When the Thrill Is Gone

48

Dreaming is the true genius of man, my father told me one night after one motherfucker of a nightmare. I was six years old and the previous evening I had seen the fifties science-fiction classic The Fifty-Foot Woman. She was chasing me down Broadway. The streets were deserted and my breath was ragged enough that my lungs felt like tattered paper. When my father picked me up I was still screaming. I held on to him so tight that my arms and fingers ached. But I wouldn’t let go. Old Tolstoy carried me to his favorite chair and cradled me, waiting for the sobs and shaking to subside. When I was a little calmer he told me about dreams and genius. He didn’t try to lessen the effect of the dream itself. No. He accepted the fear, and so I did, too. He hailed my shuddering experience as brilliance.

That morning, on the cot in my office hall, I was more than half the way to consciousness but my eyes were still shut and the realm of dreams was close at hand. My thoughts were images instead of logical systems. There was a commune on an upstate farm and a cowboy hitching his palomino to a rail set out just for him. A man wearing a tuxedo but with the cowboy’s face came out through the swinging doors (the commune had become a saloon). The front wall of the establishment came loose from the rest of the building and fell on the two men. The horse was crushed but the fancy gentleman was standing in the doorway, and the broncobuster happened to be situated beneath an open window. They were both standing there unharmed, with dust from the heavy impact rising around them.

“Mr. McGill.”

Cowboys and communes (a word which rhymed with saloon). And then there were peas in a pod and dumb luck, two phrases somehow having the same meaning in my dream.

“Mr. McGill,” a different voice said.

I realized for the first time clearly how difficult constructing a poem must be.

I opened my eyes. Iran Shelfly and Mardi Bitterman stood over me. Their proximity — and me in a bed in a perpetually empty office space — threatened to become my second first draft of a poem that morning.

“Hey,” I said.

Iran had on a mustard suit and a yellow T-shirt, both close-fitting, of course. The ethereal Mardi’s dress was cream and crowded with rose-colored roses. I inhaled through my nostrils, expecting the scent of those flowers to narcotize me.

“Time to get up, boss,” she said.

I sat up, fully dressed except for my shoes. I was hungover but hadn’t had a drink. I was an elite mercenary armed with nothing but poetry.

“What time is it?”

“Eight twenty-one,” the ex-con told me.

I scanned the floor, focused on my shoes. Before I could lunge Mardi bent down and actually slipped the boatlike brogans onto my still-stockinged feet. This action soothed someplace deep inside.

“Cyril Tyler is in the outer office,” she said, looking up at my satisfaction.

“What?”

“He was waiting at the door when Iran and I got here,” she continued. “We told him that you weren’t in yet. I didn’t think you were until I realized that only one lock was on.”

“Why didn’t he use the ringer?”

“He was pressing it when we walked up to him.”

That dream was more potent than I imagined.

“What you want us to do, Mr. McGill?” Iran asked.

I stood up, wobbled a bit, and then everything fell into place.

“You go to your desk, Eye. I’m gonna go down to the toilet and wash my face. In ten minutes you bring Mr. Tyler down to see me,” I said to Mardi. “After that get me some coffee and whatever our guest wants.”

The youngsters nodded, and I tried not to feel like I was somehow a fraud.

I filled the little bathroom sink with the coldest water I could get out of the spigot then submerged my whole head in the bowl. Fifteen seconds down and I pulled my head out. I gazed at my grizzled face in the stained mirror and dunked down again.

After the third immersion I felt almost good.

Bright-eyed, toweled, and dusted with a rolling adhesive lint remover, I was seated behind my desk, only distantly aware of just how little normalcy my life had in it.

The door swung open. Mardi came in, exhibiting perfect posture, followed by the slouching billionaire.

“Mr. Tyler,” Mardi announced.

He was wearing a blue blazer, white business shirt, black-and-white tennis shoes, and blue jeans. Mr. Cyril Tyler was not designed to wear jeans, especially not blue ones. He looked like a butler dressed by his four-year-old daughter — a mishmash of good intentions and ill design.

And there I was, an unshaven, rumpled page of discarded poetry, extending a hand and smiling, no doubt wolfishly.

“Good to see you again,” I said.

He nodded and mumbled something, sat in my visitor’s chair and squinted at the light coming in through the windows.

Mardi backed out of the room but didn’t close the door.

“Here we are,” I said to the target.

“What was that message you left supposed to mean?” he asked.

Even when trying to be assertive Cyril seemed vulnerable, weak. He was like the heroic bureaucrat Grand, from Camus’s great novel The Plague, the working-class hero.

“I needed to see you, and everything else I tried failed.”

“I was out of town,” he said. “I just got in last night and happened to see the blinking light on Philip’s message machine.”

“Well,” I said in my best placating tone, “at least we’re here now.”

“You weren’t hired by Chrystal, were you, Mr. McGill?”

“No, sir, I wasn’t, but that’s what she said her name was. And you sent Ira Lamont to bully me into saying that, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I did, but it was his idea, not mine. And, anyway, I shouldn’t have told him to come. I should have waited until I got back to the city and come myself.”

“Excuse me,” Iran said, coming through the open door. He was carrying a gray cardboard box that had two fancy paper cups in it. “Chai latté for Mr. Tyler and a large French roast for Mr. McGill.”

He placed the cups down in front of their respective owners and left, closing the door.

“Where were we?” Tyler asked after the interruption.

“You were telling me why you shouldn’t have sent the cowboy to bully me.”

“I didn’t send him to intimidate you.”

“No? Do you know your brother?”

He threw his hands up.

“Ira said that you had come to the house and demanded to speak to me,” he said. “I, I was in Europe. I wanted to come down and face you when I returned, but he said that that wasn’t a good idea and that he should be the one. He said that you sounded angry and he knew how to deal with that.”

“Your brother said all this?”

“Yes.”

“So why are you here now?”

“Ira said that you didn’t know anything. He said that he thought you were just making it all up. But after I heard that message I knew that he was hiding something from me.”

“And what are you hiding, Mr. Tyler?”

He squinted again, this time not from the sunlight.

“Before I say more, Mr. McGill, I want to know why you came to my house misrepresenting yourself.”

“That’s easy,” I said. “I didn’t misrepresent myself.”

“You just admitted that Chrystal didn’t hire you.”

“Her sister Shawna came to me and told me that she was your wife. She said that you had murdered your first two wives, that you had lost a lot of weight and were having an affair. She said that she was worried that you were going to have her offed, too. She had a picture of you two arm in arm. I did my homework. Your previous wives had died under mysterious circumstances. What was I supposed to think?”

Cyril sniffed as if I had insulted him.

“I was not having an affair,” he said.

“But you did kill your wives?”

Tyler closed his eyes and sat back in the chair. He grimaced and shook his head.

“It’s very hard to explain.”

“I just figured out poetry this morning,” I said. “Try me.”

“For a long time,” he began, “a very long time, I believed that I had an extra-psychic ability — the power to cause harm to people, a power I couldn’t help but despise. If I wanted harm to come to someone, it did. My first wife and I had a fight on our boat. She hit me on the head with a pair of binoculars. I locked myself in the cabin, drank cognac, and nursed an evil hatred toward her. In the morning I was alone on the boat.”

“What about Pinky Todd?” I asked. “You nurse a grudge against her, too?”

“She said that she had information about an investment group I belonged to, that she’d discovered certain illegal transactions we had made. For some reason she thought that she could get a better divorce settlement out of me if she held that over my head.”

“Sounds like a plan,” I said, “except if the victim had an extra-psychic BB gun.”

“I hadn’t done anything illegal, but I came to a better agreement over a settlement. I was angry. I admit it. And then she was murdered like that. What was I to think?”

“Exactly what Shawna thought — you killed your wife. All that leaves is the affair.”

“I had cancer,” he said.

I believe that if I had an entire lifetime to consider how he might have answered my question, cancer would never have come up.

“Say what?”

“Colon cancer,” he said. “It was pretty bad. I couldn’t bring myself to tell Chrystal about it. I believed that if I said it out loud to a loved one, my fate would be sealed. My doctors were in Geneva, and so I pretended to have work there.”

“How does that translate into an affair?”

“In order to deal with my state of mind I entered into psychotherapy. Daily sessions. My therapist, a woman named Inola Rice, spoke with me every night on the phone. Chrystal asked if I was talking to a girlfriend, but I told her no.

“The one major thing that came out of those sessions with Dr. Rice was that I suffered from a personality disorder that caused me to believe in magical thinking.”

“The belief that your rage caused the deaths of your wives,” I said.

“Exactly.”

“If all this is just in your head, then who killed Shawna?”

“Oh my God. Shawna’s dead?” He seemed really moved, exactly the way you’d expect a man to act over the unexpected death of his sister-in-law.

“Don’t you read the papers?”

“I was out of town. I told you that.”

“Shawna hired me to protect Chrystal from you. Soon after, she was murdered. Do you have any idea why any of that might be?”

“No, I don’t. Dead? I can’t believe it.”

He seemed so sincere. I wanted to believe him. It was hard to imagine him hiring an assassin. But he was rich. You didn’t have to do much when you had the kind of bank book that backed him up.

“Shawna left six kids orphaned,” I said.

“I know that. When I leave you, I will find them and bring them home.”

“I took them to their aunt.”

“Chrystal?”

“I gave her your message. She says that she wants to see you.”

“When?”

“I’ll tell her about this conversation,” I said. “If she wants, after that, I’ll call your home phone and make the connection.”

“I’ll be there.”

“I’m sure you will be.”