Lullaby

  Above us, crystal chandeliers hang at different heights, all of them cloudy and gray as powdered wigs. Frayed wires twist where their chains hook onto each roof beam. The severed wires, the dusty dead lightbulbs. Each chandelier is just another ancient aristocratic head cut off and hanging upside down. Above everything arches the warehouse roof, a lot of bow trusses supporting corrugated steel.

  “Just follow me,” Helen Boyle says. “Isn’t moss supposed to grow only on the north side of an armoire?”

  She wets two fingers in her mouth and holds them up.

  The Rococo vitrines, the Jacobean bookcases, the Gothic Revival highboys, all carved and varnished, the French Provincial wardrobes, crowd around us. The Edwardian walnut curio cabinets, the Victorian pier mirrors, the Renaissance Revival chifforobes. The walnut and mahogany, ebony and oak. The melon bulb legs and cabriole legs and linenfold panels. Past the point where any corridor turns, there’s just more. Queen Anne chiffoniers. More bird’s-eye maple. Mother-of-pearl inlay and gilded bronze ormolu.

  Our footsteps echo against the concrete floor. The steel roof hums with rain.

  And she says, “Don’t you feel, somehow, buried in history?”

  With her pink fingernails, from out of her yellow and white bag, she takes a ring of keys. She makes a fist around the keys so only the longest and sharpest juts out between her fingers.

  “Do you realize that anything you can do in your lifetime will be meaningless a hundred years from now?” she says. “Do you think, a century from now, that anyone will even remember the Stuarts?”

  She looks from one polished surface to the next, tabletops, dressers, doors, all with her reflection floating across them.

  “People die,” she says. “People tear down houses. But furniture, fine, beautiful furniture, it just goes on and on, surviving everything.”

  She says, “Armoires are the cockroaches of our culture.”

  And without breaking her stride, she drags the steel point of the key across the polished walnut face of a cabinet. The sound is as quiet as anything sharp slashing something soft. The scar is deep and shows the raw cheap pine under the veneer.

  She stops in front of a wardrobe with beveled-glass doors.

  “Think of all the generations of women who looked in that mirror,” she says. “They took it home. They aged in that mirror. They died, all those beautiful young women, but here’s the wardrobe, worth more now than ever. A parasite surviving the host. A big fat predator looking for its next meal.”

  In this maze of antiques, she says, are the ghosts of everyone who has ever owned this furniture. Everyone rich and successful enough to prove it. All of their talent and intelligence and beauty, outlived by decorative junk. All the success and accomplishment this furniture was supposed to represent, it’s all vanished.

  She says, “In the vast scheme of things, does it really matter how the Stuarts died?”

  I ask, how did she find out about the culling spell? Was it because her son, Patrick, died?

  And she just keeps walking, trailing her fingers along the carved edges, the polished surfaces, marring the knobs and smearing the mirrors.

  It didn’t take much digging to find out how her husband died. A year after Patrick, he was found in bed, dead without a mark, without a suicide note, without a cause.

  And Helen Boyle says, “How was your editor found?”

  Out of her yellow and white purse, she takes a gleaming silver little pair of pliers and a screwdriver, so clean and exact they could be used in surgery. She opens the door on a vast carved and polished armoire and says, “Hold this steady for me, please.”

  I hold the door and she’s busy on the inside for a moment until the door’s latch and handle fall free and hit the floor at my feet.

  A minute later, and she has the door handles, and the gilded bronze ormolu, she’s taken everything metal except the hinges and put them in her purse. Stripped, the armoire looks crippled, blind, castrated, mutilated.

  And I ask, why is she doing this?

  “Because I love this piece,” she says. “But I’m not going to be another one of its victims.”

  She closes the doors and puts her tools away in her purse.

  “I’ll come back for it after they cut the price down to what it cost when it was new,” she says. “I love it, but I’ll only have it on my own terms.”

  We walk a few steps more, and the corridor breaks into a forest of hall trees and hat racks, umbrella stands and coat racks. In the distance beyond that is another wall of breakfronts and armoires.

  “Elizabethan,” she says, touching each piece. “Tudor . . . East-lake . . . Stickley . . .”

  When someone takes two old pieces, say a mirror and a dresser, and fastens them together, she explains that experts call the product a “married” piece. As an antique, it’s considered worthless.

  When someone takes two pieces apart, say a buffet and a hutch, and sells them separately, experts call the pieces “divorced.”

  “And again,” she says, “they’re worthless.”

  I say how I’ve been trying to find every copy of the poems book. I say how important it is that no one ever discovers the spell. After what happened to Duncan, I swear I’m going to burn all my notes and forget I ever knew the culling spell.

  “And what if you can’t forget it?” she says. “What if it stays in your head, repeating itself like one of those silly advertising songs? What if it’s always there, like a loaded gun waiting for someone to annoy you?”

  I won’t use it.

  “Hypothetically speaking, of course,” she says, “what if I used to swear the same thing? Me. A woman you’re saying accidentally killed her own child and husband, someone who’s been tortured by the power of this curse. If someone like me eventually began using the song, what makes you think that you won’t?”

  I just won’t.

  “Of course you won’t,” she says, and then laughs without making a sound. She turns right, past a Biedermeier credenza, fast, then turns again past an Art Nouveau console, and for a minute she’s out of sight.

  I hurry to catch up, still lost, saying, if we’re going to find our way out of this, I think we need to stay together.

  Just ahead of us is a William and Mary bureau cabinet. Black lacquered pine with Persian scenes in silver gilt, round bun feet, and the pediment done up in a pile of carved curls and shells. And leading me deeper into the thicket of cabinets and closets and breakfronts and highboys, the rocking chairs and hall trees and bookcases, Helen Hoover Boyle says she needs to tell me a little story.

  Chapter 10

  Back at the newsroom, everybody’s quiet. People are whispering around the coffeemaker. People are listening with their mouths hanging open. Nobody’s crying.

  Henderson catches me hanging my jacket and says, “You call Regent-Pacific Airlines about their crab lice?”

  And I say, nobody’s saying anything until a suit is filed.

  And Henderson says, “Just so you know, you report to me now.” He says, “Duncan’s not just irresponsible. It turns out he’s dead.”

  Dead in bed without a mark. No suicide note, no cause of death. His landlord found him and called the paramedics.

  And I ask, any sign he was sodomized?

  And Henderson jerks his head back just a trace and says, “Say what?”

  Did somebody fuck him?

  “God, no,” Henderson says. “Why would you ask such a thing?”

  And I say, no reason.

  At least Duncan wasn’t somebody’s dead-body sex doll.

  I say, if anybody needs me, I’ll be in the clipping library. There’s some facts I need to check. Just a few years of newspaper stories I need to read. A few spools of microfilm to run through.

  And Henderson calls after me, “Don’t go far. Just because Duncan’s dead, that don’t mean you’re off the dead baby beat.”

  Sticks and stones may break your bones, but watch out for those damn words.

  According to
the microfilm, in 1983, in Vienna, Austria, a twenty-three-year-old nurse’s aide gave an overdose of morphine to an old woman who was begging to die.

  The seventy-seven-year-old woman died, and the aide, Waltraud Wagner, found she loved having the power of life and death.

  It’s all here in spool after spool of microfilm. Just the facts.

  At first it was just to help dying patients. She worked in an enormous hospital for the elderly and chronically ill. People lingered there, wanting to die. Besides morphine, the young woman invented what she called her water cure. To relieve suffering, you just pinch the patient’s nose shut. You depress the tongue, and you pour water down the throat. Death is slow torture, but old people are always found dead with water collected in their lungs.

  The young woman called herself an angel.

  It looked very natural.

  It was a noble, heroic deed that Wagner was doing.

  She was the ultimate end to suffering and misery. She was gentle and caring and sensitive, and she only took those who begged to die. She was the angel of death.

  By 1987, there were three more angels. All four aides worked the night shift. By now the hospital was nicknamed the Death Pavilion.

  Instead of ending suffering, the four women began to give their water cure to patients who snored or wet the bed or refused to take medication or buzzed the nurse’s station late at night. Any petty annoyance, and the patient died the next night. Anytime a patient complained about anything, Waltraud Wagner would say, “This one gets a ticket to God,” and glug, glug, glug.

  “The ones who got on my nerves,” she told authorities, “were dispatched directly to a free bed with the good Lord.”

  In 1989, an old woman called Wagner a common slut, and got the water cure. Afterward, the angels were drinking in a tavern, laughing and mimicking the old woman’s convulsions and the look on her face. A doctor sitting nearby overheard.

  By then, the Vienna health authorities estimate that almost three hundred people had been cured. Wagner got life in prison. The other angels got lesser sentences.

  “We could decide whether these old fogies lived or died,” Wagner said at her trial. “Their ticket to God was long overdue in any case.”

  The story Helen Hoover Boyle told me is true.

  Power corrupts. And absolute power corrupts absolutely.

  So just relax, Helen Boyle told me, and just enjoy the ride.

  She said, “Even absolute corruption has its perks.”

  She said to think of all the people you’d like out of your life. Think of all the loose ends you could tie up. The revenge. Think how easy it would be.

  And still echoing in my head was Nash. Nash was there, drooling over the idea of any woman, anywhere, cooperative and beautiful for at least a few hours before things start to cool down and fall apart.

  “Tell me,” he said, “how would that be different than most love relationships?”

  Anyone and everyone could become your next sex zombie.

  But just because this Austrian nurse and Helen Boyle and John Nash can’t control themselves, that doesn’t mean I’ll become a reckless, impulsive killer.

  Henderson comes to the library doorway and shouts, “Streator! Did you turn off your pager? We just got a call about another cold baby.”

  The editor is dead, long live the editor. Here’s the new boss, same as the old boss.

  And, sure, the world just might be a better place without certain people. Yeah, the world could be just perfect, with a little trimming here and there. A little housecleaning. Some unnatural selection.

  But, no, I’m never going to use the culling song again.

  Never again.

  But even if I did use it, I wouldn’t use it for revenge.

  I wouldn’t use it for convenience.

  I certainly wouldn’t use it for sex.

  No, I’d only ever use it for good.

  And Henderson yells, “Streator! Did you ever call about the first-class crab lice? Did you call about the health club’s butt-eating fungus? You need to pester those people at the Treeline or you’ll never get anything.”

  And fast as a flinch, me flinching the other way down the hall, the culling song spools through my head while I grab my coat and head out the door.

  But, no, I’m never going to use it. That’s that. I’m just not. Ever.

  Chapter 11

  These noise-oholics. These quiet-ophobics. There’s the stomp and stomp and stomp of a drum coming down through the ceiling. Through the walls, you hear the laughter and applause of dead people.

  Even in the bathroom, even taking a shower, you can hear talk radio over the hiss of the showerhead, the splash of water in the tub and blasting against the plastic curtain. It’s not that you want everybody dead, but it would be nice to unleash the culling spell on the world. Just to enjoy the fear. After people outlawed loud sounds, any sounds that could harbor a spell, any music or noise that might mask a deadly poem, after that the world would be silent. Dangerous and frightened, but silent.

  The tile beats a tiny rhythm under my fingertips. The bathtub vibrates with shouts coming through the floor. Either a prehistoric flying dinosaur awakened by a nuclear test is about to destroy the people downstairs or their television’s too loud.

  In a world where vows are worthless. Where making a pledge means nothing. Where promises are made to be broken, it would be nice to see words come back into power.

  In a world where the culling song was common knowledge, there would be sound blackouts. Like during wartime, wardens would patrol. But instead of hunting for light, they’d listen for noise and tell people to shut up. The way governments look for air and water pollution, these same governments would pinpoint anything above a whisper, then make an arrest. There would be helicopters, special muffled helicopters, of course, to search for noise the way they search for marijuana now. People would tiptoe around in rubber-soled shoes. Informers would listen at every keyhole.

  It would be a dangerous, frightened world, but at least you could sleep with your windows open. It would be a world where each word was worth a thousand pictures.

  It’s hard to say if that world would be any worse than this, the pounding music, the roar of television, the squawk of radio.

  Maybe without Big Brother filling us, people could think.

  The upside is maybe our minds would become our own.

  It’s harmless so I say the first line of the culling poem. There’s no one here to kill. No way could anyone hear it.

  And Helen Hoover Boyle is right. I haven’t forgot it. The first word generates the second. The first line generates the next. My voice booms as big as an opera. The words thunder with the deep rolling sound of a bowling alley. The thunder echoes against the tile and linoleum.

  In my big opera voice, the culling song doesn’t sound silly the way it did in Duncan’s office. It sounds heavy and rich. It’s the sound of doom. It’s the doom of my upstairs neighbor. It’s my end to his life, and I’ve said the whole poem.

  Even wet, the hair’s bristling on the back of my neck. My breathing’s stopped.

  And, nothing.

  From upstairs, there’s the stomp of music. From every direction, there’s radio and television talk, tiny gunshots, laughter, bombs, sirens. A dog barks. This is what passes for prime time.

  I turn off the water. I shake my hair. I pull back the shower curtain and reach for a towel. And then I see it.

  The vent.

  The air shaft, it connects every apartment. The vent, it’s always open. It carries steam from the bathrooms, cooking smells from the kitchens. It carries every sound.

  Dripping on the bathroom floor, I just stare at the vent.

  It could be I’ve just killed the whole building.

  Chapter 12

  Nash is at the bar on Third, eating onion dip with his fingers. He sticks two shiny fingers into his mouth, sucking so hard his cheeks cave in. He pulls the fingers out and pinches some more onion dip out of a plast
ic tub.

  I ask if that’s breakfast.

  “You got a question,” he says, “you need to show me the money first.” And he puts the fingers in his mouth.

  On the other side of Nash, down the bar is some young guy with sideburns, wearing a good pin-striped suit. Next to him is a gal, standing on the bar rail so she can kiss him. He tosses the cherry from his cocktail into his mouth. They kiss. Then she’s chewing. The radio behind the bar is still announcing the school lunch menus.

  Nash keeps turning his head to watch them.

  This is what passes for love.

  I put a ten-dollar bill on the bar.

  His fingers still in his mouth, his eyes look down at it. Then his eyebrows come up.

  I ask, did anybody die in my building last night?

  It’s the apartments at Seventeenth and Loomis Place. The Loomis Place Apartments, eight stories, a kind of kidney-colored brick. Maybe somebody on the fifth floor? Near the back? A young guy. This morning, there’s a weird stain on my ceiling.

  The sideburns guy, his cell phone starts ringing.

  And Nash pulls his fingers out, his lips dragged out around them in a tight pucker. Nash looks at his fingernails, close-up, cross-eyed.

  The dead guy was into drugs, I tell him. A lot of people in that building are into drugs. I ask if there were any other dead people there. By any chance did a whole bunch of people die in the Loomis Place Apartments last night?

  And the sideburns guy grabs the gal by a handful of hair and pulls her away from his mouth. With his other hand, he takes a phone from inside his coat and flips it open, saying, “Hello?”

  I say, they’d all be found with no apparent cause of death.

  Nash stirs a finger around in the onion dip and says, “That your building?”

  Yeah, I already said that.

  Still holding the gal by her hair, talking into the phone, the sideburns guy says, “No, honey.” He says, “I’m at the doctor’s office right now, and it doesn’t look very good.”

  The gal closes her eyes. She arches her neck back and grinds her hair into his hand.

  And the sideburns guy says, “No, it looks like it’s metasta-sized.” He says, “No, I’m okay.”