Lullaby

Chapter 42

Everywhere, words are mixing. Words and lyrics and dialogue are mixing in a soup that could trigger a chain reaction. Maybe acts of God are just the right combination of media junk thrown out into the air. The wrong words collide and call up an earthquake. The way rain dances called storms, the right combination of words might call down tornadoes. Too many advertising jingles commingling could be behind global warming. Too many television reruns bouncing around might cause hurricanes. Cancer. AIDS.

In the taxi, on my way to the Helen Boyle real estate offices, I see newspaper headlines mixing with hand-lettered signs. Leaflets stapled to telephone poles mix with third-class mail. The songs of street buskers mix with Muzak mix with street hawkers mix with talk radio.

We're living in a teetering tower of babble. A shaky reality of words. A DNA soup for disaster. The natural world destroyed, we're left with this cluttered world of language.

Big Brother is singing and dancing, and we're left to watch. Sticks and stones may break our bones, but our role is just to be a good audience. To just pay our attention and wait for the next disaster.

Against the taxi's seat, my ass still feels greasy and stretched out.

There are thirty-three copies of the poems book left to find. We need to visit the Library of Congress. We need to mop up the mess and make sure it will never happen.

We need to warn people. My life is over. This is my new life.

The taxi pulls into the parking lot, and Mona's outside the front doors, locking them with a huge ring of keys. For a minute, she could be Helen. Mona, her hair's ratted, back-combed, teased into a red and black bubble. She's wearing a brown suit, but not chocolate brown. It's more the brown of a chocolate hazelnut truffle served on a satin pillow in a luxury hotel.

A box sits on the ground at Mona's feet. On top of the box is something red, a book. The grimoire.

I'm walking across the parking lot, and she calls, «Helen's not here.»

There was something on the police scanner about everybody in a bar on Third Avenue being dead, Mona says, and me being arrested. Putting the box in the trunk of her car, she says, «You just missed Mrs. Boyle. She ran out of here sobbing just a second ago.»

The Sarge.

Helen's big, leather-smelling Realtor's car is nowhere in sight.

Looking down at her own brown high heels, her tailored suit, padded and tucked, doll clothes with huge topaz buttons, her short skirt, Mona says, «Don't ask me how this happened.» She holds up her hands, her black fingernails painted pink with white tips. Mona says, «Please tell Mrs. Boyle I don't appreciate having my body kidnapped and shit done to me.» She points at her own stiff bubble of hair, her blusher cheeks and pink lipstick, and says, «Thisis the equivalent of a fashion rape.»

With her new pink fingernails, Mona slams the trunk lid.

Pointing at my shirt, she says, «Did things with your friend get a little bloody?»

The red stains are chili, I tell her.

The grimoire, I say. I saw it. The red human skin. The pentagram tattoo.

«She gave it to me,» Mona says. She snaps open her little brown purse and reaches inside, saying, «She said she wouldn't need it anymore. Like I said, she was upset. She was crying.»

With two pink fingernails, Mona plucks a folded paper out of her purse. It's a page from the grimoire, the page with my name written on it, and she holds it out to me, saying, «Take care of yourself. I guess somebody in some government must want you dead.»

Mona says, «I guess Helen's little love spell must've backfired.» She stumbles in her brown high heels, and leaning on the car, she says, «Believe it or not, we're doing this to save you.»

Oyster's slumped in her backseat, too still, too perfect, to be alive. His shattered blond hair spreads across the seat. The Hopi medicine bag still hangs around his neck, cigarettes falling out of it. The red scars across his cheeks from Helen's car keys.

I ask, is he dead?

And Mona says, «You wish.» She says, «No, he'll be okay.» She gets into the driver's seat and starts the car, saying, «You'd better hurry and go find Helen. I think she might do something desperate.»

She slams her car door and starts to back out of her parking space.

Through her car window, Mona yells, «Check at the New Continuum Medical Center.» She drives off, yelling, «I just hope you're not too late.»