City of Masks

34

Don't pretend to believe me, Paul. It's condescending. I don't need it right now."

She hadn't meant to say it like that, but the tension she felt was making her cross, impatient. She was leaning against the door of the BMW as Paul piloted it through the sunlit streets. Even with the sunglasses she'd put on, the light seemed too bright to Cree. She felt like road kill, but six hours of sleep, a scalding shower, and a half hour of cautious yoga stretching had taken away the worst of the pain and stiffness. Joyce was long gone to City Hall and the libraries, charged with locating Josephine Dupree. At Paul's suggestion, they were going to the office of Phil Galveston, the man who had been the Epicures organization's secretary for thirty years and who had charged himself with maintaining an archive of the krewe's activities.

If the Beaufortes hadn't kept records of the years after 1968, maybe Phil Galveston had. Maybe in his files they'd find photos of the man in the boar-head mask, and a name for him. If Cree's assumption was correct.

Paul shook his head. "I'm not pretending. I'm curious – I want to understand how the parts fit together. You seem to have an integrated methodology, you have your version of clinical observation and literature. So far, it looks pretty consistent and – "

"Yeah. The only hard part is the fundamental premise."

"That what we're talking about is the psychology of dead people? Yes. That's hard. Can you blame me? Put the shoe on the other foot, Cree. Suppose you'd been going merrily along with your private psychiatry practice, never had a paranormal experience in your life, and then you met me, and I told you the things you're telling me. How would you react? Would you revise your whole personal and professional belief system, overnight, on the basis of what I said?"

Cree shrugged and looked out the window, giving the point only grudgingly.

"So go on," he urged. "You were saying you learned something last night, something about the ghost's affective complex."

Cree sighed. "I have to give you some background first. I use the word 'complex' the same way Freud did, as in Oedipus complex, inferiority complex, and so on – a connected group of repressed ideas that compel habitual actions of thought, feeling, and action. My point was going to be that though every ghost relives the experience of the death to a large degree, the act of physically dying is not necessarily the foremost aspect of the dying person's experience. At the moment of death, people experience an enormous range of emotions. It's not just about pain or fear. They might remember or relive things that seem unconnected with the circumstances of death. They often yearn toward or call out to loved ones. They might feel lonely or ecstatic or serene. They might cling to, or retreat toward reassuring thoughts. Sometimes their concerns seem at first trivial or absurd."

"Okay. But you were saying something about 'distillation' – "

"A dying person's perimortem emotions and thoughts are not random. They derive from some central, overpowering concern or issue in his or her life. Death is a moment of absolute desperation and surrender, and a person's thoughts home in on a crucial, defining image, event, emotion, or concern. If I can understand what that is, I can release the ghost."

"Example, please."

Cree took a moment to recall one that was appropriate. "A case in Arizona. The ghost – the man who had died – was a Hopi Indian, not particularly identified with Native American culture, who was making extra money stealing relics from historic Hopi sites. The physical circumstance of his death was that he'd gotten trapped in an under ground kiva, badly injured after part of the rock ceiling fell in. So the immediate dying experience was one of physical pain, fear, and the frantic desire to try to survive, all very typical. The secondary experience was one of guilt at desecrating the holy place, and with the guilt came regret over having ignored his grandfather's lifelong pleas to understand and respect traditions – this accident and injury seemed like a punishment for that, for which he blamed and hated his grandfather. The ghost relived moments of conflict with his grandfather from twenty years earlier, an incident when he'd driven away from the grandfather's home after an argument, swearing at him and deliberately running over a couple of his chickens. That's the affect that witnesses felt when they saw his ghost, and that's what I first encountered, too – rage, impulsive violence, resentment, shame. Very scary. But deeper still was another layer, more affirmative – the knowledge that his grandfather loved him unconditionally and forgave him. That was associated with a look his grandfather had given him, literally a single momentary gaze, when they were out fishing when he was a kid. Sunset, just the two of them, a powerful glance of kinship and love. In its pain and remorse, the dying man's psyche yearned for, tried to flee to, that… sanctuary."

Remembering brought tears to her eyes, and she was very glad she had sunglasses on. She didn't look at Paul, didn't know how he was hearing it, but she decided, Screw him, he can take it or leave it.

"And that's what you used, right?" he said softly. "You helped him

… find his way to that sanctuary? Helped him accept that the grandfather's love could overcome and transcend his transgressions?"

"Yes. I led him to his grandfather's eyes at the moment of that gaze."

Paul came up behind cars at a light and stopped. They sat there without talking, listening to muffled heavy metal music from the SUV in front of them,

"That's a beautiful story," Paul said, shaking his head. "Man! Every time I get around you, it's another… revelation. You… you kind of boot my brain into orbit every time we talk, so help me."

Cree didn't answer. She was glad he seemed to understand and appreciate. But it was becoming increasingly clear to her that their metaphysical differences were a real impediment to having a relationship. Last night, when they'd gone back to the Garden District to retrieve the other cars, Joyce had driven away immediately, leaving Paul and Cree standing together in the cool night, just down the block from Beauforte House. "Would you like to spend the night at my place?" Paul had asked simply. By then Cree had been on the edge of exhaustion. She'd put her arms around him and leaned her face against his. He'd held her softly, careful of her injuries, and for a full minute they'd just stood in the humid night air like that, and it felt very nice. He was warm, and she liked the rhythm of his bones, the way their bodies fit.

But other things didn't fit.

"Would you sleep with a woman you thought was presenting as schizophrenic?" she'd asked.

Against the side of her face, she'd felt his cheek move in a smile. "Not unless I was really head over heels. I'd have to be pretty far gone."

Yes, he'd framed it as sort of a joke, and it was a sweet way of affirming his attraction. But it had also been a deflection. Maybe she was still fleeing from her own ghosts, but Cree didn't think she could enter into any real intimacy unless it was truly reciprocal, equal, balanced. And as long as Paul believed she was at the very least misguided, and quite possibly in the grip of a delusive, clinically definable, aberrant mental condition, that equality wasn't possible.

She had pulled away, given his hand one last squeeze, and gone to her car.

"Here we are," Paul said, and Cree roused from her thoughts to notice her surroundings. Paul pulled over in front of a big brick building, three stories tall, with a Greek-revival-style entrance framed by four white columns. On the side of the building, a decorative sign in the style of the nineteenth century announced that it was Galveston amp; Sons Press.

"Phil's a fussy ol' fuddy-duddy," Paul told her as they went up the steps. "I don't know him well, but my father knew him, and of course I see him maybe twice a year at Epicurus functions. This is his family's business, since forever. It's a bindery, too."

A receptionist at the lobby desk told them how to find Phil's office; which adjoined the main press room. The noise of machines and the smells of ink and paper grew around them as they headed down the building's long central corridor. Cree's nervous anticipation grew with each step: This could be where they identified the boar-headed man. His identity, if her theory was correct, would make all the difference.

"For me," she finished, "that case was like watching three movies projected simultaneously onto the same screen – that raging moment of death, the fight with the grandfather, the long-ago evening of fishing. At any given moment, I had to figure out what image I was seeing, where I should start, which was most important. This case is the same way. When I experience the ghost, I sense many narratives at play at once – the affective complex of the ghost."

Paul nodded. They had come to a pair of wide glass doors that opened into a huge, high-ceilinged room lined with gigantic printing and binding machines. When Paul opened the door, the racket of the equipment enveloped them. Paul mouthed "Phil Galveston?" and a blue-uniformed technician gestured toward the back of the room, where a stairway led to a balcony lined with glass-enclosed offices. They walked along the rows of machines, skirting stacks of printed materials on pallets. Workers eyed them incuriously as they passed.

They climbed the metal stairs and entered a glass-walled lobby, where a secretary greeted them. She was a striking young black woman with the most elaborate hairdo Cree had ever seen, layers of oiled braids and curls woven and piled high on her head, and three-inch, curling fingernails. The sign on her desk said her name was Sharon Kincaid.

"Mr. Galveston is very sorry," she told them, "but he can't be here to help you. He got called to an emergency at our plant in Gretna." After all the rising expectation, the sudden letdown felt crushing to Cree. But Sharon smiled and went on. "So he told me to get you whatever you wanted from the Epicurus files. He got a whole room off his office just for those files. Sort of his hobby, you know? You all just have seat at the table there and tell me what you want, I'll go get it for you."

They told her they were looking for photos and clippings of Epicurus parties and balls and parades for 1969 through 1972. They didn't need dues ledgers, charitable donation receipts, float construction invoices, or the rest of it.

"I am sorry. Mr. Galveston is very particular, I'm supposed to bring out only one file at a time? It's a lot of stuff, the records have a way of getting mussed up. I'll be happy to bring you the other years when you're done with the first one."

They started with 1969. Sharon disappeared down a corridor between glassed offices, leaving them alone in the lobby.

Mr. Galveston was apparently an old-fashioned boss who liked the catbird seat. From this vantage they could see the entire printing room, the rows of web presses gobbling endless belts of white paper from gigantic rolls, the cutting and binding machines with their rhythmically rising and falling arms. Forklifts came and went with loads of bound books on pallets or giant spools of paper on spindles. The double-glass wall kept most of the noise out, but the floor vibrated slightly.

"You look frightened, Cree," Paul said quietly.

In fact, she felt sick with anticipation. "I was going to tell you what I learned from getting so… close to the ghost last night. First, his pursuit and rape is not his dying experience. I can't get any sense of the act of dying. That's been bothering me from the start, enough that I'd almost consider Joyce's specter idea. But for now, I'm still going to operate on the theory that the boar-headed man is a memory – a crucial, pivotal memory that in some way defines his life. The memory perseverates because it was so intense an experience – a peak of sadistic indulgence. I have to assume he perseverates because the guilt and regret he feels are so extreme, even though I can't find them in him. He's reenacting his worst deed. His perseverating as this pursuit and rape is his self punishment. In effect, he's condemned himself to reenact his most destructive, self-demeaning act."

Paul nodded thoughtfully, as if they were consulting about a living person. "That's how you'll reach him, right? That'll be your handle on him? Appeal to his contrition?"

"Maybe. It'd be nice if it was that easy." Cree slowed, feeling her nervousness spike, feeling suddenly not equal to the revelation that she was sure was imminent. "But there's one other thing I got last night, Paul. His arousal is predatory and sadistic as much as it is sexual. The pursuit and Lila's terror, the sense of power that gives him, are just as important to him as the rapes that culminate it. A big part of the thrill is the sense of violation. There's an element of that in all sexual encounters, even normal sexuality, the violation of social distance, right? But in his case, there's an acute sense of violating taboos. That really floats this bastard's boat."

"Well, sure, rape is pretty damned taboo – "

"I'm afraid it's more than that. I think it's the taboo against incest. He's related to his victim, Paul, he's aware of how taboo it is. That's part of the excitement for him."

Paul's shoulders slumped and his eyes fell to his empty hands on the tabletop. After a moment he stared out across the press room floor, a distant gaze oblivious to the activity below. Cree knew he was plugging the idea into his analysis of Lila; more, she could see genuine compassion in his face. He was as nervous as she was, drumming all ten fingers rapidly.

Below, at the far end of the press floor, a spindle lift driven by a young man approached a stack of paper rolls, each four feet in diameter. The shiny, six-foot steel phallus approached the holes in the massive paper spools, raised, lowered, found its way into the hole, backed halfway out to adjust its angle, went in again. How many bad jokes that job must generate here, Cree thought, feeling more than a little sick. It occurred to her that the incest probability didn't negate the specter theory. Ro-Ro's dark side?

And then Sharon was back, carrying a couple of fat, accordion-style folders. "Here we go," she said cheerfully. "Epicurus, 1969. Y'all take your time and enjoy." She gave them a stewardess smile and went back to her desk.

Paul seemed to share Cree's reluctance as they opened the first. It was a tidily organized file of photos of different sizes, some obviously done by a professional hired for the job, some three-by-fives apparently taken by Mr. Galveston or other Epicurus members. There were also newspaper clippings, yellowing and turning a little crumbly in glassine envelopes.

They flipped photos for a few minutes. People in tuxes, people in costumes, people toasting, people dancing, people looking up from meals. Then a posed group photo, obviously done by a professional: around thirty costumed partyers standing shoulder to shoulder. Cree thought she recognized Bradford Lambert in the middle row, the swashbuckling pirate.

And then she saw the boar-headed man.

He stood at the left end of the back row, his bristled head turned to a three-quarter view. He wore a jacket of some coarse material, ragged and patched.

Cree felt the breath go out of her. Paul whipped the photo over. Penned in neat copperplate, row by row, were the names of the partyers.

Far left, back row, was Richard Beauforte.