You Are Not on Solid Ground

The air was damp and smelled like mud and the bright sun baked bloated worms into the walk, causing Roman to deliberately place his steps on his approach to the White Tower. He stopped and produced a small vial of coke from his blazer pocket, feeling on balance pretty good about the limitless opportunities of this new morning. On balance all this goddamn pussyfooting was against his genetic disposition, and if there was any lesson to be taken from his lineage it was that history’s great murderer of clarity was always other people. Jacob Godfrey once said that the one thing that others could be reliably depended to provide was gastrointestinal distress, and this had never been so poignant to Roman before now. But it was a Godfrey who had built this town, so it was only fitting that it would be a Godfrey to save it from itself. He didn’t need them. They could suck each other’s dicks. He didn’t need anyone. He did a bump into each nostril and wiped his nose. The sun glinted off the side of the Tower and he found himself fixating on it, the light pulling itself to the center of his mind’s eye as shadow found the fringes …

He shook his head. Not now.

“Goddamn pussyfooting,” he said. He resumed his steps. “They can suck each other’s dicks,” he said.

He entered the building and the sterile air enveloped him and he strode with decision to Reception, where a slight man glanced up from the newspaper horoscopes.

“May I help you?” he said.

“I want to see Dr. Pryce,” said Roman.

“Is Dr. Pryce expecting us?” said the receptionist. “No. But he’ll see me.”

“And may I inquire our business?”

Roman put his hands on the desk and leaned forward. “What’s your name?” he said. The man made a God-give-me-strength face. “My name is—”

Roman cut him off. “I really don’t give a shit. My name is Roman Godfrey. And I’m here to see Dr. Pryce.”

The receptionist was quiet, then picked up the phone. So there you had it. How things got done around here.

Waiting, he paced the floor with restless coke legs. The overhead lights were jellyfish on the marble floor.

“Hey,” said the receptionist, flagging his attention. “What’s your sign?” “Aries,” said Roman.

The man looked at the newspaper. “‘Senses will lie as dreams wake. You are not on solid ground. Don’t look down.’”

“Is that a haiku?” said Roman.

The man started counting syllables on his fingers as Dr. Pryce emerged from the elevator and came forward. Any perturbation he may have felt at the interruption or what the boy might be doing here

independent of his mother, at whose side he was as good as surgically attached at the public functions where their interaction was almost entirely localized, was not evident.

“The big man,” said Pryce, shaking his hand. “Isn’t this a nice surprise? What brings you our way?” Roman returned his smile. “Project Ouroboros,” he said.

Pryce pursed his lips, nonplussed. “Well, I can’t imagine you’d find it very interesting,” he said. “Suppose I do,” said Roman.

They looked at each other. Several lab techs entered and passed through the mezzanine, glancing at this unusual impasse of lord and vassal. Finally Pryce shrugged and gestured for Roman to follow. He conducted Roman to the Herpetology Lab and repeated the same performance he had given Norman.

“Oh, wait, no,” said the lab tech. “There’s the decimal.”

Pryce made a conciliatory face for Roman. “Not a thrill a minute, I suppose, but I hope it’s what you need. If you want, we can drop by Prosthetics—there’s a robot arm you can make play Nintendo with your own motor cortex.”

Roman did not look at the lab tech. “Get out,” he said. The lab tech looked at Pryce.

“Did you just try to touch my dick?” Roman said to the lab tech. The lab tech was alarmed.

“I’m calling the CFO right now and telling him you tried to touch my dick,” said Roman. Pryce gave the lab tech a nod and he exited.

Pryce was amiable. “Your dad was a real pistol too,” he said.

“Show me what I came for,” said Roman. “Project Ouroboros. The real one. It’s underground and I’d like you to take me to it.”

Pryce laughed. “If there’s some secret underground experiment, I’d sure like to see it too.” “Do not fucking laugh at me,” said Roman.

Pryce stopped laughing. He gestured for Roman to have a seat. Roman did not. They looked at each other.

“Relax,” said Pryce.

“Who do you think you’re talking to, Johann?” said Roman. He had never called Dr. Pryce by his first name before. He loved today. Yesterday and every day before he had allowed that greasy faggot to call the shots, but now look who was the warrior.

Pryce took a pen from his shirt pocket and twiddled it between his fingers.

“Of course,” he said. “There is no presumption quite so infuriating as to be treated like the boy you were and not the man you’ve become. So. What can I do for you, young man?”

“I don’t think I need to be clearer,” said Roman.

“There is, however, a consequence to stepping into your father’s shoes,” said Pryce. “Or rather, a great number of them, compounding in interest until the day you die. It has been my experience—”

“Did I say, Talk to me like a little cunt?” said Roman. So down to business. He looked Pryce in the eye. “Tell me—” said Roman.

Pryce clicked his pen three times in succession. clickclickclick. It cut Roman’s focus off at the knees. Three. Atonal, asymmetrical, amoral. Bad luck’s favorite number, its association with the divine the devil’s hat trick. Roman sputtered, trying to expel this emissary of the dark place.

Pryce waited.

Roman shook it off and recovered, looking Pryce in the eye with renewed intensity. “Tell me—”

clickclickclick

Roman sputtered again and then was still and ominously quiet.

Pryce watched him with concern now. “Do you need a glass of water?” he said.

Roman blinked rapidly and glared, willing his anger into a penetrating focus. “Tell me—”

clickclickclick

“GODDAMMIT!” Roman roared and seized the pen from Pryce’s hand and hurled it across the room. It bounced to no great effect off a cage, causing its inhabitant to languidly raise its head, find nothing going on of interest, and return to its meditation.

Roman fell into the chair previously offered him and wheeled it facing in the other direction from Pryce. His eyes had filled with useless water and the clicking echoed in his brain like the abyss in tap shoes.

Pryce stood over him and gently kneaded the boy’s neck. “Inch by inch,” said Pryce.

Roman breathed and allowed the tension to release under the gentle hands behind him; he’d pissed away too much dignity to have any option left but submission.

“It has been my experience,” said Pryce, as though he had never been interrupted, “that being a man consists in large part of accepting how little of it is getting what you want when you want it.”

* * *

Outside, Roman headed back down the walk. His shoulders were clenched and his cheeks were as hot as though they’d been slapped, and so acute was his annoyance and embarrassment over this failure that he very nearly, without even thinking about it, stepped on a crack, catching his foot just at the last moment. He looked down appalled at this averted catastrophe.

“Fucking Peter!” he said. “Fucking goddamn Peter!”

On the next square of the walk an earthworm writhed speckled with little black ants, and Roman stomped on the entire squalid spectacle. He resumed his step.

clickclickclick

Roman whirled, eyes darting wildly, but no one was there. “Breathe,” Roman said. “Breathe.”

He felt the ground under his feet. This was here. He took out his mint container and tapped out the rest of his coke on the back of his hand and sucked it with both nostrils, grinding his nose into it. This was really here. He wiped his nose with his sleeves and once more started walking.

clickclickclick

Roman froze. His blood went cold. Oh no. It had gotten in him. It had gotten in him and taken up a small chisel and clickclickclick clickclickclick clickclickclick it worked away at him. It worked away with purpose. It wanted something.

Roman whimpered. He covered his face with his hands. He did not know if they were his own hands or the other hands. The dark ones. He did not know what was here and what was from the dark place they came from that he wanted so desperately to stay there.

“Please,” said Roman.

clickclickclick clickclickclick clickclickclick clickclickclick clickclickclick clickclickclick clickclickclick clickclickclick clickclickclick clickclickclick clickclickclick clickclickclick clickclickclick clickclickclick clickclickclick CLICKCLICKCLICK CLICKCLICKCLICK CLICKCLICKCLICK CLICKCLICKCLICK CLICKCLICKCLICK CLICKCLICKCLICK CLICKCLICKCLICK CLICKCLICKCLICK CLICKCLICKCLICK CLICKCLICKCLICK CLICKCLICKCLICK CLICKCLICKCLICK CLICKCLICKCLICK CLICKCLICKCLICK CLICKCLICKCLICK CLICKCLICKCLICK CLICKCLICKCLICK CLICKCLICKCLICK CLICKCLICKCLICK

And then it was quiet again, and what boundary there was between Roman and the dark place fell

away, and his eyes turned backwards and he saw the other side of it, he saw with clarity something he once knew, the most forbidden possible thing to know, the thing that Francis Pullman had seen when he looked into his eyes. The thing that had happened, and was still to come.

Roman screamed, and his knees buckled under him and he fell to the lawn screaming, and the ground around him buckled inward in a concavity of a perfect circumference that appeared around him, but he did not notice as the ground rippled and then fell away and he was swallowed by the pit.

* * *

Norman,

It’s a funny thing how you can look at something a thousand times without really seeing it. This happened to me recently when I saw the word gentleman in print and for whatever reason for the first time really saw it. Gentle man. Oh, I thought, that’s my brother. A gentleman is my brother, Norman.

But she won’t let that stand. She will bring out all the worst in you and by the time you realize it it’s too late, because she’s already destroyed the best. I could see the look in your eye the last time we talked, but under the circumstances I hope you will understand how seriously I mean this.

Do not let her destroy you.

Also, just so it’s in the record, I did attempt the other way first but it didn’t fly. She won’t let me kill her.

JR

Catabasis

From the archives of Dr. Norman Godfrey:

NG: How are you feeling this morning, Christina?

CW: It’s very pretty here. I took a walk for the first time earlier. It was a very nice walk, although there were branches all over the place. That sure was a heck of a storm last night. My grandfather would call it a barn burner.

NG: Yes, it was. I hope it didn’t upset you.

CW: Oh, I love storms. I can sit and watch a real barn burner of a storm all day. It’s like the thrillers my grandmother reads, you know? There’s no literary value, of course, but once the blood and guts start flying, oh boy! Nothing beats being safe and snug while things are just going to pieces, you know?

NG: You feel safe here?

CW: I mean, I’m not an expert on mental institutions, but this feels like a pretty tight ship. Kidding, I’m kidding. But yes. I do. It feels like nothing can get its hands on you in here.

NG: …

CW: I knew him, actually. NG: Excuse me?

CW: You’re thinking about him. That bum. Sorry, I shouldn’t call him a bum. But he was your patient too, wasn’t he?

NG: Yes, he was.

CW: My grandparents live by Kilderry Park, so I’d see him around a lot. I guess I shouldn’t say I knew him. He had an entire life and parents and everything and I don’t know anything about it. Except the obvious.

NG: The obvious?

CW: He watched him do it. He watched Peter Rumancek eat that girl. NG: …

CW: Doctor, do you need a glass of water or something?

* * *

There was a silence of dread character when Dr. Godfrey returned from work. Marie was in the kitchen, scouring the counters, and there were eddies of tension around her neck and shoulders. There had been a time when he could have put his hands on her shoulders and it would have relieved that tension. There had been a time when kindness passed between them other than for an audience and their interactions had more underlying themes than blame. He stood in the doorway and she knew he was there and allowed a sense of foreboding to build, nothing good to come from a Godfrey woman doing her own cleaning, and he waited with habitual fatalism about what he regarded not just as the years’ accumulation of domestic hostility and disappointment but also a cosmic punishment. Because she had never fallen out of love with

him.

He looked at the face on the refrigerator door. The lumpy eyeless face, a goblin made of Silly Putty. And he had argued in favor of displaying Letha’s ultrasound because … because he had lost the power to say no to her.

“She has nothing to say to me,” said Marie finally. She did not turn to face him. “She looks at me like the goddamn grand inquisitor. Maybe you’ll have better luck. Doctor.”

In his near decade of medical training it had never occurred to him it would come to fruition with the honor of having this title spat at him like that.

He went to Letha’s room. She was on her bed doing math homework and did not look up, denying him her attention with an air of beatific persecution. An unwelcome image came to mind of this “ponytailed hoodlum” bucking on top of her. This was the lot of man: you begin life as the young buck only to blink and find yourself the father of the young lady being bucked upon.

“I guess I’ll run off and join the Calvinists,” he said.

She ignored him. In the pains he had gone through in his own courtship days he could never imagine a denial more acute than his daughter’s affection. But there were larger considerations. One of the biggest factors fracturing this household was Marie’s perception of irrelevance; from her perspective it would seem more as factioning: her husband and daughter banding against her. Which they were; they were because he was doing everything to encourage it. So there was no choice. He would have to align himself with Marie, even at the risk of alienating his daughter, of his daughter looking at him as they did her, with such … disappointment. If he wanted to fix the one thing that was in his hands, he would be forced to take her mother’s side. He closed the door.

“I’m not here to mom you,” he said.

She looked at him and he felt the thing he knew was the last thing he should be allowing himself to feel: that he was winning. But right now his talents were needed elsewhere. He sat on her bed and fortified himself to disengage the father side of him and employ professional neutrality. Sword swallowers actually manage to rearrange internal organs. All manner of feats were possible.

“Was it your first time?” he said.

In a manner of speaking, he added silently. “Yes,” she said.

“It’s not a bad thing,” he said. “Don’t ever let anyone put it in your head that it’s a bad thing.” “Okay,” said Letha.

“But … you have to understand our concerns. Look around you, sweetpea. The biggest thing was not knowing. You have to understand how we’re going to take not knowing where you are.”

“But that’s not it,” she said. “The biggest thing is Peter. And that’s exactly why I didn’t say where I was. Because I don’t want to lie to you, but I knew you would react exactly the same either way. At least she would.”

He concealed the satisfaction he took in the amendment.

“She’s just as judgmental as anyone else,” said Letha. “It’s the same with Roman. It’s confirmation bias. She’s already made up her mind and will only see what makes her right.”

“I’ll have to look at my parenting rules of order, but I’m not sure you’re allowed to be throwing around terms like confirmation bias,” he said.

A plastic thread curled from her comforter and he pulled it straight and let it recoil. “And,” he said, “I have to ask you, how much do you know about this boy?”

He could see in her eyes a pulling away with the clarity of physical movement.

“Letha, I hear things,” he said. “And this is a person I hear about more than some. Now, I’m tying pianos to my legs not to jump to conclusions, but this young man has quite a reputation.”

She was quiet a moment and he wasn’t sure if this was a losing battle. If there was any way to discuss

it without making her hate him. If this was a defeat he could live with.

But then she looked at him and her eyes were glassy and she said, “Dad, I’m in love with him.” He said nothing. His eyes glassed too.

“People see what they see,” she said. “They see someone like Peter and he’s just a blank page that people can put on whatever they’re afraid of. You know how people are.”

He did. But he also knew this little girl who spoke with unearthly authority was very possibly insane. He lay his hand flat on the bed. She put her hand in his. They were quiet.

The door opened and Marie came in. Invaded, was what it felt like. It felt like an invasion of privacy. He hoped Letha wouldn’t move her hand and she didn’t. So there.

“Olivia called,” said Marie.

And so that was that. He knew what was coming, all these dumb-ass years coming, and in a single instant over, and what this instant revealed to him was that he was not simply prepared for it but elated. Elated because it was not in his cosmology to leave her.

He held his daughter’s hand and waited for it to come. “Roman is in a coma,” said Marie.

* * *

Roman was in the attic at Godfrey House. Pryce had told Olivia that his EKG was stable but he strongly advised against bringing him home. This advice was overridden. Shelley had communicated that she wanted him to be up in the attic with her and received her mother’s consent. Shelley carried his bed up herself. He lay there now in a gown from the institute. They stood over him, Godfrey and Olivia and the girls. There had been no pretense of Marie having any place here. Godfrey looked down at the boy, the boy lying there but with a kind of lack of thereness that looked exactly nothing like sleeping as the smell of his own childhood attic conjured reams of irrelevant memory, and needing some air he asked Olivia to come downstairs with him. The girls stayed. Letha looked up at Shelley. Shelley’s eyes looked hard and cool to the touch like quartz. Letha wrapped her arms around Shelley’s trunk. Her hands did not quite meet.

Godfrey and Olivia stood out on the back patio. The motion sensor light came on and threw their shadows lank over the lawn.

“You know he should be in a hospital,” he said. “He’s staying here,” she said.

Godfrey looked at the tall man he made on the grass. He had told her once, long ago, that he would without hesitation have her children taken from her if he ever thought there was a reason. But in this circumstance, where intervention was clearly justified, he suffered no illusion of his conscience holding any jurisdiction.

“How did it happen?” he said.

“A drug overdose. He was on narcotics and causing a scene at the institute.” “Why was he there?”

“I don’t know.”

He pressed a fingertip to the apex of the pyramid post cap of the railing.

“Olivia, tell me the truth,” he said. “Do you know anything about Project Ouroboros?”

“I’ve told you I haven’t got any better idea what goes on there than you do. Has it got something to do with Roman?”

“Why was he there?” Godfrey said again. “Something’s going on here, you can’t act like it’s not.”

She turned to him with a look totally incongruous of his experience of her. She looked at him with no agenda.

“Norman, the last thing I feel like right now is acting,” she said.

She lit a cigarette. The motion light went out. The cherry of her cigarette glowed in the tears on her cheeks.

“Liv,” he said. He had not referred to her by this glaring homophone of a diminutive in a very long time.

“Liv Liv Liv,” he said.

* * *

That night after midnight Godfrey’s phone rang. He said “Hello” and then “Oh for God’s—” and then “No no, I’m on my way.” He hung up and turned to Marie and began his cover but did not bother to finish; it was beyond redundant. Her impassivity over his leaving their bed inspired in him the morbid impulse to oversell his desire to return to it. He hovered over her, rubbing her arm, and said he would be back as soon as he could. She expressed no need for this to be any truer than it was.

Vindicated, he drove for the second time that day to Godfrey House and climbed into another bed and afterward engaged in an activity with Olivia they had not done in as many years as it had been since he called her by her pet name. They slept together. A phrase he had always failed to understand as a euphemism for fucking as though fucking were of intrinsically greater consequence.

Some hours later he woke suddenly, an animal confusion over being in the wrong bed. He was alone now in the bed, and having regained his orientation looked up to find her sitting at the bay window. She was nude and one knee was drawn up and the whisper of cigarette smoke was over her head. Lost in her own thoughts. Her own heartbreak for a world where these things happen to our children and there’s nothing we can do about it.

* * *

Peter and Letha were eating lunch in the cafeteria and he felt it coming. He detected a kind of nervous energy in her, a distinctively female tension that when released would be no good for anyone. He felt it in his Swadisthana. A week had gone by. Roman was still under and Peter had made no headway in the investigation. He had done nothing at all; he knew the fight that was coming but did not know what new and inspired ways things could get fucked if he continued trying to get around it. For now the only thing was to take things as they came and avoid getting into any more grief-inducing scenarios. For now he was totally set on those. But the way Letha was worrying her yogurt it was clear that whatever was on her mind would soon be on his.

“Wow, do your earrings match your purse?” said Peter. As a rule he kept observations about fashion decisions women had made in reserve for diversionary purposes.

“I want you to come to dinner at my house,” she said. Peter was quiet.

“It would be kind of a big deal for them,” she said. “It … would be kind of a big deal for me.”

Peter told his mind’s eye to picture the way the sun falls like honey on the grass in autumn and a low stream passing over round stones and the first angel’s-hair sliver of the new moon. Make “this” a lot easier. So we’re a “this” now. As if that wasn’t the exact kind of talk that led to boyfriend and commitment and other words he was allergic to. Girls. The second you set up a perfectly reasonable boundary is the second they’re shopping for bulldozers. Ever the foremost of ironies that men are considered the hunters of the species.

She looked at him, expecting. Expecting the ten million things that girls get it in their heads to expect. Obviously he was letting things come too far. Obviously she was hard of hearing in that way they get when you say “I need my space” and they hear wedding bells. He knew how to handle this. As Nicolae had said: nine out of ten times a woman is giving you an ache in the belly it can be easily solved by taking

her home and giving her the business. There it was. He would just take her home and give her the business like it was going out of style and there’d be nothing more to talk about. He smiled at her and nodded and she smiled back, thinking she was getting her way.

The subsequent evening Marie Godfrey could hardly contain her disbelief that she sat across the table from this greasy and quite plausibly lice-ridden thug like any school friend breaking bread with her family. Or at least the stand-in family whose resemblance to the one she had devoted her best years to diminished by the day. But it was still her table. Appropriate enough for the ritual sacrifice of what was left of sanctity. Classist! The nerve of such an implication when Marie Newport had grown up the daughter of an unskilled steelworker from a side of the tracks that neither her husband, daughter, nor any Godfrey had a conception of any more than the dark side of the moon. As though it made one some scaly old relic out of a Jane Austen novel for having some concern about one’s only child ending up chopped up in a ditch. As though it made any difference how many charitable endeavors you were spearheading or that you would cut off your arm before voting Republican; that one look at the likes of a Peter Rumancek and you had a responsibility to your eyes irrespective of something so notional as class. Unless your name was Norman Godfrey. If this was your name your responsibility was to an argument against an ancestor who had been dead for nearly a hundred years.

But none of this was what caused the greatest strain on Marie’s credulity. What astonished her most about this performance was her own collaboration with it. When Letha had first sprung this proposal, Marie’s response was a hard and brittle laugh unpleasant to her own ears and an unequivocal “Absolutely not.” But Letha had not bothered to argue her ruling or even look at her. She looked at her father in unmistakable collusion: he would handle it. Handling crazy people was his job. Marie wondered if there was a word for what she had become. It would be the opposite of an echo, a body severed from the voice. When all the voice wanted, if anyone could hear it, was to ask how they had let this happen.

After dinner she excused herself, claiming a sudden onset of fatigue, and Dr. Godfrey poured himself a drink and offered one to Peter. The kid earned it sitting under the klieg light of Marie’s hospitality.

And now, upon meeting the accused in person, Dr. Godfrey was more sympathetic to his daughter’s point of view: Peter was a different breed. He was not our neighbor. He did not want the things we wanted. If you told him to straighten up and fly right he could only look at you in utter confusion: to his mind this was exactly what he was doing. Foremost he was guilty of civilization’s unthinkable crime, as plain in his walk as a limp: he was not owned by anyone.

He did not want to be here right now, that was certain. But he was. He was here because Letha had asked him to be and this demonstrated a base level of integrity that in Godfrey’s estimation earned the kid a fair shake. His darkest fear had been that Christina Wendall had concocted the werewolf story much as Letha had, as a psychological bulwark against the more disturbing reality, but his instincts drew him to another theory about that particular patient. Otherwise, it was in the water supply: people were afraid and someone had to account for it, and Peter was not One of Us. But here he was, making this effort (though would it have really killed him to wear a tie?), and besides, it could not be discounted that he had been kind to Shelley. Of all things, that could not be discounted.

Godfrey handed Peter the glass, which Peter held up to clink against his own.

“To … Roman,” said Godfrey. He’d been searching for something leavening and innocuous but that’s what came out.

“To Roman,” said Peter, and in his eye was a sort of strange character Godfrey had caught at odd moments all through the meal, not so much a maturity as a nature consciousness as though he were at times a boy exactly of his years and others a soul out of time wearing a boy mask.

Godfrey noticed him squeeze Letha’s leg, and that filled him with a gladness that surprised him considerably. But he was glad. That his strange daughter had found this strange suitor, that there was a person in her life to touch her like that. Here was a woman he had made.

Once the table was cleared he made a show of skepticism when Letha said she would drive Peter home, but, as she pointed out, he’d been drinking, and neither broached the idea of rousing Marie. And by now he had privately abdicated any responsibility of being another obstacle between them. They would run into plenty without his contribution. He gave them the parting admonition “Behave,” counting on that they would do the contrary. They would live.

A real live woman. What did you know about that?

* * *

From the archives of Dr. Norman Godfrey:

CW: It was that dream again, the one in the mill. But it was different this time, this time the moment comes, I don’t know whether to hide or to turn and face it, but this time I can see someone outside, someone out the window. It’s Francis Pullman. I can tell because … God, I hate saying this out loud, but because of that creepy dead eye. And that’s the only thing that changes, he’s just standing out there not saying anything, and I’m still stuck in the same place but with a dead man watching me.

NG: Do you have any idea what significance Pullman or Pullman’s ghost would have here? CW: I … This is going to sound a little crazy, Doctor.

NG: I think you’re in the right place. CW: The look on his face.

NG: What do you mean?

CW: He wasn’t saying anything, but I knew he was telling me something by the look on his face. NG: Is it something you’re comfortable sharing here?

CW: He was telling me … You are going to lose your soul. NG: …

Date: 2016-01-05; view: 591