Houdini Heart

  This means I will get out of whatever mess I am currently in here in River House. I will not be netted and locked up for death-in-life in a Retirement Home for the Criminally Insane. I will die as I intend dying. Or even, maybe, live. Somehow. But first I will climb those god-damned stairs. Even if I can’t climb the stairs without somehow winding up in someone’s book or movie or short story, I will still stand in the tower and know the heart of River House.

  Just as I knew his heart. The one I keep with me always, perfectly pickled in its pickling jar. If I ever had real need, I could eat it out of my Houdini hand.

  ~

  I’ve covered the scrawl on the wall by pinning up my blanket over it. To hide the three deep, closely placed, stab marks that my blanket can’t reach, I’ve had to use my pillowcase. I’ve shut the closet door. Now I’m going outside for awhile. Breathe air that hasn’t made its ragged way from end to end of the long stale corridors of River House, gone in and out of rooms not mine, in and out of lungs not mine. Nothing odd ever happens to me outside of River House, or at least, I don’t think so. There was the dog with his beautiful boy on the river bank. Both boy and dog were certifiably odd when I surfaced from my plunge under the Connecticut River. There was the disappearance of the crane on Maple Street, and then its reappearance. There was the figure in the tower window I thought might be my mother and the woman who became a girl who is now a child when she walked the streets with the same dog. But all these things were and are as nothing compared to what goes on in River House.

  This time, heart beating at warp speed, I’ll go window shopping, perhaps have a cup of tea in Little Sokoki’s rather homey tearoom. I could browse in a bookstore, see what’s been published lately, what’s selling, if anyone I know has a new book out, buy a postcard of Little Sokoki and send it…to whom? A long time ago I started feeling as Ingrid Bergman once felt. “I have time now for only two kinds of people,” she said, “those who can make me laugh, and those who can further my career.” He was the only person who could make me laugh. As for my career, my career has gone about as far as it’s going to go. As a newly minted murderess, the only people who could further my latest career are the police, and they get plenty of postcards. The Zodiac Killer, the Son of Sam, lesser homicidal sociopaths, even Saucy Jack himself, all wrote to the cops. But these are serial killers, while I’m probably just your plain everyday one-person-only kind of killer. No urge to brag to the police. That leaves only me. Should I send myself a postcard?

  Increasingly baggy jeans over his pajamas, sweater from the thrift shop over my “New York Paris London Rome Little Sokoki” tee shirt (also from the thrift shop), I’m off to be “normal” at least once more before I climb those now-you-see-me, now-you-don’t stairs and really get to where they’re going, no matter how I manage it. They probably go to the tower. And the way into the tower is obvious, of course, and has been ever since I saw the drawings on Benjamin Willow’s walls. I have to break into the little house on the roof that once was home to the family of Charles River Akeley himself. I have to enter the vacant sixth floor of River House. And then I have to break back out of it, cross the roof, and do more breaking and entering into the south facing window of the tower.

  That means I have to find more stairs. The ones that lead to the Akeley House.

  If I were writing all this into a screenplay, it might not be a snap, but it would be doable for my intrepid heroine, with plenty of heart-stoppers along the way. Little oh-my-god moments to keep an audience on the edge of its seat. Since this isn’t a screenplay or a novel or even “real life”—real life took a very wrong, very unreal, turn quite some time back—I have no idea how the whole thing will go. No script, no plans, no skills for such an undertaking. Just me and what’s left of my mind. And, of course, my hammer. A hammer is always useful. And my flashlight. Never forget that. I don’t suppose I’ll need my knife, though I might carry it anyway. Just in case. But I can’t carry a huge chef’s knife in my pocket: I’ll need a sheath. Think a minute. If I take my flashlight and my hammer, I’ll need a—what? Well of course. How obvious. I’ll pop into the Little Sokoki hardware store and buy a tool-belt. In one of his early movies, not his best, though not his worst, he wore a tool-belt, playing a psychotic undercover cop posing as a carpenter. In that movie, he was crazier than the villain, more dangerous by half. Watching him ply his supposed trade, you’d swear he could have built an entire barn single-handed. You’d also actually swear he was truly disturbed. Actually, he couldn’t drive a nail. Or a car. He went everywhere by taxi. Or by limo if someone else paid for it. A tool-belt like his psycho-carpenter-cop movie tool-belt would do just fine.

  ~

  I’m sitting on a small dusty couch in Little Sokoki’s tearoom, a small place, easy to miss, even easier to turn an ankle getting down to, tucked as it is under an old brick building on the steep west bank of the Connecticut. The couch faces the one large window lit by fairy-lights and the window faces the river, flowing by only yards away.

  In front of the couch is a low table and on the table sits a cup of steaming tea. Plus a bun of some sort. I didn’t order a bun. Under the table is a large paper bag with a brand new tool-belt in it; also fresh flashlight batteries, as well as a few little things that fit nicely in the tool-belt that I could not resist. (I learned as much, if not more, about carpentry from his role in that movie than he did.) Bugger the expense. What little money I have left is quite enough to last these last few days. My rent is paid to the end of the month and the end of the month will be without doubt the end of me.

  Aside from the tea-maker, now gone back to hiding behind a bookcase where he can continue reading his book (nothing I’d write, or even read: an Anne Rice undead quasi-spiritual weirdly erotic rather heartless sort of thing), the place is empty of the warmth of other tea-drinkers, but otherwise charming. It’s like the sitting room of someone with very little money yet still sweetly hopeful; someone who has aimed for quaint, but ended up with eccentric. There are fat chairs and thin chairs. Slightly shabby pillows and slightly knocked about stools. There are tall tables, standing like newborn foals on long and uncertain legs. There are short legged tables, not foals but full grown bulldogs, their broad backs swamped in magazines, mostly very old copies of National Geographic and Vermont Country Store catalogs. Hidden away somewhere, there’s a cheap sound system playing New Age music: an unending loop of someone plucking a harp. It’s the kind of plucky noise the beautiful but brainless Eloi would be listening to in H.G. Wells’ Time Machine, while deep in the earth below them the brutal Morlocks would be gnawing on yet another Eloi thigh bone at the same time banging their thick heads together to early Black Sabbath.

  Heaped on shelves are boxes and bags and baskets of tea, every kind of tea. Interesting things hang on the walls. Interesting things dangle from the ceiling. The rugs underfoot are a bit bare, a bit tattered. There are dead flies on the window sills, in the corners of the room, under the bun and pastry counter. There are two tired bees bumping against the window doing what I’m doing: trying to find a way out. Everything, including the teas, is covered by a thin layer of dust. The tea itself is terrible. Americans don’t understand tea. It’s all too strong or too weak or not tea at all, but some sort of berried citrus’d cinnamoned grassy brew they think is healthy or invigorating or swimming with antioxidants or whatever. I tried for a simple cup of black Orange Pekoe, a little milk, a little sugar. I got something that would eat my spoon if I left it in too long. But I haven’t come for the tea. I have no intention of actually drinking the tea.

  I’ve come to live out my last few ordinary hours in an ordinary fashion.

  Of course it doesn’t work out that way. Nothing has ever been ordinary in Little Sokoki, Vermont, at least not for me. The beautiful young man, last seen at my door holding out an innocent apple (but now, as I recall the moment, it seems more as if I were Snow White and he a wicked queen—or maybe it was the other way round), has just walked into the tearoom. He sees me immedia
tely. How could he miss when I am the only customer here?

  “Ah,” he says, seating himself on my small couch, without invitation or encouragement, “I’ve been looking for you.”

  Looking for me? Why? He wants to give me another apple? Or he wants to converse? I don’t do conversations anymore. I’m out of practice, out of patience, and out of time in several more ways than one. (Although I used to write great dialogue. A director or a producer wanted to perk up his picture with a little wit, a little classy Tracy-Hepburn give and take, he or she came to me. But all that is, like everything else, gone now.)

  I say nothing, but this seems better than nothing to him. He signals the tea-maker from his book. “Lapsa Oolong, please.” And then turns his attention to me.

  I must look a sight. Days and nights and days of adventures in relative reality, the body neglected, the mouth turned down, the eyes turned inward, the soul readying itself for a leap into a void, any void. Does he see all this? Oh crap. He still has his camcorder. It’s in a small black bag, the bag is zipped shut, but I know he has it. I know he wants to use it. On me. To record what he sees in me. Dissolution? Despair? Corruption? Even so, how beautiful this one is. I am used to beautiful people. In our world, we were surrounded by them. In his own way, he was beautiful. In my own way, I was beautiful. Every year, much of America’s beauty: young, clueless, vain, desperate for fame, needy, and aside from the excessive quality of greed, quite ordinary, makes the trek to New York or to Hollywood. Once gathered in one spot, they all become somehow…less. Less unusual, less beautiful, less confident, though no less greedy. But no matter how much less they become, en masse they make the rest of us look worse than we already do. No fat, no bad teeth, no bandy legs or bulbous noses or sticky-out ears or acne scars. No cripples, no malformed, no diseased—on the outside.

  But here in Little Sokoki, all alone amidst the usual assortment of the plain, the ordinary and the downright ugly, this young man shines like an angel.

  I don’t ask why he’s been looking for me. I spend no more than a moment remembering I once thought to look for him…as a partner or a helper or at least a sympathetic ear. I don’t drink my tea or eat my unordered bun. I merely sit on my couch, my last hope for a last taste of normal life gone. All I’m doing now is waiting him out.

  His tea delivered and steaming beside him, he leans close. “I know who you are.”

  I think: that’s more than I know. But it jolts me. I admit it moves me. Not that I show it. I am immobile. I seem impassive. I say, “Who am I?”

  “A writer.”

  If I were to be drawn out, if he could accomplish that, I would now say, “I was.” And he would either say, “You still are,” or, “What makes you say that?” Either way, we’d be off, we’d be having a conversation, and somewhere along the way he’d want to take out his camcorder and film me, a real writer in a small town without doubt filled with writers as every town and every city all over the world are filled with writers. We are Legion. Most of us think there’s a story in us. Some of us think the story we’re full of is important enough to share with others. And we all begin with the same pathetic dream. To write something that will make other people love us. And when they do, we can then pretend, like Mailer, like Salinger, like Thomas Pynchon, like Dorothy Parker, like Hunter S. Thompson, like Capote, like Hemingway, like, like, like…to scorn them for having been duped—because no writer feels good enough to be loved. Except, maybe, bad writers.

  One of the best things Hunter ever said was: “Real writers are monsters.” I am again defined. I may not be a good writer but I am a real writer which means I am a monster.

  “You wrote The Windigo’s Daughter.”

  Oh, fuck.

  “There was a movie made out of it.” Smiling, he sips his Lapsa Oolong, the smell of which, combined with the incessant plucking harp music, makes me slightly ill. But since I am already sickened by his naming my most famous book, it hardly matters. “Of course,” says he, “the movie wasn’t a patch on the book. The book was fantastic. But that’s normal, isn’t it?”

  Normal? I have no idea anymore what’s normal. I only know one thing for certain. He isn’t. There’s something about him that’s very abnormal. What is it? The smile? The beauty? The apple? The fact he lives in River House and River House is not for the usual run of the mill hominoid? This conversation? He knows what I’ve written. Therefore he must know who I was married to, who I am the recent widow of. I repeat: oh fuck.

  Now we both sit quietly. He’s working hard here, holding his breath, maintaining his cool, sipping his tea. Me, I’m watching mine grow cold, eying my bun and idly imagining the life forms it supports, even now, before it begins to decay. This bun will end up out back of the tearoom in a garbage can. I think of who will fish it out again, of who will eat it, rot and all.

  I am about to heave. I am also just about to get up and leave, when he says, “Did it begin as an accident?”

  I know exactly what he’s talking about. He’s asking if I flensed, filleted, sliced and chopped him up into rather small pieces by accident. He wants to know what I did with his head. It’s in the news. No head. He wants to know if the fire was an accident. I think: if he thinks any of the above was no accident, he’s taking a big risk confronting a murderess, now isn’t he? I’ve seen movies that contain a scene like this. Lots of them. Too many. Some heedless fathead who can’t imagine being killed by someone who has killed before, dying to have answers to what might be his dying questions. This variation of the “idiot in the attic” wants to know what it was like to murder someone, particularly what it was like to kill a movie star. As written by me and most everyone else, the typical idiot hardly ever achieves his desire to feel what the killer felt (ah, but there was Kevin Costner’s Mr. Brooks, wasn’t there? damn good movie, but again a case in point), but he does get to know how the victim felt. I was right. This one is not normal. Or maybe he is. People are monkeys and monkeys are such a curious bunch.

  His fingers are touching his camcorder case, a slight caress. I see he wants to film me answering his questions. He thinks it will make him famous. The man, the youth, who caught the notorious Hollywood screenwriter and novelist who murdered one of the world’s greatest stars.

  For the first time I really look at him. He’s looking at me, his blue eyes all bogus seeing, all bogus knowing, all cod pity, all ultimate greed…and all completely stupid.

  I have little choice. He’s just taken it from me. I may not want to live much longer, but I sure as hell don’t want this little beauty turning me in, living off my name, not to mention his name, for the rest of his life. But most of all, most importantly of all, I will not have him trading in on Kate’s death.

  I really don’t want to. It’s the truth. I swear it. I swear on my daughter’s grave, I honestly hate having to do what I must do.

  But, at least, it ought to be easy. All I have to do is invite him back to my room in River House and, well, basically—kill him.

  And even though he has everything to lose, he’ll come. Dumb fuck is living breathing prey. He thinks he’s a predator, but he’s dead meat. Me, all along I’ve thought myself a hero. Not a great hero, not one to remember, but nevertheless heroic. But now, by doing what he’s forcing me to do, I will also become the villain. Which, storywise, is a good thing. There is no story without conflict. No story can exist without a villain.

  I am what I am. I do what I do. Villains are always the hero in their own story. Villains always have a reason for what villainy they get up to. Me, I just need a little more time. A little more time is all I ask for. This beautiful boy is the villain to my hero; he’s going to take my time away from me. He’s going to make a spectacle of my life, and of Kate’s. He’s going to require me to continue living, a captive subject of endless chatter and patter and pity and horror and scorn. In order to further himself, he will condemn me to the tabloids, to the law, and to my own ongoing conscious awareness. To do nothing about it is to be neither hero nor vill
ain. To do nothing is the coward’s choice, a choice made by most people for the whole of their lives. I am a choice-maker. I am now making my choice. I will be the villain to his hero as he is villain to mine. I will not let him have his way.

  As I gather my things, as he pays for everything, including my unordered uneaten bun, I speak to him. I say, “The day I first saw you, outside the Brooks House…was that your dog?”

  He looks at me, definitely guileless, opened by surprise. “What dog?”

  ~

  Here’s a little more of the book he remembers so well, the one he thinks is better as a book than a movie.

  What was once Mr. Honig is now a very big bee wearing a yellow tie, but the yellow of the tie blends with the yellow of his bee fur. And what once were wedding guests are now a swarm of bees. Very big bees, bees as big as wrens. All the bees, including the bee Faye has just married, are buzzing and buzzing and fanning their enormous wings which lifts them from the lawn like flies, or like hummingbirds, or like tiny helicopters. Like helicopters, their wings push at the air, turn it into wind, and the wind flattens the skin of Faye's keening face.

  If she only had her slingshot.

  Baring her teeth, Faye snaps at the bees. For the first time ever, although Faye has always known how to cause fear, she now knows how to feel fear. She knows what fear means. For Faye, it means shrieking up out of her chair, it means throwing the skirt of her bloodred dress over her head, it means screaming and screaming and running around the table on her back lawn windmilling her arms like a woman chased by bees.

  If you are a presentable and seemingly willing female, it’s easy to get a heterosexual male to do almost anything. So easy, even now when I am far from my best it feels a little like cheating. But then I remember why he’s come, and I know he’s thinking the same thing. How easy it is for someone with his beauty to get a female to do almost anything. Especially an older female who’s in a world of trouble.