NOS4A2 A Novel

The Carriage House


VIC HAD ONLY BEEN IN THE CARRIAGE HOUSE ONCE, WHEN SHE FIRST looked at the property. She had talked to her mother about cleaning the place out and using it as an artist’s studio. So far, though, her pencils and paints hadn’t made it any farther than the bedroom closet, and the carriage house was as cluttered as the day they had moved in.

It was a long, narrow room, so crowded with junk it was impossible for anyone to walk a straight line to the back wall. There were a few stalls where horses had been kept. Vic loved the smell of the place, a perfume of gasoline, dirt, old dry hay, and wood that had baked and aged for eighty summers.

If Vic were Wayne’s age, she would’ve lived in the rafters, among the pigeons and flying squirrels. That didn’t seem to be Wayne’s thing, though. Wayne didn’t interact with nature. He took pictures of it with his iPhone and then bent over the screen and poked at it. His favorite thing about the lake house was that it had Wi-Fi.

It wasn’t that he wanted to stay indoors. He wanted to stay inside his phone. It was his bridge away from a world where Mom was a crazy alcoholic and Dad was a three-hundred-pound car mechanic who had dropped out of high school and who wore an Iron Man costume to comic-book conventions.

The motorcycle was in the back of the carriage house, a paint-spattered tarp thrown over it but the shape beneath still discernible. Vic spotted it from just inside the doors and wondered how she could’ve missed it the last time she’d stuck her head in here.

But she only wondered for a moment. No one knew better than Vic McQueen how easy it was for an important thing to be lost amid a great deal of visual clutter. The whole place was like a scene she might paint for one of the Search Engine books. Find your way to the motorcycle through the labyrinth of junk—without crossing a trip wire—and escape! Not a bad notion for a scene, really, something to file away for further thought. She couldn’t afford to ignore a single good idea. Could anyone?

Wayne got one corner of the tarp and she got the other, and they flipped it back.

The bike wore a coat of grime and sawdust a quarter inch thick. The handlebars and gauges were veiled in spiderwebs. The headlight hung loose from the socket by its wires. Under the dust the teardrop-shaped gas tank was cranberry and silver, with the word TRIUMPH embossed on it in chrome.

It looked like a motorcycle out of an old biker movie—not a biker film full of bare tits, washed-out color, and Peter Fonda but one of the older, tamer motorcycle films, something in black and white that involved a lot of racing and talk about the Man. Vic loved it already.

Wayne ran a hand over the seat, looked at the gray fuzz on his palm. “Do we get to keep it?”

As if it were a stray cat.

Of course they didn’t get to keep it. It wasn’t theirs. It belonged to the old woman who was renting them the house.

And yet.

And yet Vic felt that in some way it already belonged to her.

“I doubt it even runs,” she said.

“So?” Wayne asked, with the casual certainty of a twelve-year-old. “Fix it. Dad could tell you how.”

“Your dad already told me how.”

For eight years she had tried to be Lou’s girl. It had not always been good, and it had never been easy, but there had been some happy days in the garage, Lou fixing bikes and Vic airbrushing them, Soundgarden on the radio and cold bottles of beer in the fridge. She would crawl around the bikes with him, holding his light and asking questions. He taught her about fuses, brake lines, manifolds. She had liked being with him then and had almost liked being herself.

“So you think we can keep it?” Wayne asked again.

“It belongs to the old dame renting us the house. I could ask if she’d sell.”

“I bet she’ll let us have it,” he said. He wrote the word “OURS” in the dust on the side of the tank. “What kind of old lady is gonna want to haul ass around on a mother like this?”

“The kind standing right next to you,” she said, and reached past him and wiped her palm across the word “OURS.”

Dust fluffed up into a shaft of early-morning sunshine, a flurry of gold flakes.

Below where the word “OURS” had been, Vic wrote “MINE.” Wayne held up his iPhone and took a picture.





Haverhill


EVERY DAY AFTER LUNCH, SIGMUND DE ZOET HAD AN HOUR TO himself to paint his tiny soldiers. It was his favorite hour of the day. He listened to the Berlin Orchestra performing the Frobisher sextet, Cloud Atlas, and painted the Hun in their nineteenth-century helmets and coats with tails and gasmasks. He had a miniature landscape on a six-foot-by-six-foot sheet of plywood that was supposed to represent an acre of Verdun-sur-Meuse: an expanse of blood-soaked mud, burned trees, tangled shrubbery, barbed wire, and bodies.

Sig was proud of his careful brushwork. He painted gold braid on epaulets, microscopic brass buttons on coats, spots of rust on helmets. He felt that when his little men were painted well, they possessed a tension, a suggestion that they might, at any moment, begin to move on their own and charge the French line.

He was working on them the day it finally happened, the day when they finally did begin to move.

He was painting a wounded Hun, the little man grabbing at his chest, his mouth open in silent cry. Sig had a daub of red on the end of the brush, meant to put a splash of it around the German soldier’s fingers, but when he reached out, the Hun backed away.

Sigmund stared, studying the one-inch soldier under the bright glare of the lamp on its articulated arm. He reached with the tip of the brush again, and again the soldier swayed away.

Sig tried a third time—Hold still, you little bastard, he thought—and missed entirely, wasn’t even close, painted a crimson slash across the metal lampshade instead.

And it wasn’t just that one soldier moving anymore. It was all of them. They lurched toward one another, wavering like candle flames.

Sigmund rubbed his hand across his forehead, felt a hot and slimy sweat there. He inhaled deeply and smelled gingerbread cookies.

A stroke, he thought. I am having a stroke. Only he thought it in Dutch, because for the moment English eluded him, and never mind he had spoken English as his first language since he was five.

He reached for the edge of the table, to push himself to his feet—and missed and fell. Sig hit the walnut floor on his right side and felt something snap in his hip. It broke like a dry stick under a German jackboot. The whole house shook with the force of his fall, and he thought—still in Dutch—That will bring Giselle.

“Hulp,” he called. “Ik heb een slag. Nr. Nr.” That didn’t sound right, but he needed a moment to figure out why. Dutch. She wouldn’t understand Dutch. “Giselle! I have fallen down!”

She didn’t come, didn’t respond in any way. He tried to think what she could be doing that she wouldn’t hear him, then wondered if she was outside with the air-conditioning repairman. The repairman, a dumpy little man named Bing something, had turned up in grease-stained overalls to replace a condenser coil as part of a factory recall.

Sig’s head seemed a bit clearer, down here on the floor. When he had been up on the stool, the air had started to seem soupy and slow, overheated, and faintly cloying, what with that sudden smell of gingerbread. Down here, though, it was cooler, and the world seemed inclined to behave. He saw a screwdriver he had been missing for months, nestled among some dust bunnies under the worktable.

His hip was broken. He was sure of that, could feel the fracture in it, like a hot wire embedded under the skin. He thought if he could get up, though, he could use his stool as a makeshift walker to get across the room to the door and out into the hall.

Perhaps he could reach the door and shout for the air-conditioning man. Or to Vic McQueen, across the street. Except: no. Vicki was off in New Hampshire somewhere with that boy of hers. No—if he could get as far as the phone in the kitchen, he would just have to call emergency services and hope Giselle found him before the ambulance pulled in to the driveway. He didn’t want to shock her more than was necessary.

Sig reached up with one gangly arm, got the stool, and struggled to his feet, keeping his weight off the left leg. It hurt anyway. He heard bone click.

“Giselle!” he screamed again, his voice a throaty roar. “Gott dam, Giselle!”

He leaned over the stool, both hands on its edge, and took a long, trembling breath—and smelled the Christmassy odor of gingerbread again. He almost flinched, the fragrance was so strong and clear.

A stroke, he thought again. This was what happened when you were stroking out. The brain misfired, and you smelled things that weren’t there, while the world drooped around you, melting like dirty snow in a warm spring rain.

He turned himself to face the door, which was not twelve paces away. The door to his studio hung wide open. He could not imagine how Giselle could fail to hear him shouting, if she was anywhere in the house. She was either outside by the noisy air conditioner or shopping or dead.

He considered this array of possibilities again—outside by the noisy air conditioner, shopping, or dead—and was disquieted to find the third possibility not quite preposterous.

He lifted the stool an inch off the floor, moved it forward, set it down, hobbled forward with it. Now that he was standing, the inside of his head was going light again, his thoughts drifting like goose feathers on a warm breeze.

A song was running around and around in his head, stuck in an idiot loop. “There was an old lady who swallowed a fly. I don’t know why she swallowed the fly—Perhaps she’ll die!” Only the song grew in volume, building and building until it no longer seemed to be inside his head but in the air around him, coming down the hall.

“There was an old lady who swallowed a spider that wriggled and jiggled and tickled inside her,” sang the voice. It was high-pitched, off-key, and curiously hollow, like a voice heard at a distance, through a ventilation shaft.

Sig glanced up and saw a man in a gasmask moving past the open door. The man in the gasmask had Giselle by the hair and was dragging her down the hall. Giselle didn’t seem to mind. She wore a neat blue linen dress and matching blue heels, but as she was hauled along, one of the shoes pulled loose and fell off her foot. The Gasmask Man had her long chestnut hair, streaked with white, wrapped around one fist. Her eyes were closed, her narrow, gaunt face serene.

The Gasmask Man turned his head, looked in at him. Sig had never seen anything so awful. It was like in that movie with Vincent Price, where the scientist crossed himself with an insect. His head was a rubber bulb with shining lenses for eyes and a grotesque valve for a mouth.

Something was wrong in Sig’s brain, something maybe worse than a stroke. Could a stroke make you hallucinate? One of his painted Huns had strolled right off his model of Verdun and into his back hallway, was abducting his wife. Maybe that was why Sig was struggling to stay upright. The Hun were invading Haverhill and had bombed the street with mustard gas. Although it didn’t smell like mustard. It smelled like cookies.

The Gasmask Man held up a finger, to indicate he would be back shortly, then continued down the hallway, towing Giselle by the hair. He began to sing again.

“There was an old lady,” the Gasmask Man sang, “who swallowed a goat. Just opened her throat and swallowed a goat. What a greedy bitch!”

Sig slumped over the stool. His legs—he couldn’t feel his legs. He reached to wipe the sweat out of his face and poked himself in the eye.

Boots clomped across the workshop floor.

It took an effort of will for Sig to lift his head. It felt as if there were a great weight balanced on top of it, a twenty-pound stack of iron.

The Gasmask Man stood over the model of Verdun, looking down at the cratered ruin, stitched with barbed wire. His hands on his hips. Sig recognized the man’s clothes at last: He wore the oil-stained jumpsuit of the air-conditioner repairman.

“Little men, little men!” the Gasmask Man said. “I love little men! ‘Up the airy mountain, down the rushy glen, we daren’t go a-hunting, for fear of little men.’” He looked at Sig and said, “Mr. Manx says I’m a rhyming demon. I say I’m just a poet and didn’t know it. How old is your wife, mister?”

Sig had no intention of answering. He wanted to ask what the repairman had done with Giselle. But instead he said, “I married her in 1976. My wife is fifty-nine. Fifteen years younger than myself.”

“You dog, you! Robbing the cradle. No kids?”

“Nr. No. I have ants in my brain.”

“That’s the sevoflurane,” the Gasmask Man said. “I pumped it in through your air conditioner. I can tell that your wife never had kids. Those hard little tits. I gave ’em a squeeze, and I can tell you, women who have had babies don’t have tits like that.”

“Why are you doing this? Why are you here?” Sig asked.

“You live across the street from Vic McQueen. And you have a two-car garage, but only one car,” the Gasmask Man told him. “When Mr. Manx comes back around the corner, he’ll have a place to park. The wheels on the Wraith go round and round, round and round, round and round. The wheels on the Wraith go round and round, all day long.”

Sig de Zoet became aware of a series of sounds—a hiss, a scratch, and a thump—repeating over and over. He couldn’t tell where they were coming from. The noise seemed to be inside his head, in the same way that the Gasmask Man’s song had seemed to be inside his head for a while. That hiss, scratch, and thump was what he had now, in place of thoughts.

The Gasmask Man looked down at him. “Now, Victoria McQueen looks like she has a real set of mommy titties. You’ve seen them firsthand. What do you think of her tits?”

Sig stared up at him. He understood what the Gasmask Man was asking but could not think how to reply to such a question. Vic McQueen was just eight years old; in Sig’s mind she had become a child again, a girl with a boy’s bicycle. She came over now and then to paint figurines. It was a pleasure to watch her work—painting little men with quiet devotion, eyes narrowed as if she were squinting down a long tunnel, trying to see what was at the other end.

“That is her place across the street, isn’t it?” the Gasmask Man said.

Sig intended not to tell him. Not to collaborate. “Collaborate” was the word that came to his mind, not “cooperate.”

“Yes,” he heard himself say. Then he said, “Why did I tell you that? Why am I answering your questions? I am not a collaborator.”

“That’s the sevoflurane, too,” the Gasmask Man said. “You wouldn’t believe some of the things people used to tell me after I gave ’em some of the sweet old gingerbread smoke. This one old grandma, like sixty-four years old at least, told me the only time she ever came was when she took it up the pooper. Sixty-four! Ugh, right? ‘Will you still need me, will you still ream me, when I’m sixty-four?’” He giggled, the innocent, bubbling laughter of a child.

“It is a truth serum?” Sig said. It took a profound effort to verbalize this question; each word was a bucket of water that had to be laboriously drawn up from a deep well, by hand.

“Not exactly, but it sure relaxes your intuitions. Opens you up to suggestion. You wait till your wife starts to come around. She’ll be gobbling my cock just like it’s lunch and she missed breakfast. She’ll just think it’s the thing to do! Don’t worry. I won’t make you watch. You’ll be dead by then. Listen: Where is Vic McQueen? I’ve been watching the house all day. It doesn’t look like there’s anyone home. She isn’t away for the summer, is she? That’d be a pain. That’d be a pain in the brain!”

But Sigmund de Zoet didn’t answer. He was distracted. It had come to him, finally, what he was hearing, what was producing that hiss, that scratch, that thump.

It wasn’t inside his head at all. It was the record he had been listening to, the Berlin Orchestra playing the Cloud Atlas sextet.

The music was over.





Lake Winnipesaukee


WHEN WAYNE WENT TO DAY CAMP, VIC WENT TO WORK ON THE NEW book—and the Triumph.

Her editor had suggested maybe it was time for a holiday-themed Search Engine, thought a Christmas adventure could be a big seller. The notion, at first, was a whiff of sour milk; Vic flinched from it reflexively, in disgust. But with a few weeks to turn it over in her mind, she could see how brutally commercial such an item would be. She could picture, as well, how cute Search Engine would look in a candy-cane-striped cap and a scarf. It never once occurred to her that a robot modeled on the engine of a Vulcan motorcycle would not have any need for a scarf. It would look right. She was a cartoonist, not an engineer; reality could get stuffed.

She cleared a space in a back corner of the carriage house for her easel and made a start. That first day she went for three hours, using her blue nonphotographic pencil to draw a lake of cracking ice. Search Engine and his little friend Bonnie clutched one another on a chunk of floating glacier. Mad Möbius Stripp was under there in a submarine crafted to look like a kraken, tentacles thrusting up around them. At least she thought she was drawing tentacles. Vic worked, as always, with the music turned up and her mind switched off. While she was drawing, her face was as smooth and unlined as a child’s. As untroubled, too.

She kept at it until her hand cramped, then quit and walked out into the day, stretching her back, arms over her head, listening to her spine crack. She went into the cottage to pour herself a glass of iced tea—Vic didn’t bother with lunch, hardly ate when she was working on a book—and returned to the carriage house to think about what belonged on page two. She figured it couldn’t hurt to tinker with the Triumph while she mulled it over.

She planned to bang at the motorcycle for an hour or so and then go back to Search Engine. Instead she worked three hours and was ten minutes late to pick Wayne up from camp.

After that it was the book in the morning and the bike in the afternoon. She learned to set an alarm so she’d always be on time to get Wayne. By the end of June, she had a whole stack of pages roughed out and had stripped the Triumph down to the engine and the bare metal frame.

She sang while she worked, although she was rarely aware of it.

“No one sleeps a wink when I sing this song. I’m gonna sing it all night long,” she sang when she worked on the bike.

And when she worked on the book, she sang, “Dad been driving us to Christmasland, just to ride in Santa’s sleigh. Dad been driving us to Christmasland, just to pass the day away.”

But they were the same song.