“Hey, Mom,” he said.
Monica Krenzler surveyed the apparent disorganization of the room. It was a stark contrast to Bruce’s usual tidiness. “Bruce,” she said, sighing. “Already off to college.” She ruffled his hair and said, “I’m going to miss you terribly. But someday you will be a remarkable scientist.”
And Bruce, seeing an opportunity, asked, “Like my father?”
Slowly she removed her hand from his hair, and to Bruce it seemed as if the temperature in the room had dropped. “Do you remember him?” asked his adoptive mother, and there was a certain amount of caution in her voice.
“No, but you said once that he was a scientist,” said Bruce.
“Did I?” She seemed surprised that she had done so, and searched her memory. Then, very casually, she said, “I must have been guessing, seeing how brilliant you are.” She studied him thoughtfully, and then she leaned toward him. “Someday you will discover there is something inside you so . . . so special, some kind of greatness, I am sure. Someday you will share it with the whole world.”
He hugged her tightly, and thus was unable to see the narrowing of her eyes, and the curious combination of sadness mixed with quiet and distant contemplation, as if she were perceiving Bruce not as a loving son departing home but as a project that was entering a new stage.
repression
The cabin had seemed the ideal place for a getaway.
Betty had talked about it any number of times. Her father had built it with his own hands, and it held many fond memories for her of when she was a little girl playing hide-and-seek under the porch. The Ross family had known their happiest times here.
But after Betty’s mother passed away, Thunderbolt lost his taste for the cabin. Betty had always surmised that it no longer held any joy for him, because all he did was associate the place with his late wife. It was understandable. Her mother had decorated every inch of the cabin, and although that sort of presence was a comfort for Betty, her father obviously found it disconcerting, even sad. At one point he had simply told Betty that she should consider it hers from now on, for he had no more use for it and it was a shame to let it go to waste. She had taken him at his word, and now she had brought Bruce here to spend the weekend.
Now in her late twenties, Betty had grown into a beautiful young woman who was—painful for her father to admit—the image of her late mother. When she spoke it was with quiet confidence, and when she moved it was with a dancer’s grace, even though she had never actually taken lessons. And the most charming thing about her was that she had no idea just how stunning she really was.
All she knew was that she wanted the weekend to be perfect. The only problem was she’d been working like a maniac at the lab to try to clear the time for their weekend expedition, which for most people wouldn’t have been a problem, but Betty tended to work hours that bordered dangerously on 24-7. She felt exhausted. Her hair, she believed, was matted and disgusting, and ordinary cosmetics couldn’t begin to cover the wan look of her face.
Both of them were dressed in outdoorsy camping clothing, plaid shirts, and pants with lots of utility pockets. Bruce and Betty posed in front of a camera that was perched on a tripod, and Betty—feeling anything but photogenic—gamely smiled into the camera in a way that she was sure was evocative of someone on death row maintaining a stiff upper lip. As the flash went off in her face, she could feel how awkward and disgusting she must look, and suddenly she was more self-conscious about it than ever before.
Bruce, displaying his customary obliviousness to anything that wasn’t practically shouted in his face, didn’t pick up on Betty’s discomfort at all. The light of the flash hadn’t begun to dim in her retinas before Bruce was already on his feet, approaching the timer.
“Let’s try another,” he said.
“No,” protested Betty. “I look tired.” She ran her fingers aimlessly through her hair, as if she could restore it to some degree of attractiveness through sheer willpower.
Bruce didn’t notice. He was far too engaged with the mysteries of the timing mechanism to care about something as mundane as his girlfriend’s feelings. Small wonder, she mused, considering how little his own feelings meant to him. So at least he was consistent in that respect. Then, as if he had taken long seconds to recall what she had just said, he replied, “You are tired, but you look great.”
She smiled sadly. There was no doubt that he was sincere. But usually when a guy compliments a girl, Betty thought, she could sense any range of emotions or wants filtering through the carefully chosen words. Whereas Bruce was just . . . Bruce. She wondered, not for the first time, if he was gay. He reset the camera and then went to sit beside her. He put his arms around her and the camera took the picture. He looked at her and brushed her hair back. “Hey, what’s the matter?”
Betty had no intention of telling him, but she blurted it out before she could stop herself. “It’s the dreams. They’re terrible. I keep having them.”
“Then do like me: Don’t sleep,” said Bruce. There was an air of forced joviality in his tone, but it didn’t fool Betty for a moment.
She placed a hand atop his. “Not an option . . . and it shouldn’t be for you either,” she said in a serious tone.
It wasn’t difficult for Bruce to turn somber. It was his natural state of being; anything else he did was an affectation assumed for Betty’s benefit. His face clouded, he drew her closer in a protective manner. “Tell me about your dream.”
She liked the weight of his arm around her, and snuggled in even closer to him. She felt like she fit there, one piece of a jigsaw puzzle finding its mate. In doing so, she relaxed enough to talk about her dreams for the first time in ages. “It starts as a memory. I think it’s my first memory. An image I have from when I was maybe two years old. There’s this . . . this little girl . . .”
“You?”
She nodded, half-smiling. “You don’t miss a trick, do you? Yes, it’s me. I’m in an ice-cream parlor. And I’m being tossed into the air, caught, tossed again.”
“Who’s doing it?”
“My father. He’s in full uniform. He looks so—” She paused, trying to figure out the best way to phrase it. “He’s looking the way I always saw him when I was a child. Big, proud, invincible. More than human.”
“I’d be careful about things that are more than human, if I were you.” He paused thoughtfully. “So you’re bouncing up and down, and your father’s involved. Sounds vaguely Freudian.”
“Oh, you!” She elbowed him in the chest and was rewarded with a startled grunt. “One more comment out of you like that . . .”
“I’m sorry,” he said, rubbing his chest where she’d struck him. “Okay, so . . . your father . . . invincible, et cetera. Then what?”
“Well, then this jeep pulls up, and soldiers are calling my father over. And things start getting jumbled together—you know, the way they do in dreams. Like, one moment I’m still in the ice-cream parlor, and suddenly I’m in a desert, and then there’s a house with a little boy looking out a window, and then I’m back in the parlor. Except it all makes sense when it’s happening.” She could almost see the images now, as if watching a film unspooling. “He’s putting me down. I’m crying. Then there’s this . . . this rumbling sound, like a storm coming in, but it’s not a storm. There’s this cloud . . . with a green tint. It’s almost like it’s alive. . . .”
“You think it’s a memory,” Banner asked, “or is it just a dream?”
She shook her head. “I think it’s something that must have happened out at Desert Base with my father, when I was growing up,” said Betty.
“Desert Base. That’s the one filled with aliens and UFOs, right?”
She knew perfectly well that he knew the difference, but she laughed anyway, appreciating his endeavor to lighten the mood a touch. “That’s Area 51, silly,” said Betty. “Desert Base is even more secret. Anyhow . . .” Her thoughts drifted back to the narrative, and now that she was talking about it, sh
e could see it even more vividly. “The dream keeps going. Suddenly I’m alone. I’m crying and crying, and then a hand covers my face.”
“Your father’s?”
She shook her head, and couldn’t quite look him in the eye as she said softly, “Yours.”
He withdrew from her then, just as she suspected he might. Still seated, she turned to face him, expecting him to look appalled or horrified or hurt or . . . or something. Instead his expression, as always, was totally, infuriatingly impassive.
“But that’s terrible,” said Banner. At most he sounded ruffled, as if the idea was ludicrous. “You know I would never hurt you.”
“You already have,” said Betty, affectionately but pained.
“How?”
“You’re breaking my heart.”
She watched his eyes carefully as she said it. Once again she sought . . . astonishment? Surprise? Hurt? Anger?
Nothing. Just that same, infuriating calm, as if the very notion of acting in any manner that suggested depths of emotion was anathema to him. “I don’t understand why you would say that.” He made the comment with the same puzzled air that might pervade him if an experiment didn’t quite go right.
“Do you love me, Bruce?”
“Of course. You know I do.”
“You see! Right there!”
Finally an emotion: bewilderment. “Right where?”
“Right there, right now. The way you said that. ‘You know I do.’ Bruce, the woman you love has doubts about how you feel about her, and you respond with such detachment that you might as well be saying that it looks like it might rain.”
“I’m not detached,” he assured her.
“Aren’t you? Bruce,” and she squeezed his hand even harder, “we’ve talked about things, made plans, but I’ve never gotten a feeling from you that you have anything truly emotional invested in our relationship.”
“I thought you knew me better than that.”
“Oh, I know you . . . better, I think, than you know yourself . . .”
“No.”
Betty was startled at the firmness, almost the ferocity of the denial, as if something had slipped ever so slightly. As if a curtain had been pulled aside just a few inches to reveal something unexpected and surprising . . . surprising to Betty, if not to Bruce.
And then, just like that, it was gone. A veil was once again drawn over Bruce’s eyes, and he was saying with far more restraint, “No. You’re wrong about that, Betty. You have to take my word for that: You’re very wrong. I know myself, far better than anyone else could.”
“But you see, that’s what a relationship is all about. Letting the other person know you as well as you know yourself.”
“Then I guess we don’t have a relationship.”
She was utterly taken aback by the words. Even Bruce seemed mildly surprised at his own pronouncement, but he made no effort to retract or elaborate on what he had just said. Instead his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down, as if he had just swallowed something very large.
“Is . . . that how you want it, Bruce?”
“No,” he said very softly. “But apparently . . . that’s how it is.”
“But why? Why can’t you let me in?” she asked with growing urgency, desperate to comprehend why this relationship, which she felt was possibly the greatest thing that had ever happened to her, seemed to be slipping away between her fingers.
“It’s not a matter of letting you in.” He rose from the couch, his hands thrust deep into his pockets. “That’s not it at all.”
“Then what is it?” she demanded. “You owe me that much, at least. If it’s not about letting me in . . .”
“It’s not. It’s about letting me out.” He said it with the air of a doctor diagnosing a fatal disease.
“I don’t understand,” she told him.
Bruce had walked toward the door, and now he stood there with his hand resting on the knob. “Neither do I,” he said, as much to himself as to her, and then he let himself out the front door of the cabin, shutting the door gently behind him.
By the time he returned some hours later, Betty had cried and dried her tears and reapplied her makeup. They stayed the night at the cabin, she in the bedroom, he on the couch. It wasn’t how she had planned for the weekend to go, and late that night the tears came once again and Betty sobbed miserably into a pillow. She didn’t know if Bruce heard her, nor did she care. She wondered if, in that regard, she was getting to be more like him.
one year later . . .
Benny Goodman was a harmless enough fellow.
In his early sixties, with a perpetual smile, a thick beard, and a good sense of humor, which was necessary for someone who’d grown up enduring jokes about the Benny Goodman orchestra, Benny prided himself on not having an enemy in the world. So it was that when he heard a knock on his front door late one evening, he opened it without a second thought.
There was a man standing there who was about Benny’s height and weight, and sported a beard not dissimilar to Benny’s. Three ratty-looking dogs were grouped around him; well-trained, they stayed precisely in their places.
“Benny Goodman?” asked the man. His voice was low and gravelly.
“Yes.”
“Benny Goodman, who works as a janitor down at Lawrence Berkeley labs?”
Benny was beginning to get a faint buzz of warning. “Is there a problem down at the lab?” he asked.
“No, no. It’s just . . . my dogs are hungry.”
Benny stared at them. They growled. “I’ve . . . nothing to feed them,” he said.
“Not a problem. We’ll improvise,” said the old man, and he snapped his fingers. The dogs were upon Benny in a heartbeat, one of them—a pit bull—clamping his teeth around Benny’s throat before he could get so much as a scream out. The old man stepped through the door as the animals bore Benny to the floor, and as the janitor writhed in his death throes, the old man said, “By the way . . . love your orchestra,” as he closed the door behind him.
Not for the first time, Bruce Krenzler had the oddest feeling that he was staring into the mirror at someone else’s face. Or perhaps it was something other than that. Yes. Yes, it felt as if he were studying his own face, but eyes other than his were gazing back at him with intensity and curiosity and . . . hatred.
Why hatred?
Why not?
The query and the reply ran through his head, one stumbling over the other, and the impact of their collision nearly jolted him from his reverie. His mind split ever so slightly, and he saw himself from beyond the restrictions of his mortal shell, as if he were having an out-of-body experience. How ludicrous it would have seemed to someone on the outside looking in. Here he was, standing bare chested, a towel wrapped around his middle, staring into a mirror as if his own reflection were simply the most irresistible thing he’d ever laid eyes on. He would have come across to an observer as a world-class egomaniac. Or a narcissist. Or an actor, he added mentally, and tried to laugh at his little unvoiced jest. Oddly, he found he couldn’t.
His straight black hair was still slicked down from his having showered minutes before, but his skin had dried. He studied his face more closely. His ears stuck out a bit on either side. He thought he looked like a reasonably intelligent individual, and then wondered whether that again wasn’t the consideration of someone who was too self-obsessed for his own good.
Bruce looked a bit older than he felt. He was reasonably muscled. He didn’t get the chance to exercise all that often, because he was so busy in the lab. He used to have much more of a tan, but lately he’d been eating, sleeping, and breathing in the laboratory, and some days it seemed the only reason he came home was because Betty practically forced him to.
Something flickered in his eyes when he thought of Betty. Again, he wasn’t sure what it was, and that bothered him a lot. He thought of the time when they’d been on their way up to the cabin, and Betty had gazed at him lovingly and spoke of how the eyes were the window to the soul. Br
uce had laughed and said in an offhand manner, “Yes, but whose soul?” When Betty had asked him what that was supposed to mean, he didn’t have an explanation. He still didn’t.
“My God, Bruce,” he said out loud. Although the shade was drawn in his bathroom, the light of dawn was visible through it. “Could you possibly waste time any more comprehensively than you already have?”
He then wondered for some odd reason if he was going to respond to himself. They always say talking to yourself is no big deal; it’s when you start replying that you’ve got a problem.
He didn’t reply, which provided at least some temporary degree of relief.
Deciding that he’d been screwing around for far too long already, Bruce quickly lathered up his face and began to draw his razor across it. He did so with the same careful, methodical strokes he always used when attending to—well, just about anything, really. Betty had once said that with the slightest push, he could easily trip over into the realm of obsessive-compulsive disorder. “I could never have OCD,” Bruce had assured her. “I’m too anal retentive.” That made Betty laugh, and the matter had been dropped. Not forgotten by Bruce, or Betty, truth to tell, but dropped nevertheless.
The razor moved across his face. He watched it carefully. Gradually Bruce realized that there was something wrong with his reflection, but he couldn’t fathom what it might be. Finally he noticed it: He’d stopped blinking. He was so fixed on what he was doing that his eyes were just staring, like the orbs of a serpent. Or a madman.
He blinked. It took an effort, but he did it. One blink, slow, methodical, and then open, and there were those eyes again, set in his relatively nondescript face, and damn, but it felt as if someone else was staring back.
You’re losing it, Bruce.
Yes. You are.
He almost jumped as he once again responded to himself, in a voice that sounded like hell’s cement mixer, and he nicked himself shaving.
And there was blood, blood everywhere, gushing, and it was horrible, just terrifying, and deep within something rooting around recoiled in terror and anger, all mixed together, looking at his eyes, through his eyes, with burning hatred . . .