Little Deaths, page 32
‘He gave it to me as a gift before he died.’ Gary didn’t sound convinced. He reached out in the gathering darkness and touched her shoulder. Pressed it. She smiled and shook her head.
The thing that had fled from her and Marty settled on Gary’s shoulders unnaturally, like cinders falling in the twilight.
‘You’ve done it all wrong,’ she said, feeling the black sparkle and malevolence of a force that didn’t want her any more, but hovered near the one who stole it from extinction. ‘You had the gall to tattoo us with something that doesn’t belong to us, you had it put on by a man from another tribe, because a Micronesian would have refused.’
Gary was waiting, listening. He didn’t feel the membrane of the curse drifting down on them, but Beth could feel its yearning to enter Gary.
‘I think the old man had something else in mind. Let me show you,’ she said. ‘Put my hand on your tattoo.’
He took her hand and brought it to his shoulder. She could sense his arousal.
‘No, Gary. Take your shirt off. It’ll work better.’
He was silhouetted in the falling darkness, feverishly jerking at his shirt.
‘Just turn your shoulder this way,’ she whispered.
He turned and she lashed out with thorned cane. It whistled through the air but landed with the curiously blunt noise of a blow softened by hundreds of spikes impacting flesh.
‘SON OF A BITCH! WHAT ARE YOU TRYING TO DO?’
He grabbed for her, but she stepped away, whipping at him again with the cane. His hands took the brunt of the attack, and he drew back, breathing heavily. Then the demon came out of the blackness, descending hungrily on the holes in his flesh and on his pain. The tattoo sliced into him, as if its strands were cleaving their way through bone and tendon. He fell to the ground, shuddering and struggling for breath. Kneeling beside him, she gently laid down the bloody cane. Touching him, she could feel the spectre of the tattoo under her hands, resting in the core of a man who understood so little. It wreaked havoc in his body, feeding off pain that he couldn’t translate to ecstasy.
Beth rose and went to Marty. They would sleep together, then talk of many things, perhaps about where she would pierce herself next.
She would never see Gary again. Perhaps he would work it out one day, how to exorcise the demon from his consciousness, but she doubted it. The tattoo’s spirit would only make its presence known to him as long as pain lasted. Any pain.
THAT OLD SCHOOL TIE
by
Jack Womack
Womack has only written a handful of short fiction but each piece has been a gem. Unlike his longer works, which some critics place in the cyberpunk subgenre, his short fiction focuses on dysfunctional intimate relationships. Each story is like watching a traffic accident—what’s happening is horrible but you just can’t look away;
THAT OLD SCHOOL TIE
Charles spun webs of charm and guilt around his friends, entwining them tighter if they tried to wander, loosing them once they drew near. The resulting networks were so complex that it was impossible for onlookers, or even participants, to discern who might be spider and who, fly.
We met at college and grew closer over the years, as people do when they have nothing in common but the length of time they’ve known one another. He taught English at NYU and wrote several books about lesser figures of the Romantic period, who seemed all the lesser once he was through with them. I’d been in pre-med until discovering how readily I weakened at the sight of real blood, and so I edited medico-legal textbooks instead; forensic pathology was my métier. Call it slumming amid the stews of human behaviour, if you like; Charles once did. The manuscripts arrived in my office exclusive of their photographs—cake without frosting, as it were.
Charles and his wife Elaine, a divorce lawyer, lived on Riverside Drive, in a long-hall apartment overlooking the shadier side of 99th Street; their six-year-old daughter, Cecily, attended a good school, though one unblessed with alumni of more than moderate renown. I lived alone, on 95th Street.
They rented a house in Springs every other August; he invited me out one weekend, the summer before his final semester. On Saturday we went to the beach, smothering sandfleas beneath our towels as we roasted ourselves; Cecily begged her mother to put away the phone she’d brought along.
‘Charles,’ Elaine said, pressing her palm over the mouthpiece. ‘Put some sunblock on me, please. I’m burning already.’ While she consulted with her client, Charles rubbed oil into his wife’s shoulders until they shone. His own were as muscular as they’d been in college, when he was on the crew; I was never one for sports, myself. Rubbing his hands dry against his plaid swim trunks, he reached into Elaine’s bag, extracted a cigarette and lit it.
‘He’s got nothing to go on, believe me,’ she told her client. ‘Give him enough rope, they always use it—’
‘Mommy—!’ Cecily said; Elaine lifted a finger, shushing her. She shook her father’s arm as if to break it off, and whispered into his ear. ‘You take me swimming.’
‘Mom’s a better swimmer,’ Charles said, gently pushing her aside. ‘She was on the team at Vassar. Want to go to Vassar?’
‘Take me now.’
‘Shouldn’t complain until you have something to complain about, honey.’
‘Now!’
He looked at his daughter, appearing to love her. Charles’s parents held old Yankee notions of appropriate behaviour, and drummed into him the belief that revealing one’s emotions to a feckless world is a shameful act. While young, he perfected an impénétrable façade—bland half-smile, eyes lowered but alert—that served him in every situation, however pleasant or grotesque. The structure was unimportant to the facing; the person, superfluous to the mask.
‘Cecily!’ She quieted.
‘The writ’s in order. Don’t worry, I said. Call you Monday.’
Elaine put away her phone and stood, dropping the towel with which she was swathed. Her bathing suit, a white maillot, sheathed her torso with a condom’s snugness. None of Elaine’s physical attributes would have been unattractive had they appeared, singly, on other women; the ensemble as presented was sadly disconcerting. Her suit rode up her hips with every step as she led Cecily toward the sea. Charles stared at his wife, evincing no more emotion than when he’d watched her talking on the phone.
‘Doesn’t she look good in that?’ Charles asked, his tone assuring me that he’d served as fashion advisor. He snuffed his cigarette in a tuffet of sand, and as speedily lit another.
‘She seems uncomfortable,’ I said. Elaine left Cecily to play near the shoreline; eased her suit over her buttocks before plunging headlong into a wave.
‘First thing she told me was take it back. Said she was too old for it. Got her to reconsider. Told her to give it a spin, she agreed. Never guess she was as insecure as she is, would you?’
Elaine and Charles were married twenty years; they had a competition, rather than a relationship, throughout. I declined to sit as judge, however often he handed me the gavel. ‘When’s class start?’
‘Two weeks,’ he said.
‘Anticipating or dreading?’
‘Got to look at it as a challenge. How long will it take to find the one who stands out from the crowd? If I find them, they make up for the rest. If not, so be it.’
‘You’ve still got freshmen courses?’
He shivered; I gathered that the breeze chilled him. ‘Only one. Up for tenure in January. No more after that. Rest are juniors and seniors.’
‘Better informed?’
‘School’s out even when it’s in, these days. Not when we were going.’ He sighed; eyed Cecily as she dug a hole. ‘What’ve you been working on?’
‘The Pathology of Trauma.’
He frowned; his eyelids crinkled as he confronted the sun. ‘The usual?’
‘Nothing unexpected,’ I said. ‘One fascinating case study. Suicide by dynamite.’
‘What did they do? Blow up the house?’
‘Used a stick as a cigar, sort of. Astonishing results.’
Charles grimaced. ‘Don’t you think you’d ever want to get into the general field? Don’t see how you can keep your head on straight, editing what you do. Not healthy. I know people, I could call around. Never too late.’
‘Sometimes it is,’ I said. ‘I like what I’m doing, Charlie.’
‘I can help,’ he said. ‘Trust me.’
‘Believe me.’
Charles’s sense of noblesse oblige, also grafted onto him by his parents, was as genuine as it was fulsome; still, little disgruntled him more than to have his proffered altruism declined—save when his help was accepted, and the gratitude resulting struck him as incommensurate with his beneficence. ‘You don’t get out enough,’ he said. ‘Haven’t I always told you that? You’re not getting younger, you know.’
Charles was my age. ‘I’m content.’
‘Fine, then,’ he said, his expression unchanged, his words rich with hints of disappointment. For a minute he said nothing, containing unseemly emotion; then he changed the subject, lowering his voice, as if afraid that fellow beachgoers would dash off to enter marks into his permanent record if they cared to overhear. He was accomplished at drawing out the guilt in others for having felt its frisson so keenly, so often, himself. ‘Remember Gail Hamilton?’
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘Ran into her on Lexington. Held up pretty well. Told me I’d held up better.’
Had his hair still been brown he would have looked two or even three years younger than he was. ‘I wasn’t aware she lived here.’
‘Moved back from San Francisco in April. Divorced, lives at Second and 68th. Told her we should get together for lunch one day.’
‘You going to?’
He shook his head. ‘Been so long. Too many questions. What’s she been doing? Why’d she get divorced? Looks fine, but who’s to know?’
‘Any reason to think that she’s not?’ I asked. ‘Is she all right?’
‘Says so. They always seem all right at first.
Why do you care?’ ‘Why’d you suggest lunch, then?’
He slipped on his sunglasses. ‘Have to be polite.’
Elaine, treading water beyond the breakers, called to Cecily, who then ran up to us, sprawling herself in the dunes at our feet. ‘Mommy wants her towel,’ she told Charles. ‘She wants you to bring it to her.’
‘Why me?’
‘Mommy says just bring it.’
He stood up, hoisting his trunks above his deflating waistline. Retrieving Elaine’s towel, he followed his daughter to the water and walked in up to his knees. Elaine swam inland; leapt up and took the towel from him. Her suit’s fabric, when wet, became so translucent that she appeared to be naked. Cloaking herself, she emerged from the ocean and strode across the sand as if into court. ‘Excuse me,’ she said, picking up her bag with one hand, securing her towel with the other. ‘I have to put on my sun suit. I’ll be right back. Charles, watch Ceese.’
Charles called after her as he ascended the dunes, ‘Could wear it at home.’
‘Give it to one of your students,’ she muttered, walking away. His smile flattened; he sat down. Cecily slapped his knees with her plastic bucket; then she wandered a few feet away and started filling it with sand. While waiting for Elaine to return we watched a speedboat roar by, scarring the water. He said something I didn’t catch.
‘Pardon?’
Charles examined his knees closely, as if fearing his daughter had bruised them. ‘Beautiful day, don’t you think?’ I couldn’t disagree.
Two or three times a month Charles and I met after work for drinks and dinner. After a point in the evening our conversation revolved, inevitably, around our old college days. If our memories differed, it was expected that I support his version, which he felt suffered less from time’s numberless rewrites. Often—more often, of late—we’d read obits of acquaintances from school who’d died of coronaries or cancer, and mourn them as we remembered them, their collegiate portraits blurry with thirty years’ distance. Charles grew uncomfortable, considering the oft wayward course of postgraduate lives.
Once I was positive that a remarkable case study I’d proofed was one of our housemates during our sophomore year; I told Charles. ‘Wasn’t him,’ he insisted, with uninflected voice. ‘If he was going to die, he wouldn’t have died that way.’ I avoided trifling with my old friend’s preferred realities, and so concurred in his opinion, without belief. Change didn’t disturb him as did unpredictability; one of many talents on which Charles prided himself was his ability to foresee situations early enough to benefit from their results—in truth, he rarely did.
The first time we got together, that semester, Charles raised an unanticipated subject, and told me he’d already encountered the student who stood out. ‘A brilliant young woman,’ he said, intoning his new mantra while his fettucini cooled. ‘Brilliant. Audited my poetry class on the second day. By the end of the hour she was the only one participating. Class was full, but I pulled some strings and got her in. Simply brilliant.’
‘How brilliant?’ I asked, trying to decipher his face; his expression was as he moulded it each morning, though I thought he might be on the verge of allowing his smile to wax gibbous. ‘What’s her name?’
‘Valerie,’ he said. ‘She’s twenty-one. We spoke after class. She’s formulating her own critical theory. Non-traditional, perhaps wilfully so, but that’s half the pleasure of it. And it works. Only meet students like her once in a lifetime.’
‘Where’s she from?’
‘Shaker Heights. Left Swarthmore to come here.’
‘Why?’
He shook his head and chuckled. ‘Swarthmore didn’t get the concept of chaos philology at all.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Her critical theory,’ Charles said. ‘Takes semiotics one step beyond.’ As he spoke his smile broke loose of its moorings, curling into an unsettling rictus; his eyes shone as if they’d been moistened.
‘How?’
‘Ask her,’ he said, rising. ‘Valerie, like you to meet—’
‘Charmed,’ she said, taking my hand before I offered it. Charles provided her with a chair expropriated from another group’s table. Valerie wore a cashmere turtleneck, striped leggings and yellow running shoes; at first glance she looked slim enough to slip through a mail slot. Her ivory skin possessed the matte finish older women sometimes develop when their features are annually updated. She had a child’s smile, a doll’s eyes; her hair was black as the wing of a carrion crow. Valerie was beautiful, though her beauty was of a sort often attainable only through compulsion. Taking a roll from his plate, she bit into it with sharp little teeth.
‘Charles was starting to tell me about your theory—’
‘Which?’ Seizing a knife, she smeared butter over the remains of the roll; crammed it into her mouth as if she were starving.
‘Chaos philology,’ Charles said. Valerie grinned, and snatched the fork from his plate, wreathing its tines in chilled fettucini.
‘Did he explain it?’ She brushed her hair away from her face and sucked the fork clean. ‘The bottom line is that unravelling always works, even where deconstruction doesn’t.’
‘Unravelling what?’
As Valerie reached for another forkful, she overturned my glass, baptizing the table with barely-sipped bourbon. ‘Whatever’s communicated,’ she said, ignoring the spillage. ‘Written or verbal narratives. Like this. One, unravel the text as presented. Two, reweave into a turbulent pattern of discourse. Three, examine the new design. Chaos philology allows deepest penetration into auctorial intent.’
Charles slid his plate in front of her so that she could reload her fork with less collateral damage. ‘Could you give me an example?’ I asked.
‘Sure. Let’s stick to Romantics. His favorite.’ Charles smiled. ‘Take a typical passage from Shelley’s Adonais such as, “Peace, peace, he is not dead, he doth not sleep.” From her backpack Valerie took a pen and notebook and began writing, dripping strands of pasta onto the paper while she ate. ‘Start simple, finish big,’ she said, presenting it to me. On the page I read Sleep doth not peace dead not peace is he he. Each word was harnessed to its mates by curves, lines and arrows; singly, in pairs and as ménages à trois.
‘Remarkably subtle patterns,’ I said, regarding the fetishistic intricacy of the lacings.
‘They leap out at you, after a while,’ said Charles.
‘If you desire, you can defer the critical climax indefinitely,’ Valerie continued. ‘If not, bang and run. Strip sense from nonsense. See what fantasies the author tried to hide. You understand how it works? It’s so obvious that what Shelley is doing in that particular line is laughing at the prospect of his own predictable death.’
‘I wish I’d taken more lit courses,’ I said. Charles beamed, and gave her a look that gave me a toothache.
‘Wouldn’t have helped,’ she said. As she lay down her fork I thought I glimpsed a tattoo of a green butterfly on her left wrist. ‘Authors never mean what you think they’re saying. You have to find a quick way to get them to confess. Chaos philology may seem violent, assaulting the author from behind as it does, but how else do you get to know what’s really there? Nothing wrong with that. Nothing’s wrong as long as it doesn’t hurt someone you don’t know.’
Valerie slumped, as if her air had run out; she looked at Charles, seeming hungry to hear not only agreement, but approval.
‘Method broadens the range of readings,’ he said. ‘Makes what’s obvious to me obvious to anyone tying themselves into the network. The Romantics always lied about what they were really up to, for example.’
‘Downright morbid, most of them. If you hadn’t had Romantics, you wouldn’t have had Hitler,’ Valerie said. Charles nodded. ‘Chaos philology is usable in unravelling any fantasy in any field, the more I think about it.’
‘I’m completely lost,’ I admitted.
‘You’re unravelling,’ she said, bouncing up and down in her chair as if it were hot. Charles interrupted, keen as ever to assist the unassistable.
