The Animal Hour Page 11

  “Shuah,” the policewoman repeated. “Everything’ll be fine.”

  Nancy could only nod. I do have the right to a phone call, she wanted to say. But she didn’t have the courage. She looked out the window.

  The police car rounded the bend. It headed toward the white building. Nancy watched the building growing larger, coming toward her. Suddenly, she heard herself give a nervous laugh, and she blurted out: “Boy, I am just really scared here. I guess it’s silly, huh? But I’ve just never been in a hospital like this.” She fought down her tears. “I am just really, really frightened, I don’t know why …”

  The policewoman glanced at her partner again, but she didn’t say anything else. By now, anyway, they had arrived. The car was slipping into a low-ceilinged bay that ran along the building’s side, pulling to a stop at the hospital curb. Nancy pressed her forehead to the window. All she could see was a glass door. Then the policewoman was out of the car. Out on the sidewalk, opening Nancy’s door. She reached in and took Nancy by the elbow. Drew her out onto the sidewalk.

  “Let’s just take it easy now,” the policewoman was saying. “Everything’s gonna be awright.”

  Nancy pressed her lips together. The policewoman wasn’t even talking to her. She was talking to someone else, to some crazy woman she didn’t know. Nancy felt alone.

  Another cop—a squat black woman—pushed open the glass door from inside. The blonde policewoman gripped Nancy’s arm tightly and walked her quickly through the open door. Nancy heard the door swing shut behind her. The sound made her look up. What she saw made her gasp. She cried aloud: “Oh no! Oh God!”

  There was a white corridor before her. A corridor of closed doors. Behind the doors, there were whispers. She could hear them.

  “Nancy. Oh, Nancy.”

  She could hear the singsong whispers calling to her.

  Her mouth went wide, but she could not scream. She was being pulled along the corridor and there, at the end, was a figure on a throne. A slim figure in black robes, holding a scepter in a bony hand and …

  Nancy dug in her heels. She would not go. “NO!” She started screaming. Twisting to get free. Struggling to pull her arms free from the cuffs. “Please! Please! No!”

  She could hear her own high-pitched shrieks. It was odd. She could hear her wild cries and she could see herself as if from a distance. She could see herself twisting and struggling frantically in the policewoman’s grip. Her eyes rolling, white. White froth bubbling over her lips onto her chin. She could see her feet kicking and skidding on the slick linoleum floor as she fought against going. Her head thrown back, her neck taut. Every muscle of her slim body strained backward as if she were a child being dragged to the woodshed.

  And it was odd—it was really bizarre—because she could also see now that she was not in the nightmare corridor at all. She was just in the hospital. In a hallway. With a policewoman struggling to hold on to her arm. And two more officers were charging toward her from the far end of the hall. And two women in white uniforms were running at her too, shouting over her crazy screams.

  She felt as if she were putting on a performance. In front of them, in front of herself. As if she were just pretending to be insane so she wouldn’t be held responsible for everything. She could even hear her real self thinking: Okay now, this is a bad idea. We are not making a good first impression here at all. So let’s stop this right now. All right? Right this minute.

  And yet she couldn’t. She couldn’t make the performance stop. She went on screaming, kicking. Lashing her head from side to side, snapping with her teeth. And now came a man in a white coat—a slender young doctor with a pointed beard. He strode through a doorway, walking at her quickly, holding up a syringe. A syringe! She could see him squeezing a spurt of juice through the needle, clearing the air bubble. Two nurses waddled out of another door, holding a terrifying contraption of pads and straps.

  That’s a straitjacket, Nancy! she thought. They are not kidding, all right? Let’s knock this off right now.

  But the performance would not end. The doctor, the straitjacket—these only seemed to crank her hoarse shouts louder. She hurled herself to the floor, her body whipping and bucking even harder in her efforts to get free. Her real self watched helplessly as policemen, orderlies, nurses, and the doctor converged quickly on the shrieking performer. Only once, at the very end—only for a second, with an insinuating little chill of nausea—did it occur to her that this was not a performance at all.

  And then they swarmed over her.

  Perkins managed to vomit on the floor. He flung himself away from the toilet. Away from the glassy eyes, the severed, blood-drenched head. He fell to his hands and knees as his stomach disgorged Avis’s scrambled eggs and toast. The loose yellow mess splattered on the white tiles. Perkins could not lose the image of the woman’s slack and ghastly face beneath him, and he vomited again. He groaned, his eyes closed. Then, still spitting bits of undigested toast, he started crawling to the door. He wiped his mouth with his hand. He kept crawling. He had to get away from it. He had to get out of there.

  The second he was in the hallway, he climbed to his feet. He braced his hand on the phone table and got his wobbly legs under him. He was gasping, out of breath. But he had to get out of the mews, get away from it. He stumbled to the top of the stairs, grabbed the newel post. He could see light below, gray light in the living room. He realized he had left the front door open.

  That was the project: Get out that door. Get out of here and back into the sweet, bright, busy city. Get to a telephone. Call the police. Get out of …

  He was about to start down the stairs when he heard something that made his breath stop. It was the creak of a floorboard. Somewhere in the house: a footstep.

  His first crazy thought was to look down the hall. At the gray door, the door to his old bedroom. What if the sound had come from in there? What if the headless thing on the bed was moving? Rising … coming into the doorway … A silhouette in the rectangle of dim light.

  Look, Oliver. Look what they did to me. Let me show you what they did to my head.

  Then he heard it again. Another step. He stood absolutely still. He listened. It was coming from downstairs. Someone was moving around down there. Moving stealthily, slowly. Crossing the kitchen. Just out of his view. Coming toward the stairway. He heard a deep murmur, a few low syllables.

  Shit, they’re still here.

  He backed away from the head of the stairs, back into the shadows. Another floorboard creaked. They’re still in the house, he thought. Whoever they were, whoever had done this. They were still in the mews. The woman’s face seemed to appear before him again, her dead stare up from the toilet. They had carried her head from the bedroom down the hall … She had been alive just before. She had been a woman. She had had blue eyes. A woman’s voice. She must have thought thoughts—lived—even as they put the knife against her throat…

  And they were still here. The people who had done this. They were in the mews. In the kitchen. Creeping quietly toward the stairs.

  Perkins dragged his hand across his damp mouth. He looked right, down the dark hall, toward his old bedroom. He looked left. It was the only way to go. The way to Nana’s room. The outline of the door was dark. The room was dark, darker than the hall.

  With a last glance down the stairs, Perkins moved. He took long strides along the passage. Going quickly, trying to stay quiet. If he could get to the room, get a window open … It was only a one-story drop, and even a broken ankle was a lot better than meeting up with these guys.

  He reached the doorway and paused. Listened. A stair creaked—one of the bottom stairs. They had started up.

  He entered the small room cautiously. The air was musty here, but the smell of butchery was not as thick. He could see the wooden shutters on the windows to his right. Lines of white light between the slats. Then he pulled up short as a movement caught his eye. But it was only a dresser mirror against the far wall. He could make out the dim s
hape of it. And the queen-sized bed against the wall beside him. A rocking chair … He scanned the room slowly. No other shapes. No human silhouettes …

  Look, Oliver. Look what they’ve done.

  He heard another step on the stairs. Closer to the top now. He moved swiftly around the end of the bed. Crossed the room to the shuttered window.

  Come on, come on.

  His fingers fumbled with the metal hook that held the shutters closed. He couldn’t hear the footsteps anymore. He didn’t know where the hell they were. The hook swung up with a little rattle. He folded back the shutters.

  The light hit him bright and hard. The white-blue sky over a Tudor cottage. A car parked quietly at the alley curb. A woman walking her corgi turning the corner onto MacDougal … Christ, to be out there in the light … Perkins pushed open the double casements. The crisp, autumn air sighed in to him. He glanced over his shoulder once, to check the door …

  Something stopped him. He saw something. On the bed. Frightened, he flicked his eyes over it. There was a shape. No. Just an impression. The imprint of a head on the pillow, of a figure on the spread. Someone had been lying there and …

  And there was a gleam. He was about to turn away, about to go out through the window when he saw that, that little gleam of light. A thin line of silver. It lay on the pillow where a head had been. A single silver hair.

  Perkins hesitated a second, his eyes fixed on it.

  Tiffany?

  And that was one second too long.

  The floor creaked again. At the threshold. Right here. Perkins’s stomach dropped as his eyes flashed up from the bed to the doorway. A shadow stepped through into the room.

  My head, Oliver.

  But it was a man. Or not a man—a kid. A boy, still in his teens it looked like. He came into the light, blinking. A kid with a thin, pimply face. Blond hair in a crewcut. Frightened eyes—he looked almost as scared as Perkins. The two of them stared at each other. Slowly, the kid lifted his hand. The sunlight glinted blackly off the barrel of his gun. His lips worked silently for a moment before he could get the words out.

  Then he said: “All right. P-P-P-Put your hands up. NYPD. You’re under arrest.”

  Zachary remembered how Oliver had found him. That time at the mews. It was over a year ago now. Zach had been lying in the bedroom, on the floor next to his old bed. He had been naked and the warm night air had felt like water on his sinewy body. There were images floating in that water. Swirling, drifting, dissolving. Memory become vision. He had been gazing at those images and laughing and crying. He had not even heard Ollie arrive.

  Then, all at once, Oliver was there. Zach had thought his brother was just part of the vision at first. But Oliver was loud, solid. He did not swirl or dissolve. Oliver was shouting at him, telling him to get up. Zach tried to explain about the teacup. He was laughing; it was so beautiful. It was the same teacup that had lain beside their mother when she died. And he could see it, floating in the liquid air above him: an inexpensive cream-colored teacup with a brown border at the rim. Only it was changed now. Not in appearance, no—it had been metamorphosed from within. It was filled with meaning that seemed to unite it to all the meaning everywhere. It was as if it had gone from being an individual object to a pattern in the greater pattern of an endless tapestry.

  Zach had tried to explain this to his older brother. “Look, Ollie,” he had said, laughing. “Filled with love. Our love. Brothers. Everyone. In the structure, the molecules. See it? Right there.”

  “Get up, you stupid prick!” Oliver had shouted. Oliver had not seen it. “Come on! We’ve gotta get you to the hospital.”

  Zach remembered this as he pressed against the wall beside his window. He was naked now too. His balls tight with fear, his dick shriveled. He was peeking out at the street, at the detective stationed below him in the street. The detective was a pasty-faced thug in a tartan windbreaker. He leaned against a blue Dodge Dynasty with a long scrape in its front door. He smoked a Camel, glancing up and down the street. Watching for Zach. Waiting to arrest him because of the body in the mews.

  This was how the world was without the drug, without Aquarius. Everything grainy with details. The crumpled cigarettes in the gutter at the detective’s feet. The rubble in the empty lot across the street. The lightning bolt shape of the crack in the plaster right beside Zachary’s nose. How was he supposed to think with all this stuff cluttering his mind?

  He pulled back from the window, rested his head against the wall. He had to think. He had to get out of here, get to Ollie. The police would be back any minute. They would search the place. Find him. Open the red overnight bag. Somehow, he had to get past that detective downstairs. Haul his ass over to big brother’s.

  He slid down the wall, rough plaster scraping his naked back. Down to the floor. On all fours, his bare ass high. Carefully, so he could not be seen from the street, he started crawling. He crawled back through the railroad flat, back to the bedroom. Over the dust balls on the wooden slats. Over the long gray patches where the white paint on the slats had peeled away. Oh Jesus, please, he thought. He was so sorry he had taken the drug again last night. He knew that God was punishing him for breaking his promise. But he could not believe that Jesus meant him to feel so alone, so detached from the tapestry.

  He did not stand up until he was at the closet door again. Then he slipped back into the closet. Back among Tiffany’s clothes. The trace of her smell, her delicate musk. She wore jeans a lot of the time, but sometimes, luckily, she liked skirts too. Long skirts with colorful South American designs. He selected one of these now. An ankle-length with swirls of red and blue, cultic stick figures and rude drawings of sheep. It made him flash back on an argument Ollie and Tiff had had in Lancer’s, the café downstairs.

  “Ol-i-ver!” Tiffany had said, musically drawing out the syllables as she strained the petals from her chamomile tea. “Are you so invested in your Eurocentric authority that you can’t even accept native art’s validity as art?”

  And Ollie, leaning his head so far back that he was gazing at the ceiling, groaned, “I accept, I accept. Native art is art and native medicine is medicine. But give me a Park Avenue surgeon and Picasso any day.”

  Zach felt dizzy. He leaned against the wall. Closed his eyes. He remembered the soggy flowers lying on her saucer. The coffee grounds at the bottom of his demitasse. The way the lines of Tiffany’s sweet face turned down at Ollie, as if she were more hurt by him than angry. And the way Ollie waved her off. And himself, seated at the table between them, with that feeble grin on his face. “You know, I really do believe that a mystical reading of the New Testament can help us transcend these categories.” Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be ineffectual.

  He sighed. Opened his eyes. There was too much to straighten out. He could never get everything right. The police figured he’d killed the woman in the mews. They were going to put him in jail for it. He might as well give up now.

  But he didn’t. Moving heavily, he tugged one of Tiffy’s sweaters off a hanger. It was a bulky Guatemalan knit, gray with blue zigzag patterns. Under the Volcano, the label said. He carried it and the skirt to the dresser in the corner.

  The dresser was by the open window. He felt the autumn air on his skin as he stood there. It made him nostalgic and sad. If they put him in prison because of the woman in the mews, he thought, he would kill himself, that’s all. Even if they accused him, if they indicted him, he would kill himself. He couldn’t stand it. He would throw himself in front of a subway or something.

  He opened Tiffany’s underwear drawer and then changed his mind. He went for his own briefs and a pair of white socks. Then he moved away from the window. He didn’t want anyone to see him from the buildings surrounding Lancer’s garden.

  He went into the bathroom. Shaved first—super-careful not to nick himself. Then, once he had his underwear and socks on, he stepped into Tiffany’s skirt. Pulled on the sweater. He knew he had to hurry but he couldn’t focus
his mind. At one point, he just stopped, just stared, stupidly. At the beard hairs in the sink. At the smear of toothpaste on the faucet. All this stuff, he thought. God! He shook himself out of it. Pulled open the mirror that covered the medicine chest.

  Tiffany didn’t wear much makeup. She didn’t need much, she had that natural cream complexion. But there was a tube of lipstick and some eyebrow guck in there. Zach took the lipstick. Swung the mirror shut. He leaned into the glass and started to paint his lips bright red.

  Do it fast, he thought. But then he was lost in the task. Smearing the stick on carefully. Pressing his lips together the way Tiffy did. He was thinking of Tiff again. Of Tiff and Ollie, arguing. In the churchyard over at St. Mark’s this time. Sipping cider, standing on the implanted memorials. Oliver had just given a reading in the church, and Tiffany’s friends from the bookstore were pissed. Trish and Joyce, radical fems in studded leather. They stood behind Tiff, at either slim shoulder. Glared at Ollie from the night like specters of revenge. Zach had stood at Ollie’s shoulder trying to look husky, just to be fair.

  Tiff, though, had only been petulant. She crossed her arms, stamped her foot at him. “I don’t know, Oliver. I think you’re just being shallow on purpose …”

  “Right,” Oliver had said wearily. “So if we’re not biologically determined, Oh Enlightened One, what are we determined by? Little messages from our incorporeal souls?”

  Trish and Joyce had snarled like pit bulls. Tiffany’s doe eyes had gone wide. For a moment, Zachary thought she was actually near tears. “Damn it, Oliver,” she said. “You just do this to alienate people.”

  “Why don’t you two stop?” Zach had said finally, a little desperate. He had put his hand on his big brother’s arm. He had hated the small, plaintive sound of his own voice. “Why don’t you two ever stop?”

  He was done. He leaned back from the mirror. He stood on tiptoe to get a look at the length of him. The bulky sweater hiding his shape. The skirt to his ankles, the white socks and clogs covering his feet. The detective was not expecting him to come from inside. It would be enough. It would have to be.