Desolation Road

26

For a year now it had been the same all day every day: how unfaithful he had been to her, how she had loved only him, only him, always and only, never a thought crossed her mind of another man, no, never, not once in all those years, not ever, and while she was sitting at home worshipping him in the temple of her heart, what had he been doing, oh, yes, you know only too well; yes, that, with that jade of a woman, that scarlet woman of bad parentage (may her womb rot within her and her breasts wither like dry eggplants) and he had earned no better than he deserved, yes, justice had been done, for the betrayal of a wife as adoring as she and what had he done, what had he done; shamed her before the whole town, yes the whole town, where she could no longer hold up her head in dignity or pride again, where she must hide from the people who said of her as she passed by “there she goes, there, look at her, the woman whose husband cheated on her and who never knew"; well, now everyone knew thanks to him, thanks to the goodness of his heart, his wonderful lofty intentions getting that Stalin man off the hook, his own rival and enemy, no less, he had given plenty of thought for rivals and enemies, yes, but was there ever a single thought for poor devoted wives, the kind who love with a love incomparable, and what had he done with all that love, eh? what had he done?: only squandered it on some cheap bawd who was not nagnagnagnagnagnagnagnagnag from rising to set the fire at dawn until she went to bed at sunset, and he saw how the nagging had made her ugly in body and soul and he hated her for it, hated the maliciousness that made her nag nag nag him for eternity in the bosom of the Panarch, he hated her and so he decided to punish her, so one day he whistled and called to his daughter until she put down the book and pushed her face against the blue bubble and he said to her, “Arnie daughter, have you ever wondered where you came from?” and Arnie replied, lips brushing the blue forcefield, “You mean sex and all that?” to which he said, “Oh, no, I mean, you, personally, because, Arnie, I’m not your daddy,” and then he told her what he had learned from his brush with the Panarchical Omniscience of how a woman had stolen a baby from a childless old woman and how that woman wanted that baby more than anything else in the visible or invisible world and enfolded and nurtured and birthed that baby as if it were her own, and after he had told her all this he said, “Go look in the mirror, Arnie, and ask yourself, do you really look like a Tenebrae, or do you look like a Mandella, for that is what you are; Rael’s sister, Limaal and Taasmin’s aunt,” and when she went to the mirror in her room and he heard her sobbing, he was much pleased, for he had sown the seeds of his wife’s destruction in the girl who was not and never had been his daughter’s heart and such was his malignant glee that he turned little cartwheels of delight in his shimmering blue bubble.