Mortal Fear m-1

by Greg Iles

  Closing my eyes, I fill my mind with images of Erin: a child laughing in the bathtub with Drewe in grainy home movies; a girl smoking cigarettes behind bushes in a Girl Scout uniform; a teenager riding pillion behind a Harley-crazed pothead, her long hair flying in the wind; a high school junior standing naked on a pier; a young woman, glossy-faced in the magazines, moving urgently beneath me in Chicago; a bride draped in white and kissing Patrick at her wedding, eyes open and looking down the row of groomsmen, to where I stand. This is like performing a classic song. You don’t just sing and play the notes; you open yourself to the subliminal power of the whole, the fluid biopsy of personality that was somehow captured in the words and music of the original recording. And if you’re lucky, for one small slice of time, you become Otis or Muddy or Jimi or Janis or Lennon.

  I have done that.

  And if I can do that, I can do this.

  When I speak, I hear my voice as Erin’s hypnotic contralto. The sound soothes my nerves. Using stories told me long ago by Bob Anderson, I begin weaving a history of Drewe and Erin’s ancestors, then slowly draw it into a New South tale worthy of Margaret Mitchell. My reason tells me I shouldn’t use too much truth, but instinct tells me that straying too far from it will destroy my credibility. The lives I use for thread are like my own, are in fact part of my own, and the tapestry that results will not be pulled apart, not even by Brahma. Yet as my story moves into the recent past, he begins asking questions.

  MAXWELL› You do not get along with your sister now?

  ERIN› We get along. How can you not get along with the most perfect person in the world?

  MAXWELL› Obviously you don’t believe that about her.

  ERIN› Sometimes I do. She’s a doctor now, but everybody knew she’d be an astronaut or something like that even when she was a kid. You’d probably love her.

  MAXWELL› I doubt it. I know many female super-achievers, and the image rarely reflects the reality beneath.

  ERIN› In this case it does. My sister’s life could be a movie, only it would be too boring. It’s more like a TV commercial.

  MAXWELL› Is she attractive?

  ERIN› Yes.

  MAXWELL› But you are more so.

  ERIN› Physically.

  MAXWELL› She was jealous of your beauty?

  ERIN› If she was, she never showed it. If she’d tried, she could have gotten as much male attention as I did. But while I was cutting class, she was dissecting fetal pigs.

  MAXWELL› Did you go to university?

  ERIN› No, New York.

  MAXWELL› Ah. What did you do there?

  I pause. It’s time to bend the truth a little.

  ERIN› I was a singer.

  MAXWELL› What kind of singer? Opera? Broadway?

  ERIN› A folk singer. Sort of Joni Mitchell, but with more edge. I changed my name so my family couldn’t find me. My father had told me I’d end up turning tricks to eat, but I was signed pretty quickly. I was wined and dined and photographed and flown to Montserrat to cut a CD. Then my A amp;R guy got fired for signing too many acts that flopped. I think he only signed me because he wanted to sleep with me. Nobody else at the label cared whether I lived or died. My CD was never even mastered. I got depressed, did more coke than Sherlock Holmes and Freud put together, and crashed in less than a year.

  MAXWELL› Crashed?

  ERIN› Lost my bearings. Did too many drugs, slept with too many men, even started losing my looks. They’re back now, thank God. I’m vain enough to appreciate that.

  MAXWELL› Vanity may be what saved you. But don’t you think it’s time we went back a bit further? Perhaps discussed your father a bit more?

  ERIN› Why?

  MAXWELL› I think you know. It’s the oldest story in the world, Erin. Let yourself be rid of the weight.

  ERIN› You think my father tried to screw me or something?

  MAXWELL› Not necessarily. Most adult-child sex involves oral or manual stimulation, not penetration.

  ERIN› My God. You’ve got it ALL wrong.

  MAXWELL› That sounds like denial to me.

  ERIN› And you sound like every stupid shrink I ever went to. My problem has nothing to do with my father. It’s my sister.

  MAXWELL› Your sister? Are you telling me you had a lesbian affair with your sister? That you’re haunted by some silly adolescent cunnilingus or suchlike?

  ERIN› Or _suchlike_? How old are you really?

  MAXWELL› Forty-seven.

  ERIN› God. I’m not sure whether we can talk or not. Different cultural vocabularies.

  MAXWELL› I transcend generations, Erin.

  ERIN› Right. Do you keep yourself in shape?

  MAXWELL› Cellini’s Perseusis my ideal.

  ERIN› I’ve never seen it, but I get the idea. How close do you come to your ideal?

  MAXWELL› Perhaps one day you will judge. Let’s return to your sister. What is this thing you try so to avoid telling me?

  ERIN› It’s her husband.

  MAXWELL› You are bedding her husband?

  ERIN› _Bedding?_ No. Worse than that. I have a child by him. A son.

  In the ensuing silence, I sense Brahma’s heightened interest like a leopard raising its head.

  MAXWELL› Your sister is still married to him?

  ERIN› Yes. She does _not_ know he’s the father of my child.

  MAXWELL› Ah. Does he know?

  ERIN› Yes. I told him three months ago.

  MAXWELL› How old is your son?

  ERIN› Three.

  MAXWELL› How did this happen, Erin?

  With a fluidity that surprises me, I give Brahma a condensed history of the relationships between myself, Drewe, and Erin-but from Erin’s perspective. The names I change, yet the eternal triangle retains its mythic power. Brahma seems particularly interested in the diametric personalities of Erin and Drewe. When I arrive at the incident in Chicago, he asks:

  MAXWELL› What was the sex like between you?

  How do I describe sex with myself from Erin’s point of view? This may be the obstacle that finally trips me.

  ERIN› It was the consummation of years of suppressed desire. In a certain way, it was unique. I’d been disillusioned by men very early. Men see women as saints or whores, and at that time I saw men in similar terms. Bastards or wimps. The bastards I was always attracted to tried to destroy me, and the nice guys _I_ destroyed. That’s what’s happening to my husband now.

  MAXWELL› Which type was your sister’s husband?

  ERIN› Neither. That was the unique thing. With him I responded like I had with my bastard lovers, but he wasn’t one. He was gentle. He was a musician, a songwriter.

  MAXWELL› But this is the root of your desire for a man with the soul of a woman. Artists are the bridge between the male and female poles. They are spiritually hermaphroditic.

  ERIN› Maybe that’s it. Because he took me to a different place than I’d ever been. Sometimes when we made love, I achieved something more than an orgasm. It was a total obliteration of consciousness. The waves would start, and then suddenly I’d reach this hyperaware plateau, a clear white space like a liquid dream. And then I’d black out. Absolutely. When I woke up, I felt something I never had before. Peace. I felt I’d known what it was to be dead, or at least beyond life. And I _liked_ it, you know? I wanted that peace. Later I found out the French call that “the little death.”

  MAXWELL› Sex and death are opposite sides of the same coin, Erin. We in the West repress this, but the East has always known it. Death without sex means extinction, sex without death the same. Orgasm is a bridge between the two states, a temporary annihilation of the self, a momentary return to the womb waters, to the mindless timeless flux of nature. It was into this infinite province that he took you.

  ERIN› You sound like you know a lot about it.

  MAXWELL› Death and life? Yes. I know them well. But you should not long for that annihilation. We all get there too s
oon. Tell me, why did you not marry this unique lover?

  As I describe Erin’s marriage of convenience to Patrick, and his promise never to ask about Holly’s father, I am forced to look into an abyss I have not allowed myself to think about for the past three months. The dark hole where Dr. Patrick Graham has become unhinged, obsessed by a shadow face that lurks in his dreams like a grinning demon that will never grant him peace.

  My face.

  MAXWELL› Has your husband ever struck you during these arguments?

  ERIN› No. Not that I haven’t deserved it. But I’m starting to understand him now. I once thought he could grow to love my child as part of me. But men aren’t built that way. In the animal world, males try to kill the offspring of other males. At some primitive level, I think the same thing is happening in my husband’s brain. The more he loves my son, the more he hates him.

  MAXWELL› Yes. And what is your solution to all this?

  ERIN› I haven’t got one.

  MAXWELL› Of course you do. You simply haven’t found the strength to admit it. You don’t love your husband, do you?

  ERIN› No. He’s a good father, though. I picked well in that department, even in desperation.

  MAXWELL› Do you love your sister’s husband?

  ERIN› I don’t think so. I don’t know.

  MAXWELL› If you knew you were going to die tonight, how would you feel about him?

  ERIN› I don’t know. I’d be angry that he was going to be left with my sister. Be free of me and my son. I guess I must resent his happiness.

  MAXWELL› And your sister’s.

  ERIN› No. I was never jealous of my sister. My parents always loved some Nancy Drew idea of me, but my sister really knew me. And she loved me anyway. She still does.

  MAXWELL› So why resent her husband’s happiness?

  ERIN› Maybe because he’s the only man who ever made both of us love him. He got to screw Mary Magdalene and deflower the Virgin Mary too, all without taking any consequences. I mean _I_ certainly had to take consequences.

  MAXWELL› You want your sister to know the truth.

  ERIN› I don’t know. But I’m not sure I can keep the secret regardless. My husband is forcing the issue. What if he leaves me? Should I end up alone with my son while his real father lives an idyllic life with my sister? Is that fair? It makes me crazy! I hate him when I think like that.

  MAXWELL› Has he asked you for sex since Chicago?

  ERIN› No. But he’s still haunted by me. I feel it whenever I’m around him. And now that he knows about our son, he’s really going out of his way to see us. God. Everything is going to hell and I have no control over it. My sister wants a baby of her own. My son is like an unexploded bomb lying between our two families. My husband’s going crazy, my sister’s husband’s going crazy, I’m going crazy.

  MAXWELL› Calm down. Tell me one thing only. What do you want?

  Out of five different impulses, the right answer comes to me like divine revelation.

  ERIN› I want out.

  MAXWELL› That’s simply another way of saying you haven’t the courage to try to get what you want, which is your sister’s husband.

  ERIN› No! I WANT OUT!

  MAXWELL› Out of what? Out of your situation? Out of life?

  ERIN› It’s hard for me to admit this, but I still dream of the magical, mystical man out there somewhere who is what I’ve always wanted. LikeSnow White. Someday my prince will come. Go ahead, tell me I’m pathetic and unliberated and everything else. I could care less. That’s what I want. I want to be saved.

  MAXWELL› Describe your prince for me.

  I close my eyes.

  Out of the luminescent afterimage of the computer screen, something is moving toward me. It is formless yet threatening, faceless yet drawing into focus. It is not one thing. It’s a mass of shadows. An army of ghosts, walking with their eyes shut. Ghosts of all the blind men who used Erin throughout her life. And my ghost walks among them. But behind those pale shadows I see something else. A shining obsidian darkness. And within that darkness floats a single pair of open eyes. Terrible cobalt eyes framed by long lashes, eyes that stare into my soul with phallic intent.

  Brahma’s eyes.

  ERIN› I think my prince is a Dark Prince. He terrifies most women, but not me. He knows the ways of the world, but he’s not _of_ the world. Do you know what I mean?

  MAXWELL› Go on.

  ERIN› He inspires awe in men, yet abases himself before me, as I abase myself before him. He knows that all men who ever touched me were like slaves who tended me until his arrival. He knows that earthly defilement confers a certain kind of purity. He knows I possess immeasurable love, but that the edge of my love is terrible and cold, and he welcomes that. He can make me scream in the night, loose me from everything that holds me to the earth, cause an explosion in my head that dwarfs the orgasm of my body. He loves me so desperately that he wants to kill me, but that is the one act he hasn’t the power to commit. Because at the hot core of his strength, he fears me. THAT’S what I want!

  MAXWELL› Be at peace, child. I AM COME.

  A drop of stinging sweat falls into my eye. Somewhere on this planet a man sits in the glow of a computer screen, speaking these words to me and fantasizing a future I do not even want to crack the door on. I am miles farther down the road Dr. Lenz tried to walk, and the only way home is forward.

  ERIN› I don’t know what to say. Your words are powerful. I won’t deny that I’m drawn to you. But I know the reality. You’re nearly fifty years old, and you’re sitting somewhere dreaming about _bedding_ this beautiful young girl you’ve found on-line. I don’t think you’re my savior.

  MAXWELL› I am more than savior, Erin. I am a second sun burning above the teeming earth. But even suns need sustenance. They consume themselves, as I have done for so long. I am subject to one god above me, and that god is TIME.

  ERIN› You sound like you’ve gone a little far with this.

  MAXWELL› We are come to the fork in the road. To the time of choosing. You must decide whether to remain where you are, dwelling in darkness, or to journey to the place of understanding. Remember that knowledge is a burden. Knowledge has a price.

  My mind has finally gone blank.

  ERIN› I need a few minutes to think about this. It’s a lot to take in at once.

  MAXWELL› No.

  ERIN› Why not? To be perfectly honest, I need to pee. You’ve made me nervous.

  MAXWELL› Urinate where you sit. It will bring your mortality home to you.

  ERIN› I’m perfectly convinced of my mortality, thank you. I’m going to leave this terminal for five minutes. I do want to know about your life. I do believe you’re different. You might even be the one. But I have to pee, and I want to compose myself. If you’re here when I get back, I’ll be glad. If you’re not, I’ll be sorry.

  And with that-with my heart beating like a triphammer and my hair soaked with sweat-I log off.

  CHAPTER 33

  I spent most of the five-minute rest I gave myself from Brahma in the bathroom, wiping my neck and arms with a steaming washrag and staring at my stunned face in the mirror. Brahma’s life story-what I’ve heard of it-is stranger than anything I ever imagined, and I have a sense that it will only get more so. But is he telling the truth? Am I learning the genesis of a murderer? Or is he merely playing me for a fool, as he did so expertly with Dr. Lenz?

  I don’t think so. A small voice in my mind is telling me to call Daniel Baxter-or even Lenz himself-but I am not ready to do that. Having brought Brahma to the point that he wants to pour out his twisted past to “Erin,” I must push on to the end.

  Sitting back down at the computer, I pull on the headset and take a long pull from a fresh Tab. On the screen are the last sentences I spoke: If you’re here when I get back, I’ll be glad. If you’re not, I’ll be sorry. I decide to make him wait another minute, just to keep the authority on my side. After finishing the Tab, I sp
eak again, and EROS faithfully transcribes.

  ERIN› Are you still here, Max?

  MAXWELL› Yes.

  ERIN› You haven’t scared me off yet. Let’s go.

  MAXWELL› Go?

  ERIN› I’m ready to hear the rest of your story.

  MAXWELL› But we were discussing you.

  ERIN› You told me a secret, I told you one. It’s your turn again.

  MAXWELL› Such children we are. Very well. Where was I?

  ERIN› Incest. Your father married a woman in America for her money and position, while his sister-your mother-ran off to Germany and gave birth to you during the war.

  MAXWELL› Skip ahead six years. Richard had achieved his childhood dream. He was a prominent psychiatrist in one of America’s greatest cities. His wife had money but he earned plenty of his own. Yet he had one regret. The Gorgon had no intention of inhibiting her social life with the drudgery of rearing a child. So Richard lost himself in his work, and became more renowned and controversial with each passing year. His approach was simple. He encouraged people to accept their natures. He used Freud and Jung and the rest to legitimize so-called “aberrant” behavior. I find a humorous parallel with a maxim of the computer industry: “That’s not a bug, it’s a feature.”

  Richard relieved his rather exotic sexual needs away from home in a variety of ways, but he managed to stay clear of both the press and the police. When Catherine appeared on his doorstep (the old family brownstone, now fantastically refurbished) with a six-year-old boy at her side, he was stunned. I was a mirror image of him. Dark-haired, pale-skinned, classically beautiful. Mother explained the similarities with the fiction that I was Richard’s “nephew.” To explain my fatherless existence, Catherine told a harrowing tale of an impulsive marriage to a young German soldier who was quickly killed on the Russian front, then three terrible years in a displaced persons camp with Uncle Karl. The D.P. camp was real enough. The cold there lodged in my bones like tumors of ice. Catherine also revealed that I suffered from hemophilia, the same type Richard had. This made the Gorgon vaguely suspicious, but since hemophilia is passed down through females only, her suspicions were allayed.