Lullaby

Chapter 36

Instead of the stain on my apartment ceiling, there's a big patch of white. Pushpinned to my front door, there's a note from the landlord. Instead of noise, there's total quiet. The carpet is crunchy with little bits of plastic, broken-down doors and flying buttresses. You can hear the filament buzzing in each lightbulb. You can hear my watch tick.

In my refrigerator, the milk's gone sour. All that pain and suffering wasted. The cheese is huge and blue with mold. A package of hamburger has gone gray inside its plastic wrap. The eggs look okay, but they're not, they can't be, not after this long. All the effort and misery that went into this food, and it's all going in the garbage. The contributions of all those miserable cows and veals, it gets thrown out.

The note from my landlord says the white patch on the ceiling is a primer coat. It says when the stain stops bleeding through, they'll paint the whole ceiling. The heat's on high to dry the primer faster. Half the water in the toilet's evaporated. The plants are dry as paper. The trap under the kitchen sink's half empty and sewer gas is leaking back up. My old way of life, everything I call home, smells of shit.

The primer coat is to keep what was left of my upstairs neighbor from bleeding through.

Out in the world, there's still thirty-nine copies of the poems book unaccounted for. In libraries, in bookstores, in homes. Give or take, I don't know, a few dozen.

Helen's in her office today. That's where I left her, sitting at her desk with dictionaries open around her, Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit dictionaries, translation dictionaries. She's got a little bottle of iodine and she's using a cotton swab to daub it on the writing, turning the invisible words red.

Using cotton swabs, Helen's daubing the juice from a purple cabbage on other invisible words, turning them purple.

Next to the little bottles and cotton swabs and dictionaries sits a light with a handle. A cord trails from it to an outlet in the wall.

«A fluoroscope,» Helen says. «It's rented.» She flicks a switch on the side and holds the light over the open grimoire, turning the pages until one page is filled with glowing pink words. «This one's written in semen.»

On all the spells, the handwriting's different.

Mona, at her desk in the outer office, hasn't said a nice word since the carnival. The police scanner is saying one emergency code after another.

Helen calls to Mona, «What's a good word for “demon”?»

And Mona says, «Helen Hoover Boyle.»

Helen looks at me and says, «Have you seen today's paper?» She shoves some books to one side, and under them is a newspaper. She flips through it, and there on the back page of the first section is a full-page ad. The first line says:

Attention, Have You Seen This Man?

Most of the page is an old picture, my wedding picture, me and Gina smiling twenty years ago. This has to be from our wedding announcement in some ancient Saturday edition. Our public declaration of commitment and love for each other. Our pledge. Our vows. The old power of words. Till death do us part.

Below that, the ad copy says, «Police are currently looking for this man for questioning in connection with several recent deaths. He is forty years old, five feet ten inches tall, weighs one hundred and eighty pounds, and has brown hair and green eyes. He's unarmed, but should be considered highly dangerous.»

The man in the photo is so young and innocent. He's not me. The woman is dead. Both of these people, ghosts.

Below the photo, it says, «He now goes by the alias “Carl Streator.” He often wears a blue tie.»

Below that, it says, «If you know his whereabouts, please call 911 and ask for the police.» If Oyster ran this ad or the police did, I don't know.

Helen and me standing here, looking down at the picture, Helen says, «Your wife was very pretty.»

And I say, yeah, she was.

Helen's fingers, her yellow suit, her carved and varnished antique desk, they're all stained and smudged red and purple with iodine and cabbage juice. The stains smell of ammonia and vinegar. She holds the fluoroscope over the book and reads the ancient peter tracks.

«I've got a flying spell here,» she says. «And one of these might be a love spell.» She flips back and forth, each page smelling like cabbage farts or ammonia piss. «The culling spell,» she says, «it's this one here. Ancient Zulu.»

In the outer office, Mona's talking on the phone.

Helen puts her hand on my arm and pushes me back, a step away from her desk, she says, «Watch this,» and stands there, both hands pressed to her temples, her eyes closed.

I ask, what's supposed to happen?

Mona hangs up her telephone in the outer office.

The grimoire open on Helen's desk, it shifts. One corner lifts, then the opposite corner. It starts to close by itself, then opens, closes and opens, faster and faster until it rises off the desk. Her eyes still closed, Helen's lips move around silent words. Rocking and flapping, the book's a shining dark starling, hovering near the ceiling.

And the police scanner crackles and says, «Unit seventeen.» It says, «Please proceed to 5680 Weeden Avenue, Northeast, the Helen Boyle real estate office, and apprehend an adult male for questioning …»

The grimoire hits the desk with a crash. Iodine, ammonia, vinegar, and cabbage juice splashing everywhere. Papers and books sliding to the floor.

Helen yells, «Mona!»

And I say, don't kill her, please. Don't kill her.

And Helen grabs my hand in her stained hand and says, «I think you'd better get out of here.» She says, «Do you remember where we first met?» Whispering, she says, «Meet me there tonight.»

In my apartment, all the tape in my answering machine is used up. In my mailbox, the bills are packed so tight I have to dig them out with a butter knife.

On the kitchen table is a shopping mall, half built. Even without the picture on the box, you can tell what it is because the parking lots are laid out. The walls are in place. The windows and doors sit off to one side, the glass installed already. The roof panels and big heating-cooling units are still in the box. The landscaping is sealed in a plastic bag.

Coming through the apartment walls, there's nothing. No one. After weeks on the road with Helen and Mona, I've forgotten how silence was so golden.

I turn on the television. It's some black-and-white comedy about a man come back from the dead as a mule. He's supposed to teach somebody something. To save his own soul. A man's spirit occupying a mule's body.

My pager goes off again, the police, my saviors, needling me toward salvation.

The police or the manager, this place has got to be under some kind of surveillance.

On the floor, scattered all over the floors, there's the stomped fragments of a lumber mill. There's the busted ruins of a train station flecked with dried blood. Around that, a medical-dental office building lies in a billion pieces. And an airplane hangar, crushed. A ferryboat terminal, kicked apart. All the bloody ruins and artifacts of what I worked so hard to put together, all of them scattered and crackling under my shoes. What's left of my normal life.

I turn on the clock radio next to the bed. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, I reach out and scrape together the remains of gas stations and mortuaries and hamburger stands and Spanish monasteries. I pile up the bits covered with blood and dust, and the radio plays big band swing music. The radio plays Celtic folk music and ghetto rap and Indian sitar music. Piled in front of me are the parts for sanatoriums and movie studios, grain elevators and oil refineries. On the radio is electronic trance music, reggae, and waltz music. Heaped together are the parts of cathedrals and prisons and army barracks.

With the little brush and glue, I put together smokestacks and skylights and geodesic domes and minarets. Romanesque aqueducts run into Art Deco penthouses run into opium dens run into Wild West saloons run into roller coasters run into small-town Carnegie libraries run into tract houses run into college lecture halls.

After weeks on the road with Helen and Mona, I've forgotten how perfection was so important.

On my computer, there's a draft of the crib death story. The last chapter. It's the type of story that every parent and grandparent is too afraid to read and too afraid not to read. There's really no new information. The idea was to show how people cope. People move forward with their lives. We could show the deep inner well of strength and compassion each of these people discovers. That angle.

All we know about infant sudden death is there is no pattern. A baby can die in its mother's arms.

The story's still unfinished.

The best way to waste your life is by taking notes. The easiest way to avoid living is to just watch. Look for the details. Report. Don't participate. Let Big Brother do the singing and dancing for you. Be a reporter. Be a good witness. A grateful member of the audience.

On the radio, waltz music runs into punk runs into rock runs into rap runs into Gregorian chanting runs into chamber music. On television, someone is showing how to poach a salmon. Someone is showing why the Bismarck sank.

I glue together bay windows and groin vaults and barrel vaults and jack arches and stairways and clerestory windows and mosaic floors and steel curtain walls and half-timbered gables and Ionic pilasters.

On the radio is African drum music and French torch songs, all mixed together. On the floor in front of me are Chinese pagodas and Mexican haciendas and Cape Cod colonial houses, all combined. On television, a golfer putts. A woman wins ten thousand dollars for knowing the first line of the Gettysburg Address.

My first house I ever put together was four stories with a mansard roof and two staircases, a front one for family and a rear servant's staircase. It had metal and glass chandeliers you wired with tiny lightbulbs. It had a parquet floor in the dining room that took six weeks of cutting and gluing to piece together. It had a ceiling in the music room that my wife, Gina, stayed up late, night after night, painting with clouds and angels. It had a fireplace in the dining room with a fire I made out of cut glass with a flickering light behind it. We set the table with tiny dinner plates, and Gina stayed up at night, painting roses around the border of each plate. The two of us, those nights, with no television or radio, Katrin asleep, it seemed so important at the time. Those were the two people in that wedding photo. The house was for Katrin's second birthday. Everything had to be perfect. To be something that would prove our talent and intelligence. A masterpiece to outlive us.

Oranges and gasoline, the glue smell, mixes with the smell of shit. On my fingers, on the glue slopped there, my hands are crusted with picture windows and porches and air conditioners. Stuck to my shirt are turnstiles and escalators and trees, and I turn the radio up.

All that work and love and effort and time, my life, wasted. Everything I hoped would outlive me I've ruined.

That afternoon I came home from work and found them, I left the food in the fridge. I left the clothes in the closets. The afternoon I came home and knew what I'd done, that was the first house I stomped. An heirloom without an heir. The tiny chandeliers and glass fire and dinner plates. Stuck in my shoes, I left a trail of tiny doors and shelves and chairs and windows and blood all the way to the airport.

Beyond that, my trail ended.

And sitting here, I've run out of parts. All the walls and roofs and handrails. And what's glued to the floor in front of me is a bloody mess. It's nothing perfect or complete, but this is what I've made of my life. Right or wrong, it follows no great master plan.

All you can do is hope for a pattern to emerge, and sometimes it never does.

Still, with a plan, you only get the best you can imagine. I'd always hoped for something better than that.

A blast of French horns comes on the radio, the clatter of a Teletype, and a man's voice says how police have found yet another dead fashion model. The television shows her smiling picture. They've arrested another suspect boyfriend. Another autopsy shows signs of postmortem sexual intercourse.

My pager goes off again. The number on my page is my new savior.

My hands lumpy with shutters and doors, I pick up the phone. My fingers rough with plumbing and gutters, I dial a number I can't forget.

A man answers.

And I say, Dad. I say, Dad, it's me.

I tell him where I'm living. I tell him the name I use now. I tell him where I work. I tell him that I know how it looks, with Gina and Katrin dead, but I didn't do it. I just ran.

He says, he knows. He saw the wedding picture in today's newspaper. He knows who I am now.

A couple weeks ago, I drove by their house. I say how I saw him and Mom working in the yard. I was parked down the street, under a flowering cherry tree. My car, Helen's car, covered in pink petals. Both he and Mom, I say, they both look good.

I tell him, I've missed him, too. I love him, too. I tell him, I'm okay.

I say, I don't know what to do. I say, but it's all going to be okay.

After that, I just listen. I wait for him to stop crying so I can say I'm sorry.