Agyar

EIGHT

I had finished typing up the tale of yesterday and was preparing for sleep when Jim came up and told me that Kellem had been over looking for me. I cursed under my breath and said, “Did she say what she wanted?”

“No,” said Jim. “She didn’t seem upset that you weren’t here.”

“Did you invite her in?”

He nodded. “She insisted.”

“What did she do?”

“Looked around a little, complimented me on the woodwork and the fixtures.”

“That’s all?”

“Yes.”

Jim didn’t seem happy about it, but, come to that, he has been very moody since the visit of the police; I don’t know if he is worried on my behalf, or upset about having his home invaded. Perhaps some of each. I would like to go down and make a fire, but I don’t dare; the smoke might be seen. Instead, I will spend some more time going over the newspaper articles, useless as I now think that will be.

I wish I could find a way to learn or deduce what Kellem has done that worries her so. If I could find a means of protecting her that would not cost my life, I could perhaps convince her to accept it, in spite of what happened the last time I tried to speak to her.

And why shouldn’t she be willing to grant me my life, if she can do so at no cost or danger to herself? It isn’t as if she has never cared for me. Years ago, we used to spend a great deal of time together-more than she would have had to. But I was utterly taken with her, and I think she enjoyed being worshiped as intensely as I worshiped her.

We would spend hour after hour just walking and talking, me eagerly asking questions about her life and the ways of her world, and she would take me to the theater and hold forth on philosophy or tell me stories of people she had known. Her decision to leave London, and, in fact, the British Isles, came a few weeks before the battle of Atbara, and she helped me through that first horrible winter crossing of the Channel.

On the Continent, however, I at once fell in love with the European railways, and in this way we traveled together for some months or years. I took her to my boyhood home, to which I had not returned in quite some time, and she showed me Paris. I remember very little of that city, except that I can recall thinking that it would be wonderful if there weren’t so many Frenchmen there. But mostly I was still involved with her, and I doted on her every word and action.

I remember her saying, “Things aren’t like they once were, and for that you ought to be grateful. For years, for decades, I would spend my time in the shadows of the great cities, only occasionally daring to venture out into the light of society, and then never for long. Now we can walk the streets, shop, visit the theater, and it is as if we exist within a shelter. The old terrors that hardened me and trained me are gone, and I wonder if you will ever appreciate the life you enjoy.”

I can remember looking at her as she spoke; she wore a dark tailored green dress, very tight at the waist, belted, with a long fur around her neck like a scarf. The hemline came above her ankles, but she wore very trim black boots with pointed toes and square heels. I wore a long coat with eight-inch fur cuffs, a large fur collar, a white silk cravat, and a top hat, I believe. She had picked the clothes out for me with care that felt loving to my befogged brain, and perhaps it was.

I remember these things, and what she said, and that it was late autumn, and that we were in Paris, yet I cannot remember what the streets looked like, or if we were sitting, standing, or walking. No, now that I think of it, I believe we were walking through a park and there was no one around, and no sounds except our speech, the faint clop and squeak of someone’s private coach a few hundred feet away, the songs of night birds, and, very faint, the titter of the rats of Paris, whose conversation never altered. The moon shone very bright on Laura’s face, giving it an odd yellowish tint and highlighting her arching eyebrows and deep-set, narrow eyes that were always so cold and blue.

I considered her words, and tried to imagine what it would have been like living in the times she spoke of, and at last I asked, “What changed?”

“Time,” she said. “The advent of this modern, scientific age.” There was more than just a hint of derision in her voice as she spoke.

“Will it last?”

“I believe it is very nearly ending already, more’s the pity.”

“What makes you think so?”

“You haven’t been keeping up with contemporary literature.”

“I never do, Laura,” I said. “I like older work.”

“Then you’re a fool,” she snapped. “There is no better way to keep track of the thinking of men, and if you don’t know what men are thinking, you don’t know what precautions to take.”

“Is that why we left England?”

“It was time to leave the English-speaking world for a while. I don’t know for how long.”

“Fortunately, you like French novels, too.”

“Yes, but French drama is impossible.”

“Still-”

“Yes. I’ll have a pretty good guess when it’s time to leave. But will you?”

“I? Won’t you be-”

“Not forever, Agyar Janos. How well can you read French?”

“Well enough.”

“Good. That may save you.”

“I’m glad you care what happens to me.”

She laughed, which for some reason I took as reassurance, although I cannot now imagine why I did.

We create our own omens, I think, and then mystify ourselves trying to understand their significance. That is, it feels very like an omen that this conversation has just now returned to me, in Technicolor and Dolby stereo, but I cannot imagine what it portends.

Jim keeps trying to understand what Kellem is up to. For that matter, so do I. He said, “I can’t figure out what she was hoping to get from having all of those policemen look at the house, or the reason for her visit.”

“I can’t either,” I said. “If I knew what she was trying to do, I could…”

“You could what?” he said.

“I don’t know. I’d feel better.”

“Well, it doesn’t make sense; no sir, it just doesn’t. If she wanted them to find you, she could have made you be more obvious, right?”

“Right.”

“And if she didn’t, what was the point?”

“To scare me, maybe; to get me to make a mistake.”

“Why go through all that to get you to make a mistake, when she could just tell you what mistake to make, and you’d have to do it?”

“There’s that,” I said.

“Maybe she isn’t after what you think she’s after.”

“Maybe.”

His eyes focused on me for a moment before shifting away again. “You look, I don’t know, younger than you did.”

“It’s what comes of a healthy life-style. You could take a lesson from it.”

“I surely could, yessir.”

We sat for a moment in a stillness that suddenly made me uncomfortable. I said, “I wish I could start a fire.”

“There’s no more wood in here; you’d have to bring it in from the carriage house.”

“Maybe I will. Want to toast marshmallows?”

That pulled a laugh from him, albeit a small one. “Sure. Then what would we do with them?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I just enjoy watching them burn.”

The storm has ended, and I am shivering with cold; my fingers are tingling as they return to life. Perhaps it is a torture I inflict on myself to type while my hands are in this condition. If so, it is stupid. I will wait for a few minutes, then resume.

There. That is better. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned before that the windows in the typing room (there are two, one facing west and the other facing south) are boarded up. They are covered by thin plywood strips, and not perfectly, so just at the moment, with all the clouds having dissipated as suddenly as they appeared, I am receiving some light from the half-moon, which is cutting through the slats and making a sharp white image across the keys as she sinks. The weather has warmed slightly, but it is still cold, or my fingers should have warmed up sooner; but I am not inclined to start yet another fire and warm myself up thoroughly. I wonder if it would be possible to get the furnace going; it is a hot-water radiator furnace and newer than one would suppose. Does this kind of furnace produce visible smoke? Probably.

I felt that Jill had recovered enough that I could go and see her again, although I made yet another firm resolve to stay away from Susan. She has a very active life, and I didn’t want her to come down with some strange illness that matched Jill’s, and would cause doctors to start paying attention. In a general sense, doctors are the least of my worries, but why should I take unnecessary chances? And I don’t really want to make Susan start missing classes.

So I said to myself.

Heh.

I took myself to the big white house with blue lights in the attic, I entered, and found the living room empty and the inside lights off. I climbed the stairs, nodded to the saint pictured in the stained glass, and came to Jill’s door, which I opened. She was awake, sitting up in bed, I think just staring off into space. She showed no surprise when I came in; just dropped her eyes, then unbuttoned the top of her nightgown, then looked at the wall in front of her and waited.

I looked at her carefully. She was still pale, as from illness, and had unhealthy-looking circles under her eyes. Her hand, outside of her blanket, seemed to tremble slightly. I shook my head, which attracted her attention enough that her eyes returned to me; she looked puzzled.

“Not tonight,” I said. “I have a headache.”

She frowned and shook her head slightly, not understanding. I sighed. “Just rest,” I said. “Eat a lot. You need to recover.”

“But you-?” she said, her voice barely above a whisper.

“I can wait. I don’t want to kill you, child.”

“Why not?”

“You are of no use to me dead.”

“Oh.” Her lips formed the word, but I heard no sound.

I thought I would say hello to Susan, so I went over and tapped softly on her bedroom door. She called for me to come in. She was lying in bed, hands clasped behind her head. The bedclothes were down by her waist and she wore nothing. She greeted me with words I cannot now recall. Then, I suppose seeing some expression on my face, she said, “What is it, Jonathan?”

“There is a scent in this room,” I said. “A cologne that I do not recognize.”

“Oh, yes, that is Jennifer’s.”

“Jennifer?”

“A friend.”

There was a burgundy-colored button-up blouse draped over a chair. Susan would not wear burgundy. It came to me that the last time I’d been in her room, there had been a pink sweater hanging from one of the knobs of the closet door, and she wouldn’t wear pink, either.

“What is it, Jonathan?”

And, beyond the perfume, there was the unmistakable odor of sex in the room. Recent sex.

I said, “What did you say your friend’s name is?”

“Jennifer.” And yes, it was there in the way she said her friend’s name, too. Perhaps everyone else called her Jenny, but Susan had needed her version, one that she could say sleepily, while holding her in the warm afterglow of love.

I said, “I just wanted to say hello.”

“Well, hello,” she said brightly.

I smiled, keeping my feelings off my face, and closed the door. I went back into Jill’s room. She hadn’t moved. I took her shoulders in my hands; it came to me, as if from somewhere outside of myself, that if I let myself begin I would kill her; so I threw her back onto the bed. I heard something like a sob escape my throat. Jill was staring at me with a hurt-puppy look that made me wish very much to strangle her; instead I stepped around the bed, to the window, flung it open. Mist poured in like smoke, and I felt the clouds gather above. “Don’t go driving anywhere,” I told Jill. “Winter storm warning,” and I passed out through the window, into the fog and the swirling snow of the storm.

I remember little between the beginning of the storm and my arrival in this room, but my brain is full of images of swirling snow, and of lightning dancing back and forth between clouds, and throwing my rage down on the helpless Earth below me.

The storm cleared as suddenly as it had arrived, leaving me numb, as I sit here before this infernal machine. Now I am no longer cold, but I think I am still numb, and able to wonder, in a distant, abstract sort of way, what sensation will come to fill the void once the numbness has worn off.

I’m feeling about the same as before, although perhaps it isn’t quite as intense. After typing up what happened, I sat very still for a while, then went down to Jim. He said hello, and looked at me for just a moment. He asked me what had happened, and I just shook my head. He waited for a few minutes, and when I still didn’t say anything he took himself upstairs. I realized that he was reading what I’d just written, and that made me uncomfortable at first, but there were so many conflicting passions clamoring for my attention that I finally realized I didn’t care, so I just waited, wondering what he’d say.

When he came back down he asked me to explain it to him. I was not entirely certain that I could, and told him so. He said, “But this can’t be the first time something like this has happened.”

“Something like what?” I said.

He frowned, and I got the impression that talking of such things made him uncomfortable, which, just then, was fine by me; I was still in the grip of some nameless combination of emotions in which anger was, if not dominant, at least a part; I badly wanted to strike out at something or someone. In any case, he said, “Discovering that your lover has someone else.”

“ ‘Lover,’” I said. “Now there’s an interesting word for it.”

He continued to stare past my shoulder, at my chest, or occasionally at my forehead. “What word would you prefer?”

“How about ‘victim.’”

“Susan is your victim?”

“No,” I said, the word out before I actually thought about it.

“Well, then?”

“If she’s a lover, than she’s the first lover I’ve had since…”

“Yes?”

“Since Laura.”

“Kellem?”

“That’s right.”

“So this hasn’t happened before.”

“No. Other times, like with Jill, if there’s someone in her life, I either ignore him or deal with him, as the case may be.”

“But this is different.”

“That’s right,” I said. “This is different.”

“What are you going to do about it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you going to kill her?”

“Susan?”

“No, this friend of hers.”

“Oh. Jennifer. No, I’m not going to kill her. I wouldn’t do that to Susan.”

“Yo shonuff gots it, don’cha?”

“Cut it out.”

Jim graced me with one of his rare smiles and said nothing else.

After several minutes I said, “So, what would you do?”

“What would I do? Why ask me? I’m not even alive.”

“You’re more alive than most of the people I pass on the street. Besides, what does being alive have to do with anything? You’re human, aren’t you? What would you do?”

He turned around and watched the cold fireplace for a moment, then he said, “I don’t know, Jack.”

“Thanks a lot,” I said.

He just shrugged. I heard myself growling, and I suddenly wanted to take myself away from there. It was exactly the same as when I’d run away from Jill so I wouldn’t kill her, although I knew I couldn’t really hurt Jim.

I take that back. I think I could hurt Jim, and perhaps I even have. But leave that; there is no way I can hurt Jim physically. I thought I ought to type until the feeling passed, but it hasn’t.

I must get out of the house for a while.

I’m back once more, feeling maybe just a little better, and a little worse at the same time. I left the house and walked about in the immediate neighborhood, until at last all the walls came down, and then I ran. I jumped the fence into Bill’s yard, and there was a growl and a yelp and whine, and then I was gone.

Sometime later I remember walking the streets. I can’t tell you how warm or cold it was, or whether there was a wind, or what people or animals were on the street. I just walked.

I eventually made my way to Little Philly, and found where the girls were enduring the cold. I picked a tall black girl named Stacy who had long legs and a haughty look that set my teeth on edge.

She said, “Hey, honey, wanna date?”

I said, “Sure, honey. I don’t have a car. Where do you live?”

“Not far, sweets.”

“I have the money,” I said. “You have the product.”

She laughed a phony laugh and showed me to a greasy-looking hotel, and when I left she was no longer wearing her haughty look. I left her with a hundred dollars, which was five times what she’d asked, and I left her still healthy enough that she’d probably survive, which I had not originally intended. I didn’t care a great deal if she didn’t; I’m perfectly willing to let the embalmers finish what I start.

I came back home after that, and I sit here filled with that horrible mixture of physical well-being and emotional self-disgust that I’ve had before on such occasions, which is, at any rate, a distraction from thoughts of Susan.

It makes no sense to me that I should feel this way about picking up whores, though; if it is still the remainder of my upbringing (my parents belonged to the Reformation Church and took it very seriously), then all I can say is that one’s upbringing has more power than even the head doctors think, because I don’t know one of them who has ever said that childhood conditioning can stay with you beyond the grave.