Lullaby

Chapter 44

When I was twenty years old, I married a woman named Gina Dinji, and that was supposed to be the rest of my life. A year later, we had a daughter named Katrin, and she was supposed to be the rest of my life. Then Gina and Katrin died. And I ran and became Carl Streator. And I became a journalist. And for twenty more years, that was my life.

After that, well, you already know what happened.

How long I held on to Helen Hoover Boyle I don't know. After long enough, it was just her body. It was so long she'd stopped bleeding. By then, the broken parts of Patrick Boyle, still cradled in her arms, they'd thawed enough to start bleeding.

By then, footsteps arrived outside the door to room 131. The door opened.

Me still sitting on the floor, Helen and Patrick dead in my arms, the door opens, and it's the grizzled old Irish cop.

Sarge.

And I say, please. Please, put me in jail. I'll plead guilty to anything. I killed my wife. I killed my kid. I'm Waltraud Wagner, the Angel of Death. Kill me so I can be with Helen again.

And the Sarge says, «We need to get a move on.» He steps from the doorway to the steel cabinet. On a pad of paper, he writes something in pen. He tears off the note and hands it to me.

His wrinkled hand is spotted with moles, carpeted with gray hairs. His fingernails, thick and yellow.

«Please forgive me for taking my own life,» the note says. «I'm with my son now.»

It's Helen's handwriting, the same as in her planner book, the grimoire.

It's signed, «Helen Hoover Boyle,» in her exact handwriting.

And I look from the body in my arms, the blood and green drain-cleaner vomit, to the Sarge standing there, and I say, Helen?

«In the flesh,» the Sarge says, Helen says. «Well, not my own flesh,» he says, and looks at Helen's body dead in my lap. He looks at his own wrinkled hands and says, «I hate ready-to-wear, but any port in a storm.»

So this is how we're on the road again.

Sometimes I worry that Sarge here is really Oyster pretending to be Helen occupying the Sarge. When I sleep with whoever this is, I pretend it's Mona. Or Gina. So it all comes out even.

According to Mona Sabbat, people who eat or drink too much, people addicted to drugs or sex or stealing, they're really controlled by spirits that loved those things too much to quit after death. Drunks and kleptos, they're possessed by evil spirits.

You are the culture medium. The host.

Some people still think they run their own lives.

You are the possessed.

We're all of us haunting and haunted.

Something foreign is always living itself through you. Your whole life is the vehicle for something to come to earth.

An evil spirit. A theory. A marketing campaign. A political strategy. A religious doctrine.

Driving me away from the New Continuum Medical Center in a squad car, the Sarge says, «They have the occupation spell and the flying spell.» He ticks off each spell by holding up another finger. «They'll have a resurrection spell—but it only works on animals. Don't ask me why,» he says. She says, «They have a rain spell and a sun spell … a fertility spell to make crops grow … a spell to communicate with animals …»

Not looking at me, looking at his fingers spread on the steering wheel, the Sarge says, «They do not have a love spell.»

So I am really in love with Helen. A woman in a man's body. We don't have hot sex anymore, but as Nash would say, how is that different than most love relationships after long enough?

Mona and Oyster have the grimoire, but they don't have the culling song. The grimoire page that Mona gave me, the one with my name written in the margin, it's the song. Along the bottom of the page is written, «I want to save the world, too—but not Oyster's way.» It's signed, «Mona.»

«They don't have the culling song,» the Sarge says, Helen says, «but they have a shield spell.»

A shield spell?

To protect them from the culling song, the Sarge says.

«But not to worry,» he says. «I have a badge and a gun and a penis.»

To find Mona and Oyster, you only have to look for the fantastic, for miracles. The amazing tabloid headlines. The young couple seen crossing Lake Michigan on foot in July. The girl who made grass grow up, green and tall, through the snow for buffalo starving in Canada. The boy who talks to lost dogs at the animal shelter and helps them get home.

Look for magic. Look for saints.

The Flying Madonna. The Roadkill Jesus Christ. The Ivy Inferno. The Talking Judas Cow.

Keep going after the facts. Witch-hunting. This isn't what a therapist will tell you to do, but it works.

Mona and Oyster, this will be their world soon enough. The power has shifted. Helen and I will be forever playing catch-up. Imagine if Jesus chased you around, trying to catch you and save your soul. Not just a patient passive God, but a hardworking, aggressive bloodhound.

The Sarge snaps open his holster, the way Helen used to snap open her little purse, and he takes out a pistol.

He says, Helen says, whoever says, «How about we just kill them the old-fashioned way?»

Now this is my life.