“Yet there’s no doubt at all that the boy was responsible, and not Bob. The keys to Helbron’s office door were found in the boy’s pocket. The gun had been registered in his father’s name.”
“But why would he go to the hospital room of a man he’s never met, to your room, and try and kill you, and then in what seems an excess of high spirits actually murder two complete strangers? Why? It defies belief.”
“Yet the police have established fairly conclusively that it was him. The wrapping paper left in the room was from a roll in the Sheehy house. A witness saw him playing Space Invaders in the hospital basement just before the murder.”
“But why?”
Bing smiled mysteriously, as who would say, I know more than I’m telling. As indeed he did. For some weeks now he had been receiving Scrabble Ouija messages from a spirit calling itself Puck. These messages would have answered almost all of Father Mabbley’s questions (and told him a great deal, additionally, about the domestic arrangements of eels and lobsters), but Bing was sworn to secrecy. In any case, Puck’s explanation of all these events was several degrees stranger than the events themselves.
Besides, Bing liked to keep secrets. He teased Father Mabbley along, with will-o’-the-wisp cruelty, through a whole tangled forest of fruitless speculations, supplemented, when the gelatin had finally gelled, with a slice of Brandy Alexander pie.
Then, when he could endure the suspense no longer, Bing said, “Now that you’re sufficiently mellow, Father, let me show you the rest of the house. I’ve taken much greater liberties with the upstairs rooms.”
“By all means,” said Father Mabbley.
“Mother’s room,” Bing explained, mounting the stairs, “is just a hollow shell at this point. That’s where I mean to put the Hotline office. You’ll be staying in the guest room, which used to be Giselle’s. I’ve done it up in 1930s Hollywood-Moroccan. My own room is still in transition, and I need your advice about the canopy over the bed. But the pièce de résistance, so far, is the bathroom. Voilà!”
Bing flung open the bathroom door with a flourish, and Robert Glandier, stark naked, leaped up from the seat of the toilet and placed his hands over his genitals in the classic pose of post-lapsarian shame.
“Well, Father, what do you think?”
“Beardsley?” said the priest, in rather a stricken than a commendatory tone.
“I did them all myself,” said Bing. “With ordinary house paint.”
“I didn’t know you had ambitions as a muralist.”
“I’d never realized how easy it was to do until I read this article in Family Circle on how to paint enlargements of familiar cartoon characters on children’s bedroom walls. I figured if it would work for Huckleberry Hound it would work with Beardsley’s Salome. Admittedly, the execution is ragged in places. The ceiling especially. Ceilings are a bitch to paint.”
“So it would seem.”
Bing giggled. “On your honor, Father: what do you think?”
“Of this? On my honor? I would have to say I think it’s appalling. But I gather it’s meant to be appalling.”
“Mm, yes, in a way that’s so. Oh dear. Excuse me, but I fear the power of suggestion is proving too much. Would you mind interrupting the guided tour for a moment? I have to wee-wee something awful.”
“That’s quite all right, my boy. I’ll take the opportunity to do what I earlier was threatening to do—the dishes.”
“No, Father, really!”
Father Mabbley raised his hand to signify that protest would not avail, then slipped out the door and pulled it shut behind him.
Bing waited till he heard Father Mabbley get halfway down the stairs, then turned to Glandier and said, in a kind of stage whisper, “Well, that answers the question. You are invisible to everyone but me. Father Mabbley is the soul of courtesy, but even he could not have resisted noting the presence of a fat naked middle-aged man in a friend’s bathroom.”
“Go away,” said Glandier in a voice hollowed out by hopelessness. “Just go away and leave me alone.”
“Invisible, inaudible, and unable (as we well know) to go anywhere beyond the confines of this room. The prisoner, through all eternity, of the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bathroom. I think it’s droll.”
“I’ll scream,” Glandier threatened. “I can still do that.”
Bing grinned. “And I… can tweak… your nose!”
Glandier backed into the corner of the bathroom. Bing often carried out this threat, or otherwise collided with, bumped into, or goosed Glandier’s immaterial body. Each time Glandier would pop out of existence and instantly reappear on his back in the bathtub, or, if the bathtub had a corporeal occupant, seated on the toilet. It made him feel like a ping-pong ball caroming about in a shoebox.
“I thought you were going to scream,” Bing taunted. “So, scream, I’m waiting. Your screams amuse me.”
“Fucking queer,” Glandier muttered.
“Nowadays the correct term of abuse is ‘faggot,’ I’m told.” Bing turned to the mirror and affected to study his right eyebrow. “If you mean to be insulting. While for fat people ‘pig’ is generally considered most opprobrious. You do, in fact, look very porcine without your clothes.”
“Do you know,” said Glandier, in a tone of thoughtfulness, “if there were a hell, I think I’d really rather be there.”
“Does my company get you down so terribly? Poor baby! I don’t think that was Mother’s intention when she billeted you here. Indeed, I understand from a young friend of mine, whose name is Puck, that she expects us to become friends in due course! I believe her hope is that some of my good manners may rub off on you, and some of your manliness will seep into my character. What are the odds, do you suppose, of that dream coming true?”
Glandier closed his eyes and threw his head back and screamed as loudly as he could.
“And this little pig,” said Bing, stepping forward, “said wee-wee-wee-wee-wee all the way home.” He tweaked Glandier’s nose.
Instantly Glandier found himself lying on his back in the bathtub.
“Well, I must return to my duties as a host, and you must stay here and haunt the bathroom like a good ghost. One of these days I’ll open a savings account and get a radio for in here so that you’ll at least have a beat to help you while away the hours. And the days. And the years. Ta-ta.”
Glandier did not stir from the bathtub when Bing left the room. He lay on his back staring at the ceiling, where ill-drawn grotesques leered and winked and jubilated at his expense. Unheard even by Bing, who was in the kitchen helping Father Mabbley with the dishes, Glandier screamed at the jeering faces, and screamed again, and continued screaming until his throat was quite sore. Then he simply stared at the faucet of the tub and the folds of the plastic shower curtain. As so often before, he found that the best way to pass the time was by doing long division in his head. He had always excelled at arithmetic.
CHAPTER 60
The child in whose form Giselle was to have been reborn died in the third day of its embryonic life through the beneficence of a chemical abortifacient. Such was the gift of grace that she was at once free to leave Earth and old mortality for the blisses so long held in abeyance.
Without a name, without an aim, with no idea of before or after, no tears, no laughter, no clothes to wear, no forms to fill, what could be said of her soul now? That sometimes it moved, sometimes stood still. That there remained a core within, a kind of skin or shell without; and in the core a pulse, and on the skin a sense of something or of someone else, other templates and tempos, of opposing or concurrent wills.
But in such crass archetypal particulars as flowers, blue skies, sun’s heat, or star’s distance, what could she be said to know or feel? That flowers cry like children, demanding a doting adult attention; that the dome of the sky and the lens of the eye rhyme to each other, and both are real; that all heat is dissipated as a function of time; that distance is God’s supreme fiction.
Yet can’t somethi
ng more human be said? Are souls so ethereal that all statements we attach to them must be abstract as Christmas tree ornaments? Even nameless, cannot Love, like Amor, shoot his arrows into our random hearts so they may bleed responsively? Indeed he can. Indeed, there are moments when a soul released from its cave of flesh will speed toward a mortal mind as it lies entranced in sleep, will curl across its surface, frothing, like waves across a beach, touching its tenderest parts and causing dreams to rise from its depths, like the bubbles of burrowing clams. And we awake, knowing we have been touched by something beautiful, whose beauty we shall never understand, knowing only that we have been witnesses of its inexpressible passing. We call her name, if we can still remember it, and ask her to remain a moment longer, only a moment. But already she is gone.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Thomas Michael Disch became a freelance writer in 1964 after working in advertising. He was born in Iowa in 1940 and educated at New York University. He now has a long list of books to his credit—poetry, children’s books, short story collections, and such notable novels as 334, Camp Concentration, Clara Reeve, On Wings of Song, and Neighboring Lives, which he coauthored with Charles Naylor. He lives in New York City.
THE BUSINESSMAN A Tale of Terror Page 24
