Lullaby

by Chuck Palahniuk

  Her teeth are shattered, bloody gaps, and pits show inside her mouth. She puts her face against the gray window. Her breath fogging the glass, her bloody hand goes to the side of her skirt.

  “I don’t want to go back to how it was before,” she says, “the way my life was before I met you.” She wipes her bloody hand and keeps wiping it on her skirt. “Even with all the power in the world.”

  I say, we need to get her to a hospital.

  And Helen smiles a bloody smile and says, “This is a hospital.”

  It’s nothing personal, she says. She just needed someone. Even if she could bring Patrick back, she’d never want to ruin his life by sharing the culling spell. Even if it meant living alone again, she’d never want Patrick to have that power.

  “Look at him,” she says, and touches the gray glass with her pink fingernails. “He’s so perfect.”

  She swallows, blood and shattered diamonds and teeth, and makes a terrible wrinkled face. Her hands clutch her stomach, and she leans on the steel cabinet, the gray window. Blood and condensation run down from the little window.

  With one shaking hand, Helen snaps open her purse and takes out a lipstick. She touches it around her lips and the pink lipstick comes away smeared with blood.

  She says she’s unplugged the cryogenic unit. Disconnected the alarm and backup batteries. She wants to die with Patrick.

  She wants it to end here. The culling spell. The power. The loneliness. She wants to destroy all the jewels that people think will save them. All the residue that outlasts the talent and intelligence and beauty. All the decorative junk left behind by real accomplishment and success. She wants to destroy all the lovely parasites that outlive their human hosts.

  The purse drops out of her hands. On the floor, the gray rock rolls out of the purse. For whatever reason, Oyster comes to mind.

  Helen belches. She takes a tissue from her purse and cups it under her mouth and spits out blood and bile and broken emeralds. Flashing inside her mouth, stuck in the shredded meat of her gums are jagged pink sapphires and shattered orange beryls. Lodged in the roof of her mouth are fragments of purple spinels. Sunk in her tongue are shards of black bort diamond.

  And Helen smiles and says, “I want to be with my family.” She wraps the bloody tissue into a ball and tucks it inside the cuff of her suit. Her earrings, her necklaces, her rings, it’s all gone.

  The details of her suit are, it’s some color. It’s a suit. It’s ruined.

  She says, “Please. Just hold me.”

  Inside the gray window, the perfect infant is curled on its side in a pillow of white plastic. One thumb is in its mouth. Perfect and pale as blue ice.

  I put my arms around Helen and she winces.

  Her knees start to fold, and I lower her to the floor. Helen Hoover Boyle closes her eyes. She says, “Thank you, Mr. Streator.”

  With the gray rock in my fist, I punch through the cold gray window. My hands bleeding, I lift out Patrick, cold and pale. My blood on Patrick, I put him in Helen’s arms. I put my arms around Helen.

  My blood and hers, mixed now.

  Lying in my arms, Helen closes her eyes and grinds her head into my lap. She smiles and says, “Didn’t it feel too coincidental when Mona found the grimoire?”

  Leering at me, she opens her eyes and says, “Wasn’t it just a little too neat and tidy, the fact that we’d been traveling along with the grimoire the whole time?”

  Helen lying in my arms, she cradles Patrick. Then it happens. She reaches up and pinches my cheek. Helen looks up at me and smiles with just half her mouth, a leer with blood and green bile between her lips. She winks and says, “Gotcha, Dad!”

  My whole body, one muscle spasm wet with sweat.

  Helen says, “Did you really think Mom would off herself over you? And trash her precious fucking jewels? And thaw this frozen piece of meat?” She laughs, blood and drain cleaner bubbling in her throat, and says, “Did you really think Mom would chew her fucking diamonds because you didn’t love her?”

  I say, Oyster?

  “In the flesh,” Helen says, Oyster says with Helen’s mouth, Helen’s voice. “Well, I’m in Mrs. Boyle’s flesh, but I bet you’ve been inside her yourself.”

  Helen raises Patrick in her hands. Her child, cold and blue as porcelain. Frozen fragile as glass.

  And she tosses the dead child across the room where it clatters against the steel cabinet and falls to the floor, spinning on the linoleum. Patrick. A frozen arm breaks off. Patrick. The spinning body hits a steel cabinet corner and the legs snap off. Patrick. The armless, legless body, a broken doll, it spins against the wall and the head breaks off.

  And Helen winks and says, “Come on, Dad. Don’t flatter yourself.”

  And I say, damn you.

  Oyster occupies Helen, the way an army occupies a city. The way Helen occupied Sarge. The way the past, the media, the world, occupy you.

  Helen says, Oyster says through Helen’s mouth, “Mona’s known about the grimoire for weeks now. The first time she saw Mom’s planner, she knew.” He says, “She just couldn’t translate it.”

  Oyster says, “My thing is music, and Mona’s thing is . . . well, stupidity is Mona’s thing.”

  With Helen’s voice, he says, “This afternoon, Mona woke up in some beauty salon, getting her nails painted pink.” He says, “She stormed back to the office, she found Mrs. Boyle facedown on her desk in some kind of a coma.”

  Helen shudders and grabs her stomach. She says, “Open in front of Mrs. Boyle was a translated spell, called an occupation spell. In fact all the spells were translated.”

  She says, Oyster says, “God bless Mom and her crossword puzzles. She’s in here somewhere, mad as hell.”

  Oyster says, through Helen’s mouth says, “Say hi to Mom for me.”

  The brittle blue statue, the frozen baby, is shattered, broken among the broken jewels, a busted-off finger here, the broken-off legs there, the shattered head.

  I say, so now he and Mona are going to kill everybody and become Adam and Eve?

  Every generation wants to be the last.

  “Not everybody,” Helen says. “We’re going to need some slaves.”

  With Helen’s bloody hands, he reaches down and pulls her skirt up. Grabbing her crotch, he says, “Maybe you and Mom will have time for a quickie before she’s toast.”

  And I heave Helen’s body off my lap.

  My whole body aching more than my foot ever ached.

  Helen cries out, a little scream as she slides to the floor. And curled there on the cold linoleum with the shattered gems and fragments of Patrick, she says, “Carl?”

  She puts a hand to her mouth, feels the jewels embedded there. She twists to look at me and says, “Carl? Carl, where am I?”

  She sees the stainless-steel cabinet, the broken gray window. She sees the little blue arms first. Then the legs. The head. And she says, “No.”

  Spraying blood, Helen says, “No! No! No!” and crawling through the sharp slivers of broken color, her voice thick and blurred from her ruined teeth, she grabs all the pieces. Sobbing, covered in bile and blood, the room stinking, she clutches the broken blue pieces. The hands and tiny feet, the crushed torso and dented head, she hugs them to her chest and screams, “Oh, Patrick! Patty!”

  She screams, “Oh, my Patty-Pat-Pat! No!”

  Kissing the dented blue head, squeezing it to her breast, she asks, “What’s happening? Carl, help me.” She stares at me until a cramp bends her in half and she sees the empty bottle of liquid drain cleaner.

  “God, Carl, help me,” she says, clutching her child and rocking. “God, please tell me how I got here!”

  And I go to her. I take her in my arms and say, at first, the new owner pretends he never looked at the living room floor. Never really looked. Not the first time they toured the house. Not when the inspector showed them through it. They’d measured rooms and told the movers where to set the couch and piano, hauled in everything they owned, and n
ever really stopped to look at the living room floor. They pretend.

  Helen’s head is nodding forward over Patrick. The blood’s drooling from her mouth. Her arms are looser, spilling little fingers and toes onto the floor.

  In another moment, I’ll be alone. This is my life. And I swear, no matter where or when, I’ll track down Oyster and Mona.

  What’s good is this only takes a minute.

  It’s an old song about animals going to sleep. It’s wistful and sentimental, and my face feels livid and hot with oxygenated hemoglobin while I say the poem out loud under the fluorescent lights, with the loose bundle of Helen in my arms, leaning back against the steel cabinet. Patrick’s covered in my blood, covered in her blood. Her mouth is open a little, her glittering teeth are real diamonds.

  Her name was Helen Hoover Boyle. Her eyes were blue.

  My job is to notice the details. To be an impartial witness. Everything is always research. My job isn’t to feel anything.

  It’s called a culling song. In some ancient cultures, they sang it to children during famines or droughts, anytime the tribe had outgrown its land. It was sung to warriors injured in accidents or the very old or anyone dying. It was used to end misery and pain.

  It’s a lullaby.

  I say, everything will be all right. I hold Helen, rocking her, telling her, rest now. Telling her, everything is going to be just fine.

  Chapter 44

  When I was twenty years old, I married a woman named Gina Dinji, and that was supposed to be the rest of my life. A year later, we had a daughter named Katrin, and she was supposed to be the rest of my life. Then Gina and Katrin died. And I ran and became Carl Streator. And I became a journalist And for twenty more years, that was my life.

  After that, well, you already know what happened.

  How long I held on to Helen Hoover Boyle I don’t know. After long enough, it was just her body. It was so long she’d stopped bleeding By then, the broken parts of Patrick Boyle, still cradled in her arms, they’d thawed enough to start bleeding

  By then, footsteps arrived outside the door to room 131. The door opened.

  Me still sitting on the floor, Helen and Patrick dead in my arms, the door opens, and it’s the grizzled old Irish cop.

  Sarge.

  And I say, please. Please, put me in jail. I’ll plead guilty to anything I killed my wife. I killed my kid. I’m Waltraud Wagner, the Angel of Death. Kill me so I can be with Helen again.

  And the Sarge says, “We need to get a move on.” He steps from the doorway to the steel cabinet. On a pad of paper, he writes something in pen. He tears off the note and hands it to me.

  His wrinkled hand is spotted with moles, carpeted with gray hairs. His fingernails, thick and yellow.

  “Please forgive me for taking my own life,” the note says. “I’m with my son now”

  It’s Helen’s handwriting, the same as in her planner book, the grimoire.

  It’s signed, “Helen Hoover Boyle,” in her exact handwriting

  And I look from the body in my arms, the blood and green drain-cleaner vomit, to the Sarge standing there, and I say, Helen?

  “In the flesh,” the Sarge says, Helen says. “Well, not my own flesh,” he says, and looks at Helen’s body dead in my lap. He looks at his own wrinkled hands and says, “I hate ready-to-wear, but any port in a storm.”

  So this is how we’re on the road again.

  Sometimes I worry that Sarge here is really Oyster pretending to be Helen occupying the Sarge. When I sleep with whoever this is, I pretend it’s Mona. Or Gina. So it all comes out even.

  According to Mona Sabbat, people who eat or drink too much, people addicted to drugs or sex or stealing, they’re really controlled by spirits that loved those things too much to quit after death. Drunks and kleptos, they’re possessed by evil spirits.

  You are the culture medium. The host.

  Some people still think they run their own lives.

  You are the possessed.

  We’re all of us haunting and haunted.

  Something foreign is always living itself through you. Your whole life is the vehicle for something to come to earth.

  An evil spirit. A theory. A marketing campaign. A political strategy. A religious doctrine.

  Driving me away from the New Continuum Medical Center in a squad car, the Sarge says, “They have the occupation spell and the flying spell.” He ticks off each spell by holding up another finger. “They’ll have a resurrection spell—but it only works on animals. Don’t ask me why” he says. She says, “They have a rain spell and a sun spell. . . a fertility spell to make crops grow . . .a spell to communicate with animals. . .”

  Not looking at me, looking at his fingers spread on the steering wheel, the Sarge says, “They do not have a love spell.”

  So I am really in love with Helen. A woman in a man’s body. We don’t have hot sex anymore, but as Nash would say, how is that different than most love relationships after long enough?

  Mona and Oyster have the grimoire, but they don’t have the culling song. The grimoire page that Mona gave me, the one with my name written in the margin, it’s the song. Along the bottom of the page is written, “I want to save the world, too—but not Oyster’s way.” It’s signed, “Mona.”

  “They don’t have the culling song,” the Sarge says, Helen says, “but they have a shield spell.”

  A shield spell?

  To protect them from the culling song, the Sarge says.

  “But not to worry” he says. “I have a badge and a gun and a penis.”

  To find Mona and Oyster, you only have to look for the fantastic, for miracles. The amazing tabloid headlines. The young couple seen crossing Lake Michigan on foot in July. The girl who made grass grow up, green and tall, through the snow for buffalo starving in Canada. The boy who talks to lost dogs at the animal shelter and helps them get home.

  Look for magic. Look for saints.

  The Flying Madonna. The Roadkill Jesus Christ. The Ivy Inferno. The Talking Judas Cow.

  Keep going after the facts. Witch-hunting This isn’t what a therapist will tell you to do, but it works.

  Mona and Oyster, this will be their world soon enough. The power has shifted. Helen and I will be forever playing catch-up. Imagine if Jesus chased you around, trying to catch you and save your soul. Not just a patient passive God, but a hardworking, aggressive bloodhound.

  The Sarge snaps open his holster, the way Helen used to snap open her little purse, and he takes out a pistol.

  He says, Helen says, whoever says, “How about we just kill them the old-fashioned way?”

  Now this is my life.

  FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, AUGUST 2003

  Copyright © 2002 by Chuck Palahniuk

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Doubleday a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2002.

  Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the

  Doubleday edition as follows:

  Palahniuk, Chuck.

  Lullaby: a novel / Chuck Palahniuk.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Sudden infant death syndrome—Fiction.

  2. Incantations—Fiction. 3. Journalists—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3566.A4554 L86 2002

  2001052979

  eISBN: 978-1-4000-7557-7

  www.anchorbooks.com

  v3.0

 

 

 
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