by Matt Cardin
It radiated with an especial intensity from his left side. He turned his head and regarded Linda as she lay next to him, still encased in sleep, wrapped in a bedsheet cocoon with her pale lips parted and a half-snore dragging in the back of her throat. He felt his testicles draw up as if in anticipation of a blow. Surely, he reasoned with himself, his recent inability to tolerate his wife’s presence had nothing to do with her, and everything to do with his own secret disorder, whose most dramatic manifestation occurred in those regular oneiric journeys through a land of rotten wrongness.
When he stood, the familiar creak of the loose floorboard beside the bed rippled up through his leg and into his groin like a snake seeking a warm cave. He shivered and shuffled to the bathroom to urinate and shower.
Standing in front of the toilet with his boxer briefs pulled down, he considered calling the office to tell Candace, his secretary, that he was ill and would be staying home that day. The idea of temporary seclusion was exceptionally attractive in light of the fact that Wilfred J. Tyson was his first appointment of the morning, scheduled for nine a.m. sharp “or I’m gonna stab and gutfuck somebody”—as Tyson himself had phrased it in his charming mid-Texas manner—and that the meeting would almost certainly spell the death of Derek’s legal career. But then he thought of the maddening wrongness that still flitted like a cloud of black wings about the edges of everything, and found to his surprise and semi-relief that his dreadful unpreparedness for the meeting seemed, well, not so very important. Why not just go ahead and see the thing through to its limping conclusion? “Why not?” he said aloud, and then blinked at the cavelike reverberation of his voice off the slick porcelain surfaces.
In the shower his eyesight went momentarily gray, as if someone had switched off the light. He came to himself crouched in the tub with the hot water beating against his back and clouds of steam billowing up around him like fog from a midnight lake. Afterward, when he stood before the sink and shaved, his hand was trembling. The blade nicked his throat and drew a bead of blood, which transfixed him with its crimson-on-snow vibrancy. A black-winged shadow fluttered in the corner of his eye. He caught a microflash vision of something he had seen recently, perhaps while crouched in the shower—crouched low and happy in the swirling mist with the hot water beading on his back, the happy dark heat, pulsating feather of foulness—
The faucet sang a tinkling little tune. Water spiraled merrily down the drain of the pedestal sink. Lather and whiskers littered the porcelain. As if in a trance, he wiped it all off and used the same towel on his face, hardly feeling the scrape of soft cotton against his skin.
He sat at the kitchen table while Linda poured some sort of whole-grain, prepackaged breakfast substance into a plastic bowl. “What’s wrong, honey?” she asked, setting the bowl before him and taking a seat at the opposite chair.
“Nothing,” he said. A single spoonful told him the cereal was stale and the milk had tipped over into the pungent no-man’s-land between liquid and solid. But he sucked on the mushy mass anyway, savoring it with a grimace, and found he couldn’t tell whether the staleness and sourness resided in the food or on his tongue. And still the tingling buffer from the bathroom, like a buzzing wall of bees, remained interposed between him and the external world.
“You’re not still worried about your meeting, are you?” Linda reached out and tousled his dark hair. “You’ve worked on it all week. If anything, you’re overprepared. Don’t worry. You’ll do fine.”
“Sure,” he said. “Right. Like I said, nothing’s wrong.” She went to rinse the dishes while saying something about getting together with Steve for dinner that night. He ignored her chatter and watched her body closely from behind. She was wrapped in a blue terrycloth bathrobe, the fuzzy fabric pulled tight against her rump. The memory of her naked body arose unbidden from some black well of the past, from the mental ruins of another lifetime when he had actually craved the sight of her white skin and soft-rounded curves. Hot shadows rustled at the edges of his eyes and brain. His stomach lurched and squirted a jet of sourness up into his throat.
His face was a carven mask when she kissed him at the door. She remained close for a moment afterwards, her ghastly ape’s face thrust forward into his own, gazing quizzically into his eyes. “Don’t forget,” she said. When he said nothing, she helpfully clarified. “Steve. Dinner. With us. Tonight. Remember?”
He managed something like a nod, and then he turned away and walked slowly out to his car, probing the fresh cut on his throat with a trembling hand, feeling her planted there behind him and watching him from the open doorway, remembering the dream-thoughts whispering in the steam while he crouched low like some glowering little creature of fable.
The commute to work was a breathtaking kaleidoscope of wrongness. In just five years’ time the small town had exploded into a thriving suburbanesque city, complete with a raging glut of unwonted traffic, resulting in a permanent nightmare of highway construction that seemed to Derek like the engineering equivalent of emergency angioplasty—a metaphor that he saw completed in the arterial pulsing of vehicles, start-stop, start-stop, through the various detours and halts of the whole bloody-tangled mess. He often reflected that maybe it would have been better just to let the old town die quietly of heart failure instead of reviving and reinventing it for the flashier fate of death by nervous seizure.
Halfway to his office he switched on the radio. The tuner scanned the stations like—and the simile seemed natural—a schizophrenic mind surveying the spectrum of its inner anarchy. Pink Floyd and Erik Satie serenaded him in five-second bursts, followed by Kansas and Count Basie. A preacher with a northern accent spoke up momentarily, asking, “Who knows what is truly human except the human spirit within a man?” and then answering, “So also no one comprehends what is truly God’s except the Spirit of God.” A southern-sounding preacher shouted from the next station, pounding an unseen pulpit and obviously relishing his words: “Their slain shall be cast out, and the stench of their corpses shall rise! The mountains shall flow with their blood! All the host of heaven shall rot away, and the skies roll up like a scroll!”
The tuner tripped ahead yet again, cutting the preacher off in mid-jeremiad. Derek punched the button to stop it at the next station; the changes were hurting his head. For the remainder of the commute he listened to a man speaking in measured, cultured tones about an esoteric topic whose import must have been explained earlier, at the top of the hour, and whose overall gist was thus obscure. “These and many words and names,” the man said, “do not tell us what it is, but they do confirm that it is. They also point to its mysteriousness. We cannot know what exactly we are referring to because its nature remains shadowy, revealing itself mainly in hints, intuitions, whispers, and the sudden urges and oddities that disturb your life that we might continue to call symptoms. That the daimon has your interest at heart may be the part of the theory particularly hard to accept.”
Derek’s office was a nondescript architectural approximation composed of beige stonework and dark-tinted windows, squatting in semi-privacy on the outskirts of a street somewhere near the business district. It looked like wrongness personified as he drove up and parked. The fluorescent lights and cardboard ceiling panels were an ache to his eyeballs when he walked through the front door, and the electronic chime drilled into his molars with a nauseating pain.
Candace, she of the overpainted eyes and gargantuan breasts, looked up and wished him a cheery good morning from her spot behind the reception counter. As always, he found it hard to remember that she was only twenty-two years old when her appearance and demeanor rendered her overtly ageless in the exotic manner he had come to associate with raw female sexuality. She asked, “Would you like some coffee, Mr. Warner?”
He said no and then offered, “Thanks.” She smiled and continued looking at him. She was wearing the green bodice dress again, the one that encased her breasts like a second skin and gapped dramatically at the neck whenever she reached for pens or
paperclips or even moved to brush back a lock of her cherry-auburn hair. He paused for a long moment, and then he was crouched in the shower with blacksmear eyes, scalding in steam, beating blackwater—and then he blinked, turned, and walked down the hallway.
Thirty seconds later he ran to the speakerphone in the conference room, punched the call button with a trembling finger, and demanded, “Where are the case files?” He waited. “Candace? Hello?”
The speakerphone blipped and then her voice said, “—don’t know, Mr. Warner. I haven’t been back there yet today. Maybe the cleaning service moved them?”
“I thought they worked Fridays, not Thursdays.”
Blip. “—just changed their schedule this week. I’m sorry, I meant to tell you.” She had never learned to wait for the intercom function to engage fully before she spoke, even though he had explained it to her a dozen times. He felt like throttling her.
He turned from the phone without replying, waited to hear the click of the connection’s closing, and uttered a firm, quiet “Fuck.” Then he went into a low-grade panic. A crashing, banging search of every closet, drawer, and box in the conference and storage rooms, and also a frantic dig through the dumpster out back, turned up nothing
He returned to the conference room gasping and shaking and wondering how it was possible for fifteen manila folders, all bearing the name “Tyson” printed in prominent black marker, simply to disappear. No one on the cleaning crew could possibly have wanted them. A thief would have taken something else. Candace was afraid even to look at them, so severely had he threatened her about their importance. His thoughts accelerated to whirlwind speed while he cringed under the smug gaze of the leatherbound law books lining the dark wooden shelves in regal rows.
He bowed his head and reached up to massage his eyeballs. Splotchy colored lights blossomed in the darkness behind his lids, shimmering like luminescent fog above the surface of a vast reedy lake—
—and then it was night in the conference room, dark and deserted, and a misshapen Dwarf was entering through a strange angle at the intersection of two walls, waddling over to the table, seizing the files, and spiriting them away to a misshapen kingdom on the other side of that otherworldly access point where dark winds howled over a black corroded plain and Derek crushed in the shower, inkydark eyes beading blood upon his throat—
An explosion of glass brought him back to himself. He saw crystalline shards littering the carpet next to a mangled lampshade. Then he realized a table lamp had been flung against one of the bookcases. Moreover, the culprit was his own outstretched hand.
The speakerphone blipped. “—you there? Mr. Warner? Are you all right?”
His throat erupted and his mouth worked without his conscious volition. “For Christ’s sake, of course I’m here!”
A pause. And then of course, naturally, he should have known, her voice came back after another blip to say “—is here for his appointment. He says he knows he’s early but he has several other things waiting for him.”
So. Tyson was standing right there at the counter with Candace, probably eyeing her epic cleavage and smirking at the fact that he had heard Derek’s outburst. There was no remedy for it, nothing to do but go ahead and see this thing through. The very helplessness of the thought rekindled a spark of the comforting resignation he had embraced earlier at the house. As he walked up the hallway to face his fate, he felt his brain being gnawed from behind by the hallucinatory memory of the distorted Dwarf and its barren wasteland of a world.
“Morning, Derek!” Tyson drawled at the sight of him. “I hope I’m not too early. Sounds like you’re having one hell of a day.” He grinned and stuck out a ring-encrusted hand, which Derek grasped automatically. Tyson’s bushy brown eyebrows and million-dollar tan, his hand-tailored suit and bolo tie, his chic ostrich-leather boots and cowboy hat with its gaudy Texas star embroidered on the front, were all unchanged. So was his manner, as Derek observed when the man refused to make eye contact with him while they shook hands, choosing instead to glance to the side and give Candace a rakish wink. It was altogether typical behavior for the sixties-ish oil tycoon.
Derek also realized for the first time that the man could undoubtedly take Candace right then and there if he wanted to, right on the reception counter, despite his craggy, unhandsome face with which he somehow managed to radiate charm through sheer force of attitude. Derek imagined them coupling like sweaty animals under the fluorescent lights, in front of the plate-glass windows, gasping and growling while he himself crouched in the conference room a greedy-eyed Dwarf crunching bones in the blackdark—
“Fine, everything’s fine,” he heard his voice say in a smooth professional tone. “Come on back, Mr. Tyson.” He led the obscenely rich oil man back to the cramped little office with the “D. Warner” nameplate on the door, wondering for the thousandth time why somebody like Wilfred J. Tyson would pick a small-time lawyer like himself for legal representation—and one who lived three states away, no less, more than five hundred miles from the city where Tyson Oil was based. He had long thought the answer must lie in those magically vanished files, which detailed with marvelous clarity Tyson’s shady business dealings and financial misrepresentations. A small-time lawyer located so very far outside the circles that Tyson normally inhabited was so much less conspicuous than his big-time, big-city counterparts.
Or maybe the man just got off on dealing with lesser beings that he could manipulate and humiliate. Derek had never been able to decide which of the two explanations seemed more likely.
He seated himself in his leather executive chair and motioned for Tyson to pick one of the fabric-upholstered client versions. They faced each other over the desk, both of them waiting for Derek to say something. The question didn’t need to be asked, of course. He knew Tyson was there for an account, delivered in person, of how Derek had engineered a legal miracle to rescue his client from the consequences of his latest dishonest dealings. And indeed, Derek had worked for weeks and managed to come up with an absolute ringer of a plan. That was the other possible angle to explain Tyson’s retaining of him, since in his own milieu, on his own level, Derek was a young hotshot-on-the-rise.
But hotshot or not, the whole issue had become, in one fell swoop, utterly moot and meaningless. The full understanding of this fact came only now, as he sat staring helplessly into Tyson’s hawkish eyes. The files were gone—whether to Dwarf World or a more prosaic locale didn’t matter—and with them had gone all chance of success, and now Derek, too, was waiting for his own words, waiting for some sort of brilliant verbal song and dance to erupt spontaneously from his mouth. It had to come, or else he was finished, and not just career-wise. The consequences of disappointing this man would surely be severe. Tyson was famous not only for his refusal to tolerate failure but for his swiftness in punishing the responsible parties.
But of course, naturally, the saving words didn’t come. How could such words emerge into a world where absolutely everything, from Derek’s framed law diploma hanging on the wall behind him like a grinning accusation, to his pathetic desire to please this unpleasant man, to his lust for an air-headed, nubile secretary, to the walking corpse of a wife who waited for him at home like an undead symbol of all the wrong choices he had made in life—where everything, all of it, every last item and element, reeked to the skies of wrongness?
Abruptly, like the arrival of a perfumed breeze, the buzzing, tingling barrier that had encased him earlier in the morning reappeared and began to isolate him from the room. He gasped and felt suddenly weightless. His mouth opened, and it was just as if he needed to cough, to expel an odd blockage from his throat, but instead what came were words—words he had not chosen, words he could hardly believe he was hearing, and they were being spoken by a blackbrain Dwarf crouched low in a bloody tub.
The Dwarf said, “You fucking monster.”
Tyson blinked. His expert smile faltered. He had been right in the middle of lighting a cigar, and now the flame sproute
d uselessly from the shiny gold lighter he held in his right hand. He removed the cigar from his mouth and said, “Excuse me?”
“I said I lost the files. I said you’re going to prison. I said your life is over.” Derek smiled with the Dwarf. “You fucking monster.”
Tyson’s smile faded completely. His thumb released the lighter button, snuffing the bright flame. And before the man’s predictable disbelief and rage set in, before he began to sputter and curse and rant, Derek and the Dwarf were both pleased to note that their performance had elicited a real shock. Terror and bewilderment were still evident even now behind the blustering façade of Tyson’s fury.
It was really astonishingly easy, this act of career suicide. Derek let the scene play out, listening passively to threats aimed at himself and his family, destruction called down upon everyone and everything he held dear, and finally violence sworn against his person. He said nothing through it all, allowing the Dwarf to witness and absorb the energy of the moment.
And finally it was over, and Tyson was rising from his chair red-faced and quivering. “You—you—” He actually sputtered as he searched for an epithet that would convey the depth of his outrage. Derek stood up. Tyson backed away. “You’re gonna regret . . . You small-time son-of-a—”
“Have you ever carved wood?” Derek’s voice chopped off Tyson’s sputtering invective like a knife lopping off a limb, shocking them both into momentary silence. Derek hadn’t known he was going to say such a thing, and now he listened with fascination to the speech that began to emerge from his mouth.
“When I was a boy,” he said, “I used to pick up sticks in the forest around my house and carve them into all kinds of shapes. I especially liked to peel back the bark of a branch and see the white woodflesh. I liked the way it looked, the way it smelled, the way it felt.” He reached up unthinkingly and began to massage the cut on his throat. “I haven’t thought of that in years.”
