Lullaby

  Out in the world, there’s still thirty-nine copies of the poems book unaccounted for. In libraries, in bookstores, in homes. Give or take, I don’t know, a few dozen.

  Helen’s in her office today. That’s where I left her, sitting at her desk with dictionaries open around her, Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit dictionaries, translation dictionaries. She’s got a little bottle of iodine and she’s using a cotton swab to daub it on the writing, turning the invisible words red.

  Using cotton swabs, Helen’s daubing the juice from a purple cabbage on other invisible words, turning them purple.

  Next to the little bottles and cotton swabs and dictionaries sits a light with a handle. A cord trails from it to an outlet in the wall.

  “A fluoroscope,” Helen says. “It’s rented.” She flicks a switch on the side and holds the light over the open grimoire, turning the pages until one page is filled with glowing pink words. “This one’s written in semen.”

  On all the spells, the handwriting’s different.

  Mona, at her desk in the outer office, hasn’t said a nice word since the carnival. The police scanner is saying one emergency code after another.

  Helen calls to Mona, “What’s a good word for ‘demon’?”

  And Mona says, “Helen Hoover Boyle.”

  Helen looks at me and says, “Have you seen today’s paper?” She shoves some books to one side, and under them is a newspaper. She flips through it, and there on the back page of the first section is a full-page ad. The first line says:

  Attention, Have You Seen This Man?

  Most of the page is an old picture, my wedding picture, me and Gina smiling twenty years ago. This has to be from our wedding announcement in some ancient Saturday edition. Our public declaration of commitment and love for each other. Our pledge. Our vows. The old power of words. Till death do us part.

  Below that, the ad copy says, “Police are currently looking for this man for questioning in connection with several recent deaths. He is forty years old, five feet ten inches tall, weighs one hundred and eighty pounds, and has brown hair and green eyes. He’s unarmed, but should be considered highly dangerous.”

  The man in the photo is so young and innocent. He’s not me. The woman is dead. Both of these people, ghosts.

  Below the photo, it says, “He now goes by the alias ‘Carl Streator.’ He often wears a blue tie.”

  Below that, it says, “If you know his whereabouts, please call 911 and ask for the police.” If Oyster ran this ad or the police did, I don’t know.

  Helen and me standing here, looking down at the picture, Helen says, “Your wife was very pretty.”

  And I say, yeah, she was.

  Helen’s fingers, her yellow suit, her carved and varnished antique desk, they’re all stained and smudged red and purple with iodine and cabbage juice. The stains smell of ammonia and vinegar. She holds the fluoroscope over the book and reads the ancient peter tracks.

  “I’ve got a flying spell here,” she says. “And one of these might be a love spell.” She flips back and forth, each page smelling like cabbage farts or ammonia piss. “The culling spell,” she says, “it’s this one here. Ancient Zulu.”

  In the outer office, Mona’s talking on the phone.

  Helen puts her hand on my arm and pushes me back, a step away from her desk, she says, “Watch this,” and stands there, both hands pressed to her temples, her eyes closed.

  I ask, what’s supposed to happen?

  Mona hangs up her telephone in the outer office.

  The grimoire open on Helen’s desk, it shifts. One corner lifts, then the opposite corner. It starts to close by itself, then opens, closes and opens, faster and faster until it rises off the desk. Her eyes still closed, Helen’s lips move around silent words. Rocking and flapping, the book’s a shining dark starling, hovering near the ceiling.

  And the police scanner crackles and says, “Unit seventeen.” It says, “Please proceed to 5680 Weeden Avenue, Northeast, the Helen Boyle real estate office, and apprehend an adult male for questioning . . .”

  The grimoire hits the desk with a crash. Iodine, ammonia, vinegar, and cabbage juice splashing everywhere. Papers and books sliding to the floor.

  Helen yells, “Mona!”

  And I say, don’t kill her, please. Don’t kill her.

  And Helen grabs my hand in her stained hand and says, “I think you’d better get out of here.” She says, “Do you remember where we first met?” Whispering, she says, “Meet me there tonight.”

  In my apartment, all the tape in my answering machine is used up. In my mailbox, the bills are packed so tight I have to dig them out with a butter knife.

  On the kitchen table is a shopping mall, half built. Even without the picture on the box, you can tell what it is because the parking lots are laid out. The walls are in place. The windows and doors sit off to one side, the glass installed already. The roof panels and big heating-cooling units are still in the box. The landscaping is sealed in a plastic bag.

  Coming through the apartment walls, there’s nothing. No one. After weeks on the road with Helen and Mona, I’ve forgotten how silence was so golden.

  I turn on the television. It’s some black-and-white comedy about a man come back from the dead as a mule. He’s supposed to teach somebody something. To save his own soul. A man’s spirit occupying a mule’s body.

  My pager goes off again, the police, my saviors, needling me toward salvation.

  The police or the manager, this place has got to be under some kind of surveillance.

  On the floor, scattered all over the floors, there’s the stomped fragments of a lumber mill. There’s the busted ruins of a train station flecked with dried blood. Around that, a medical-dental office building lies in a billion pieces. And an airplane hangar, crushed. A ferryboat terminal, kicked apart. All the bloody ruins and artifacts of what I worked so hard to put together, all of them scattered and crackling under my shoes. What’s left of my normal life.

  I turn on the clock radio next to the bed. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, I reach out and scrape together the remains of gas stations and mortuaries and hamburger stands and Spanish monasteries. I pile up the bits covered with blood and dust, and the radio plays big band swing music. The radio plays Celtic folk music and ghetto rap and Indian sitar music. Piled in front of me are the parts for sanatoriums and movie studios, grain elevators and oil refineries. On the radio is electronic trance music, reggae, and waltz music. Heaped together are the parts of cathedrals and prisons and army barracks.

  With the little brush and glue, I put together smokestacks and skylights and geodesic domes and minarets. Romanesque aqueducts run into Art Deco penthouses run into opium dens run into Wild West saloons run into roller coasters run into small-town Carnegie libraries run into tract houses run into college lecture halls.

  After weeks on the road with Helen and Mona, I’ve forgotten how perfection was so important.

  On my computer, there’s a draft of the crib death story. The last chapter. It’s the type of story that every parent and grandparent is too afraid to read and too afraid not to read. There’s really no new information. The idea was to show how people cope. People move forward with their lives. We could show the deep inner well of strength and compassion each of these people discovers. That angle.

  All we know about infant sudden death is there is no pattern. A baby can die in its mother’s arms.

  The story’s still unfinished.

  The best way to waste your life is by taking notes. The easiest way to avoid living is to just watch. Look for the details. Report. Don’t participate. Let Big Brother do the singing and dancing for you. Be a reporter. Be a good witness. A grateful member of the audience.

  On the radio, waltz music runs into punk runs into rock runs into rap runs into Gregorian chanting runs into chamber music. On television, someone is showing how to poach a salmon. Someone is showing why the Bismarck sank.

  I glue together bay windows and groin vaults and
barrel vaults and jack arches and stairways and clerestory windows and mosaic floors and steel curtain walls and half-timbered gables and Ionic pilasters.

  On the radio is African drum music and French torch songs, all mixed together. On the floor in front of me are Chinese pagodas and Mexican haciendas and Cape Cod colonial houses, all combined. On television, a golfer putts. A woman wins ten thousand dollars for knowing the first line of the Gettysburg Address.

  My first house I ever put together was four stories with a mansard roof and two staircases, a front one for family and a rear servant’s staircase. It had metal and glass chandeliers you wired with tiny lightbulbs. It had a parquet floor in the dining room that took six weeks of cutting and gluing to piece together. It had a ceiling in the music room that my wife, Gina, stayed up late, night after night, painting with clouds and angels. It had a fireplace in the dining room with a fire I made out of cut glass with a flickering light behind it. We set the table with tiny dinner plates, and Gina stayed up at night, painting roses around the border of each plate. The two of us, those nights, with no television or radio, Katrin asleep, it seemed so important at the time. Those were the two people in that wedding photo. The house was for Katrin’s second birthday. Everything had to be perfect. To be something that would prove our talent and intelligence. A masterpiece to outlive us.

  Oranges and gasoline, the glue smell, mixes with the smell of shit. On my fingers, on the glue slopped there, my hands are crusted with picture windows and porches and air conditioners. Stuck to my shirt are turnstiles and escalators and trees, and I turn the radio up.

  All that work and love and effort and time, my life, wasted. Everything I hoped would outlive me I’ve ruined.

  That afternoon I came home from work and found them, I left the food in the fridge. I left the clothes in the closets. The afternoon I came home and knew what I’d done, that was the first house I stomped. An heirloom without an heir. The tiny chandeliers and glass fire and dinner plates. Stuck in my shoes, I left a trail of tiny doors and shelves and chairs and windows and blood all the way to the airport.

  Beyond that, my trail ended.

  And sitting here, I’ve run out of parts. All the walls and roofs and handrails. And what’s glued to the floor in front of me is a bloody mess. It’s nothing perfect or complete, but this is what I’ve made of my life. Right or wrong, it follows no great master plan.

  All you can do is hope for a pattern to emerge, and sometimes it never does.

  Still, with a plan, you only get the best you can imagine. I’d always hoped for something better than that.

  A blast of French horns comes on the radio, the clatter of a Teletype, and a man’s voice says how police have found yet another dead fashion model. The television shows her smiling picture. They’ve arrested another suspect boyfriend. Another autopsy shows signs of postmortem sexual intercourse.

  My pager goes off again. The number on my page is my new savior.

  My hands lumpy with shutters and doors, I pick up the phone. My fingers rough with plumbing and gutters, I dial a number I can’t forget.

  A man answers.

  And I say, Dad. I say, Dad, it’s me.

  I tell him where I’m living. I tell him the name I use now. I tell him where I work. I tell him that I know how it looks, with Gina and Katrin dead, but I didn’t do it. I just ran.

  He says, he knows. He saw the wedding picture in today’s newspaper. He knows who I am now.

  A couple weeks ago, I drove by their house. I say how I saw him and Mom working in the yard. I was parked down the street, under a flowering cherry tree. My car, Helen’s car, covered in pink petals. Both he and Mom, I say, they both look good.

  I tell him, I’ve missed him, too. I love him, too. I tell him, I’m okay.

  I say, I don’t know what to do. I say, but it’s all going to be okay.

  After that, I just listen. I wait for him to stop crying so I can say I’m sorry.

  Chapter 37

  The Gartoller Estate in the moonlight, an eight-bedroom Georgian-style house with seven bathrooms, four fireplaces, all of it’s empty and white. All of it’s echoing with each step across the polished floors. The house is dark without lights. It’s cold without furniture or rugs.

  “Here,” Helen says. “We can do it here, where no one will see us.” She flicks a light switch inside a doorway.

  The ceiling goes up so high it could be the sky. Light from a looming chandelier, the size of a crystal weather balloon, the light turns the tall windows into mirrors. The light throws our shadows out behind us on the wood floor. This is the fifteen-hundred-square-foot ballroom.

  Me, I’m out of a job. The police are after me. My apartment stinks. My picture’s full-page in the paper. I spent my day hiding in the shrubs around the front door, waiting for dark. For Helen Hoover Boyle to tell me what she has in mind.

  She has the grimoire under one arm. The pages stained pink and purple. She opens it in her hands, and shows me a spell, the English words written in black pen below the foreign gibberish of the original.

  “Say it,” she says.

  The spell?

  “Read it out loud,” she says.

  And I ask, what’s this do?

  And Helen says, “Just watch out for the chandelier.”

  She starts reading, the words dull and even, as if she were counting, as if they were numbers. She starts reading, and her purse starts to float up from where it hangs near her waist. Her purse floats higher until it’s tethered to her by the shoulder strap, floating above her head as if it were a yellow balloon.

  Helen keeps reading, and my tie floats out in front of me. Rising like a blue snake out of a basket, it brushes my nose. Helen’s skirt, the hem starts to rise, and she grabs it and holds it down, between her legs with one hand. She keeps reading, and my shoelaces dance in the air. Her dangle earrings, pearls and emeralds, float up alongside her ears. Her pearl necklace, it floats up around her face. It floats over her head, a hovering pearl halo.

  Helen looks up at me and keeps reading.

  My sport coat floats up under my arms. Helen’s getting taller. She’s eye level with me. Then I’m looking up at her. Her feet hang, toes pointed down, they’re hanging above the floor. One yellow shoe then the other drops off and clatters on the wood.

  Her voice still flat and even, Helen looks down at me and smiles.

  And then one of my feet isn’t touching the ground. My other foot goes limp, and I kick the way you do in deep water, trying to find the bottom of the swimming pool. I throw my hands out for purchase. I kick, and my feet pitch up behind me until I’m looking facedown at the ballroom floor four, six, eight feet below me. Me and my shadow getting farther and farther apart. My shadow getting smaller and smaller.

  Helen says, “Carl, watch out.”

  And something cold and brittle wraps around me. Sharp bits of something loose drape around my neck and snag in my hair.

  “It’s the chandelier, Carl,” Helen says. “Be careful.”

  My ass buried in the middle of the crystal beads and shards, I’m wrapped in a shivering, tinkling octopus. The cold glass arms and fake candles. My arms and legs tangle in the hanging strands of crystal chains. The dusty crystal bobs. The cobwebs and dead spiders. A hot lightbulb burns through my sleeve. This high above the floor, I panic and grab hold of a swooping glass arm, and the whole sparkling mess rocks and shakes, ringing wind chimes. Flashing bits clatter on the floor below. All of it with me inside pitches back and forth.

  And Helen says, “Stop. You’re going to ruin it.”

  Then she’s next to me, floating just behind a shimmering beaded curtain of crystal. Her lips move with quiet words. Helen’s pink fingernails part the beads, and she smiles in at me, saying, “Let’s get you right side up, first.”

  The book’s gone, and she holds the crystals to one side and swims closer.

  I’m gripping a glass chandelier arm in both hands. The million flickering bits of it shake with my every he
artbeat.

  “Pretend you’re underwater,” she says, and unties my shoe. She slips the shoe off my foot and drops it. With her stained hands, she unties my other shoe, and the first shoe clatters on the floor. “Here,” she says, and slips her arms under mine. “Take off your jacket.”

  She drops my jacket out of the chandelier. Then my tie. She slips out of her own jacket and lets it fall. Around us, the chandelier is a shimmering million rainbows of lead crystal. Warm with a hundred tiny lightbulbs. The burning smell of dust on all those hot lightbulbs. All of it dazzling and shivering, we’re floating here in the hollow center.

  We’re floating in nothing but light and heat.

  Helen mouths her silent words, and my heart feels full of warm water.

  Helen’s earrings, all her jewelry is blazing bright. All you can hear is the tinkling chimes around us. We sway less and less, and I start to let go. A million tinkling bright stars around us, this is how it must feel to be God.

  And this, too, is my life.

  I say, I need a place to stay. From the police. I don’t know what to do next.

  Holding out her hand, Helen says, “Here.”

  And I take it. And she doesn’t let go. And we kiss. And it’s nice.

  And Helen says, “For now, you can stay here.” She flicks a pink fingernail against a gleaming glass ball, cut and faceted to throw light in a thousand directions. She says, “From now on, we can do anything.” She says, “Anything.”

  We kiss, and her toes peel off my socks. We kiss, and I open the buttons down the back of her blouse. My socks, her blouse, my shirt, her panty hose. Some things drop to the floor far below, some things snag and hang from the bottom of the chandelier.

  My swollen infected foot, Helen’s crusted, scabby knees from Oyster’s attack, there’s no way to hide these from each other.

  It’s been twenty years, but here I am, somewhere I never dreamed I’d ever be again, and I say, I’m falling in love.

  And Helen, blazing smooth and hot in this center of light, she smiles and rolls her head back, saying, “That’s the idea.”

  I’m in love with her. In love. With Helen Hoover Boyle.