitably break in the lock before the other but that has no bearing on the wholeness of the other key.”
Cordo shook his head.
“Glad it makes sense to someone.”
They watched TV.
“What would you do if I killed myself?” Cordo asked. “Drove right into Possession Sound?”
“Because suicide worked so well for you the last time?”
“You told me that this—your work—was all about us. So what would you do if I weren’t in the equation anymore?”
“If you’d kill yourself after all I’ve done for us, then you’re not the man I thought you were.”
“You’re not the human I thought you were.”
She glared at him and he only smirked at her.
“This is all bigger than some sad old alcoholic.”
“It’s unnatural.”
“Indoor plumbing was unnatural until ancient Greece and then it became the new natural.”
Cordo shook his head, dispelled his drunken frustration with a chuckle.
“It’s good you have my quick wit. Without it you’d have no defense against the doubt.”
“I have no doubt.”
“No, maybe. Because your fear is greater.”
“Fear of what?”
“Of death.”
“I’ve died three times—”
“You had a safety net. But what about without? You’re too scared for that. Because what if there is some judge in the sky? How will you and your perversion of humanity weigh on His scales?”
Hortense was silent, broiling.
“After my father died, my mother foundered. She refinanced the house to have money to buy Vicodin and Percocet, got deep into debt. I could have helped her—gotten her into rehab—she’d have lost her job, the house, I’d be homeless, but hell, I could’ve moved out, gotten a job somewhere, supported myself, maybe helped her out. But I didn’t do any of that. Instead I just wrote.”
He didn’t look at her.
“Are you ready to be judged for that?” Hortense asked.
“I already have been.”
“And how were you found?”
He turned to her.
“Wanting.”
She thought about this as he snickered to himself, went beside her, stroked her belly, breathed out.
“So. Treatment? Or fire?”
She then thought about this but could make no sense of it.
“Treatment.”
Cordo nodded.
“I’ll look forward to it.”
He then stumbled into the dark hallway, into his bedroom.
The next day, before Hortense left for school, she asked Cordo—if he could, at some point in his jam-packed day—to get her some cranberry juice, she had an intense craving for it.
And while Hortense was at school, Cordo did not start drinking upon awakening but rather drove to a Seattle hardware store and bought out their stock of ionized smoke detectors—50 of them—and while checking out, he small-talked with the clerk, bemoaning that his previous smoke detector supplier had run out of the kind he typically used and he had a string of houses that needed smoke detectors before the inspector came in.
Then Cordo drove home, stopping off at an Everett supermarket to get a carton of cranberry juice.
Once back home he sat out in the sunlight of the backyard with a rusted aluminum toolbox beside him on the table bench while on the table itself, he began the tedious process of opening each detector’s packaging with a knife, then dissembling the detector’s face from its back, detaching the battery compartment, twisting off a black tube to reveal the metalwork, then unscrewing a gold metal penny-sized flat-topped screw, in the process loosening a metal disc whose middle was depressed enough to contain a tiny glass jar of tiny white specks in it. On the rim of the disc were the embossed words RADIOACTIVE AMERICIUM-241.
Cordo removed this little jar, unscrewed the lid, and emptied the little white specks into the opened bottle of cranberry juice.
He repeated this process for the remaining 49 detectors before throwing away their broken and disemboweled remains. He recapped the cranberry juice, shook the bottle, then stored it in the fridge.
That night when Hortense got home, she went straight for the stuff.
Cordo waited. He drank wine, commented on Hortense’s rapidly deteriorating appearance, though not so much that he frightened her to run to the hospital—quite the opposite. He remarked sometimes they should go see a doctor, you look pale, but she dismissed it only as a simple cold and stayed away, as far as possible, from doctors and hospitals.
She tried to keep up with her work and school but inevitably fell behind in both. First were the jitters—breaking a plate or glass at dinner because it warbled out of her grasp. Her paleness turned pink with the onset of a widespread rash.
She vomited but then maybe that was just the morning sickness. And she had diarrhea and headaches and maybe all that was just the pregnancy too.
She soon grew too weak to go out of the house. Cordo fired the driver and Hortense spent days at a time in bed or on the couch, alternating sleeping, vomiting, and lying in sweaty fever.
Cordo made her soup and brought her more cranberry juice, which she still had a taste for somehow.
In her eighth month, her hair fell out in great clumps. Bald, Cordo suggested not too insistently they go to the hospital but Hortense again denied him, some women lose hair during pregnancy!
“What if something’s wrong with the baby?” he asked drunkenly.
She felt her stomach for a moment, felt movement.
“She’s fine.”
She was now the most pregnant pregnant woman Cordo had ever seen. She looked as though she were a humanized Venus figurine or a character in costume for some movie about an obese flatulent family screaming at each other across the dinner table to pass the meatloaf.
Near the end of her eighth month, she’d abandoned any vestige of her former life to instead lie on the couch. When she wasn’t sleeping, she was crying, and after so much of this, she finally asked Cordo to take her to the hospital. Cordo denied her. She asked him again and again and finally begged him, weeping, it hurts so much. She tried to get his cell phone to call 911 but he caught her, returned her to the couch, and had to do this so much, he eventually tied a rope to her wrist and pinned the other end underneath the leg of the couch. She was by this time too weak and hoarse-voiced to cry out for help. And who knows why she didn’t decide to go to the hospital sooner but she was surely regretting it now.
She could no longer shower, had not even when she could, and Cordo washed all the dirty clothes in the house and emptied the lint filter from the dryer. He scoured the dishes with antibacterial soap and hot water, Hortense sleeping through his careless clattering as he dried and restacked the kitchenware in the cupboards and drawers.
He sprayed bleach all over the bathrooms—the toilets, showers, poured drain cleaner down the washbasins and tubs, sprayed bleach all over Hortense’s toothbrush before throwing it in the trash.
He went into Hortense’s room and doused it in bleach, discoloring the drably colored surfaces, her books with the laminated or gloss covers and deckle-edged pages.
He threw out the old plastic bags of hair samples after spray-bleaching them, then he vacuumed the whole house—the dust in the corners and windowsills and the mantelpiece, places he’d
never minded before—then poured bleach all over the vacuum filter and the interior of the vacuum itself.
He took his laptop and the external hard drive out to the backyard and sprayed them with water from the hose before smashing them to pieces with a hammer and then he sprayed the remaining debris with bleach for good measure.
Then he cleaned out his car, running a lint roller over the interior, picking up strands of black hair.
Throughout all his intensive cleaning, Hortense watched him suspiciously but when he infrequently looked at her, he half-smiled at her and asked if she needed anything.
Cordo stayed by her couch side in his papasan chair starting the first day of her ninth month. On the eighth day, he wakened her and she incoherently asked what?
“Your water broke. It’s time to go.”
He had no bag packed for her. He put one of her arms over his neck and helped her stand, stagger out the front door, which Cordo left open behind him, then helped her into the backseat of the car, where she lay mumbling before falling adrift again, routinely brought to the surface by contractions.
Cordo checked her cervix right then: about six centimeters or two fingers dilated.
He started up the car and drove away from the house.
He drove west and came to a forested cliff above the rock-strewn shallows of the ocean. There was thick fog, abundant moonlight, the salty mist spraying up as waves slammed into the cliff face.
Cordo took out Hortense, who was the two extremes of the human physique in one body, in his arms and carried her 50 yards across the cliff, which was too rocky for the car to approach.
He laid her in some grass and pillowed her head with an old flannel coat. She was more aware now as the contractions came faster, more painfully. She moaned and writhed in the dewy grass while Cordo put up her legs, removed her shoes and pajama pants and underwear.
She was 10 centimeters now.
“OK,” Cordo said. “It’s time to push now.”
She obstinately groaned, tried to roll over, feeble effort to escape. Cordo held her fast by the ankles.
Most Unnatural Page 20
