Gibbon's Decline and Fall

  But now, now Jessamine wanted to slow down and give her mind some room. She wanted to become what Sophy called a Baba Yaga: an old hen, crouching on the top rail of the fence and clucking warnings to the chicks. If the rooster would just come up there and hunker down and stop crowing, they could talk about life and share the last of their time together.

  But no; he still had his cock-a-doodle, and he would not trade it for this satisfying androgyny of experience. If the hen will not submit—or, perhaps, regardless of whether she will or not—the rooster will go down among the pullets and begin again.

  The hell with it! Estrogen replacement and plastic surgery be damned. One could not pretend to pullethood forever.

  So Pat. So be it, Pat. Farewell Pat.

  Her tears had dried. They were the last she would shed for him.

  Helen called Carolyn on Friday, about noon.

  “I had a revelation,” she said, her voice conveying an icy control that Carolyn found ominous.

  Carolyn asked, “What kind, Helen?”

  “The kind that tells me Jake will do whatever he wants to whether I obey him or not. After we were married, he told me I would do what he said or something would happen to my family. I did what he said, but Mom and Dad died anyhow. He killed them. Just the way he did Greta.”

  Carolyn was aghast. “My God, Helen. Your parents? You know that for a fact?”

  “You mean, can I prove it? No. Of course not, but I know it’s true. He married me for my trust fund, Carolyn, the one my grandfather left. Then I got Greta’s share of the trust when she died. Then I inherited from Mom and Dad when they died. Jake took everything I had, and I’ve had to take everything he wanted to dish out. I’m not doing it any longer. I’ve got to do something, Carolyn. I’ve got to do something to get back at him. Tell me something I can do.”

  “Let me pick you up—”

  “No, Carolyn, you’re not listening! Tell me something I can do to confound and disrupt this man!”

  Carolyn shivered, partly for Helen, partly at the thin edge of fanatical intensity in that voice. After a long pause she said, “Does he have a safe, there at the house?”

  “A safe? I don’t think so.”

  “Does he have any place where he keeps things, private things?”

  “His so-called game room.”

  “Somewhere he’s supposedly got some pictures of Judge Rombauer sexually involved with some Hispanic kids. They’d have been taken fairly recently, within the last year or so. If we had those pictures, Hal and I, we might be able to spike his guns.”

  “He keeps the game room locked.”

  “Combination lock? Keypad, maybe?”

  “I think a keypad, yes.”

  “Well, maybe he’s written the combination down somewhere. People do things like that. Or he’s used a date or address or phone number he remembers. Something like that.”

  “I’ll look. Oh, Carolyn, it’ll give me something to do!”

  The phone went dead. Carolyn threw herself onto the bed, arm over her eyes, trying not to weep. It did no good; the tears leaked. She sat up, wiped her eyes, then froze. She’d heard a sound.…

  Far off, something opening. Resonance coming through the opening, alien sound, the hush of immensity.

  “Sophy,” Carolyn said clearly, “if that’s you, if that really is you listening to me, watching me, I beg of you, I plead with you, please help Helen. The way you used to help people. She needs you. She really does.”

  She listened, but there was no answer. She lay back, her eyes shut. After a long, brooding moment something shut, and the world was only itself again.

  Hal spoke from the door. “Who was on the phone?”

  “Helen.”

  She felt the springs sag as he sat beside her and took her hand.

  “Ah. From the look of you, I thought so.” He stroked her arm and dried her cheeks with a corner of the pillowcase, then stood and pulled her up after him. “Enough of this brooding. Come along, dear one. Let’s you and me go fix some tea.”

  It was Hal’s medicine for all ills. Hot tea, amber or green, with honey in it. “To remind us of sweetness,” he always said when sad times came along. “We need to remind ourselves of sweetness.”

  Would there be any sweetness for Helen?

  Ophy was late for her appointment with a security car she’d summoned to the front entrance of Misery.

  “Sorry I’m late,” she muttered, shaking his hand, giving him her destination.

  The driver nodded. “Emil Fustig, ma’am. This destination a friend of yours?” He pulled the security car out into the avenue and began one-handedly changing lanes with great verve.

  She held on, knowing this dodging about in traffic for what it was—an attempt to avoid trackers, followers, people who might be up to no good. Security drivers assumed that every rider was a target for terrorists. It was part of their code.

  “No. It’s a woman I’ve met only once, the wife of a patient. I need to see her for some research I’m doing.”

  “You don’t know her place, then. Well, it’s not too bad a block she lives on. It’s a C zone. Not that it means much. It’s been quieter lately, you notice? Not so many bombings. They haven’t bombed any girls’ dorms for most of a year.”

  “I read the other day that the violence rate is way down.”

  “That’s what the tourist bureau says, sure. Don’t know whether to believe it or not.”

  She put her head back, wobbling her jaw to loosen it from clenching her teeth, which she’d been doing all morning. “It’s not just the tourist bureau. We’ve noticed it at the hospital during the last few weeks. There’s less random violence. Except for the Sons of Whoever, shooting women. I had two more victims this morning; it’s why I was late.”

  He stared at her in the rearview mirror, asking in an interested voice, “And what about these old dames preaching? What’s that?”

  She shook her head at him. “You got me. They say there’s a war coming, but, then, so do the men with the whips.”

  He swung wide around a corner and pointed ahead. “Guys who’ll rape a little girl and then call her a tramp. That’s the place, with the green awning. You just sit tight until I’ve looked it over, okay?”

  She sat. What was the point in hiring security and a bullet-proof car if you didn’t follow the rules? Her driver checked the street in both directions, including the entrance to the nearest alley, before he parked, locked the car behind him, walked over to the door, and looked the lobby over for anyone lurking. He returned to unlock the car and fetch her, walking her quickly into the lobby and over to the screen. She punched in the Jenks woman’s apartment number and stood ready, smiling nicely, trying to look unthreatening.

  “Yeah? Who?” The image was snowy, streaked, barely decipherable.

  “Ms. Jenks? I’m Dr. Gheist, from the hospital. I called. Remember? Can I come up and ask a couple of questions about your husband?”

  “Who’s that?” she asked suspiciously, peering over Ophy’s shoulder.

  “He’s a security driver. He’ll just bring me to your door. He won’t come in.”

  Self-service elevators were no longer programmed to make interim stops. They went only from lobby to requested floor, or vice versa, and fire stairs had to be accessed by code from the computer downstairs, which was supposed to open the door automatically in case of fire. When they arrived on fifteen, Ophy stayed in the elevator while the guard looked around, then went with him to the apartment door. She knocked. Ms. Jenks let her in. He stayed in the corridor, leaning against the wall, hands hanging at his sides.

  “Somma them,” the woman muttered, shutting the door hastily behind Ophy. “Somma them’re worse than the ones they protect you from, you know? What is this, now? What do you need? I told those people at Ortho ever’ thing there was to tell.” She led the way through the minuscule hall into a small living room, crowded with unmatched furniture, the walls speckled with small unframed pictures, florals and landscapes an
d nudes.

  Ophy tore her eyes away from a strawberry-pink nude petting an unlikely violet cat. “I’m sorry to bother you, Ms. Jenks. We think your husband may have had a kind of … depression. It seems to be going around, sort of … ah, like an allergy or the flu. We just wanted to know if you noticed anything about him? Or felt it yourself?”

  The straw-haired woman subsided, anger draining away. “Like a allergy, huh? I be damn. What’re we allergic to?”

  “That’s what we’re trying to find out. So you’re feeling depressed as well?”

  “Well, sure, hell, he tried to kill himself, didn’ he? That’s sort of depressin’, wouldn’ you say?”

  Ophy went down the questionaire Lotte had provided. “Had he changed his eating habits? Sleeping habits? Sexual habits?”

  Ms. Jenks shook her head, no, no, and then, at the last question, less certainly.

  “Maybe?”

  The woman shrugged. “He didn’t care about it that much. When he just quit, I thought he was prob’ly, you know, just tired of it.”

  “May I sit down?”

  “Sure, sure, sorry, sit. You want a beer or somethin’?”

  “Thanks. No. Just these three or four questions, and I’ll get out of your hair. Now, you say he quit? Did you … ah, get upset about that? Maybe say something that would have upset him?”

  “Me, what would I say? Thank you, God? Hell, he was no good at it ever. He did sex like he did those paint-by-numbers pictures he’s always workin’ at. Dab, dab, dab. Poke, poke, poke. If I ever got to come at all, it’uz just blooey. No … no rhythm to it, you gnome sain?”

  Ophy concentrated. Gnome sain. Ah. Do you know what I’m saying. “Yes, I know what you’re saying. You didn’t miss the sex. You just missed his wanting it.”

  “Right. Not much, though.”

  Ophy made a note. Now for her own question, the one she really wanted answered. “Was he ever a violent man, Ms. Jenks?”

  “Vilent? You mean, dyever hit me?”

  “Um. Did he ever? Even years ago? When you were both younger.”

  “Hell. He ever do that, I’da broke his head for him, gnome sain?”

  One little bit of corroboration denied. Damn. She rapidly filled in the rest of the form, said thank you, rejoined her guard, and returned to the corridor.

  “Didn’t take long,” the driver said, falling in beside her, punching for the elevator.

  “Just needed a few bits of information about her husband. He tried to kill himself.”

  “Lot of that goin’ around.”

  “Really?”

  “Five guys I know either did it or tried. Not the ones you’da thought, either. I mean, you know some a these big guys, always showing off their quads, you know—he makes it okay and some kinda nerdy guy, he can’t handle it, he offs hisself.”

  “Handle what?”

  “Oh, you know. How life goes. How it don’t.” He laughed. “Me, I think it’s about time we had a rest from it.”

  Ophy returned to Misery and picked up her car. She and Simon had an apartment in a quad-block uptown, and on the way there she thought about Mr. Jenks, and about Simon, who had not come home, who had not called. If he did call, could she get away with asking him if he’d been depressed lately? Even though Ophy was a physician, she was not, as Simon had pointed out more than once, his physician.

  “Let us have a little mystery,” he had murmured in her ear. “Let us leave a little distance between us. Let us not know, always, what the other is thinking.”

  A disturbance in the street brought her from her reverie. She stepped hard on the brake, coming up inches behind the bumper of the car in front of her, which had stopped just short of ranks of men robed in black with pointy black headdresses, faces bare, like a dark-clad Ku Klux Klan. Each man bore a whip or cudgel of some sort; at least one of them carried a scythe. At the center of the squad a line of drums made a relentless pom, pom, pom. The men were chanting some doggerel or other.

  Ophy locked the door and cracked the window to hear the words:

  “We are here a thousand strong; women, go home where you belong!”

  And a long pause, some men looking around themselves, trying to keep their lines even, then again, with the drums going bom, bom, bom, the ragged chant:

  “No matter what their age or race is, women must not show their faces!”

  Ophy fought down the impulse to giggle and closed the window tight, checking to be sure the doors were locked. The car next to her was a police car. The officer at the wheel was watching her reaction, grinning at her expression of distaste.

  A short-skirted girl came out of a corner drugstore, head down, and started for the street, not watching where she was going. She collided with one of the marchers, fell back, and put her hand to her head as though dazed. The man she had bumped made a halfhearted gesture with his whip, then did a quick Elmer Fudd two-step getting back into position as the last of the procession crossed the intersection and went off down the street. A marcher two rows over saw this exchange, shook his head angrily, and flicked his whip at the girl, butt first, catching her on the forehead. She stood there stupidly, blood streaming down her face as the police car squealed its wheels and took off after the marchers.

  The whole episode had a kind of cartoon idiocy to it. The words had been stupid, but the tone had been threatening; the drumbeat had been inexorable, but many of the marchers had seemed tentative about the whole thing. The one guy’s action had been almost comic. He’d been more worried about staying in step than anything else. Ophy pulled into a parking space and went back to the young woman, who was by now leaning against the wall, sobbing. Two men, one old, one young, approached hesitantly from inside the corner store.

  “What in the hell?” breathed the elder. “What do they think they’re doing!”

  Ophy pressed a clean tissue over the wound.

  “Why did he do that?” the wounded woman cried. “I didn’t do anything to him! I think he’s crazy!”

  “Honey, you and me both,” said the older man. “All my years in this town, I’ve never seen so many crazies!”

  “Is she going to be all right?” the younger man asked.

  “I’m going to drop her off at the hospital, okay? I’m a doctor. That cut needs a couple of stitches.”

  “Are they going to arrest them? Those men?” asked the younger man. “God, they ought to arrest them.”

  Moved by some obscure impulse, Ophy asked, “You never felt the urge to join one of those marches?”

  “Lord, no! Some people I know, they have, but me? Not on your life. Listen, I’ll follow you to the hospital. I can bring her home. She just lives upstairs.”

  “Thanks, Rog,” sobbed the girl. “Will somebody tell my mom?”

  The older man offered to do so. Ophy said to the younger, “If you have transportation, why don’t you take her over to MSRI?”

  The younger man put his arm around the girl’s shoulder and led her away to his car, murmuring soothingly at her.

  “You have any idea why they did that?” the older man demanded. “Any idea at all?”

  “You got me. I haven’t any idea.”

  And she hadn’t. The whole episode had seemed ritualized, even to the cop keeping watch from the sidelines. Perhaps the Elmer Fudd guy had been a trainee terrorist? A neophyte Nazi? And the other was the old professional warrior who knew when to knock heads? She was still puzzling over it when she reached the quad-block Simon had insisted they move into a few years earlier, when the violence had been at its height.

  Their quad was typical: a four-square-block area with the two cross streets walled off at the outer ends and topped with razor wire; all the outside building entrances walled up and the outside windows grilled to the roofline, where a tangle of electrified fencing overhung the street and crosshatched the roofs to prevent the unlikely possibility of wall climbers or people dropped by helicopters.

  Quad-blocks were closed fortresses; the most dangerous part of living
in one was the short walk from the car to the security gate. Ophy parked, got her HoloID out of her purse, pinned it to her shoulder, went through the security gate on her parking level, exchanging greetings with the yawning guard, who let her into the elevator. At street level she entered the lock and put her hand on the identity plate that opened the final gate.

  Once through that, she was home, among people she recognized as neighbors, all of them wearing photo IDs. Any strange face had better be labeled by a visitor’s badge with a great big number on it. Anonymity, so the quad-block charter went, was the nursemaid of crime; no anonymity was allowed.

  She walked the half block to her building lobby, where she found a woman from her floor waiting for the building elevator. They rode up together, buddy system, each keeping an eye on the other until they had their door unlocked. Ophy stood for a moment agape. The dead bolt on her door was unlocked.

  “It’s okay,” she called, waving at her neighbor and taking a deep breath. So Simon was home. Finally.

  He was sitting in the living room, the blinds drawn, a wine bottle beside him on the table, something soft and unobtrusive tinkling in the background. Harps, flutes, tom-toms. Jessamine had noticed more and more of that kind of music lately. Loose and windy music, without pattern or melody. A mere wandering of sound, an evocation of space and tranquillity.

  “Simon.”

  “Hello, love.” He turned his narrow, foxish face toward her, brow furrowed, one slender arm raised to greet her.

  “I didn’t know you’d be here.”

  “I am here. Decided the time had come. Face the music.”

  Getting to him was like swimming. The atmosphere was thick with his mood, whatever it was. Apprehension? Anxiety? She sat down on the table, leaned forward to take his hand, which gripped hers hard, as a drowning man might grip a floating log. “Simon! What is it?”

  “I don’t know, Doctor, love. Something wrong, somewhere.”