Son of Destruction

11




Dan


Burt Mixon, that unwitting genius of negative reinforcement, taught Dan the absolute integrity of personal space when he was old enough to know he had one, but not big enough to defend it.

The gawky, anxious girl’s strung so tight that the kindest thing he can do is let her go. When you get like that, you don’t want people to see you. Not the way you are. Dan knows. At the corner she turns around to check. He waves and goes back into the kind of heat that stops hearts. It’s exponential; even the cockroaches have died. Stalled in the sweltering shotgun hallway, Dan considers. He’s looking for so many things in his life that he can’t be sure what brought him here. It’s those f*cking news photos, he thinks. The ones Lucy tried so hard to hide. As if your mother can protect you from certain things.

The gabled frame house where the old lady died may have been nice back in the day but it morphed under the hands of multiple tenants, who made it hideous. Heading upstairs, he picks his way through a jumble of makeshift partitions, amateur wiring and crap fixtures, searching with no clear idea of what he is looking for: diaries, perhaps. Notebooks. Some trace. A hook to hang his story on. He’d settle for a note crumpled in a kitchen cabinet or a cry for help scrawled on the plaster under torn wallpaper, but all he finds are insect carcasses and desiccated mice, empty roach eggs. Dust.

‘Come on,’ he says to no one. ‘Give me something.’

The attic, he thinks, even though it’s clear there are no secrets there. It’s hours until dark and he’s running out of next things to do. The girl left her pack, he notes, disproportionately cheered. The teddy bear tag has Steffy McCall scrawled on its belly, with the address. He can always drop it off at her house. Dan shoulders the pack and with a false sense of purpose, doubles back on the room where the woman died, looking for something – emotional detritus or some forgotten object or her outline scorched in the floor – anything to mark the fact that something stupendous happened here.

He studies the splintered floor and peels away wallpaper. He peers into her empty closet, but Lorna Archambault might as well have blasted off, shooting up through the ozone layer to flame out on the surface of the moon. He needs to go, but heat drops on him like a dentist’s protective lead blanket. Like a collapsing lawn chair, he folds into lotus position in the spot where her recliner stood.

Absorbing the space.

His breathing slows. His hands lie palms up on his knees, relaxed, open to whatever comes. It is the posture of meditation but there is the outside possibility that sleep throws a switch somewhere inside him; he won’t know. When he next looks up, his perception has jolted into a new place. Flies drop in mid-flight in this heat; reason is stillborn. In this place, in his exaggerated state, even pragmatic reporters like Dan Carteret can inhabit the bodies of the dead.

The room is as it was in the photos, flowered wallpaper still fresh. My mother’s taste, not mine, cabbage roses and that ghastly rug. Press photos of the death scene are black and white, the room was stripped years ago, how does he know what the colors were?

He just does.

Lavender because it’s Hal’s favorite . . . Lorna means the ex-husband’s. This rocks him. How do I know? In that flash she is in this room with Dan, cynical realist that he is, sinking into cushions molded to her bulky form. Lodged in the spot that smoldered long after her soul fled the fire, he undergoes a profound change. Holy f*ck! . . . lavender ruffles at my throat. Even the BarcaLounger is restored. Gold brocade, he notes, but from a recumbent position, as though this is him kicked back in the chair, just in from dinner with Dorian, sweet boy (‘she is survived by a son, Dorian Archambault, M.D., and two grandchildren, all of Fort Jude’), a little drunk after an evening with his family, I ate too much, but . . . looking over the toes of her purple slippers at the TV. Studying the tiny feet on the raised footrest, my best feature, he notes her plush bedroom slippers, the trim, pale ankles laced with purple veins, but for a woman my age, still sexy.

‘God, where did that come from?’

Lavender nightie, Hal’s favorite color, in case he comes. If I’d worn lavender to dinner that terrible night at the Flamenco, if I’d reached under the tablecloth and touched It through his pants, would he have insisted on the divorce?

Perfume, fresh lipstick, in case he drops in for a bon voyage. The TV’s on, but she has no interest in TV. Hoping, Hal’s ex-wife waits up for him. It is, after all, my last night at home. She’s brought a nightcap to the chair with her, a little cognac on ice because this calls for a little celebration. She is tired and anxious and excited, not because of the coming trip but because maybe Hal . . . He didn’t come to the club to say goodbye because he doesn’t want Eden to know. I’m going around the world, of course he wants to see me alone . . . And when he comes, if I touch him the way he wants he’ll forget that bitch Eden Rowse and stay.

She waits.

Seething with anticipation, Lorna waits beyond all waiting. If he remembers his manners, he’ll come tell me goodbye. She hopes beyond the point of hope. She is not yet angry, even though she knows the bastard is out somewhere with that woman, he took up with her before the . . . If he loved her he’d marry her, it’s just the sex. Listening to the doleful sound of ice in her empty glass. He’s coming, he’s just a little late and then, That selfish bitch! This is her fault.

Sad, Dan thinks. No. Angry!

What do I care, this time next week I’ll be having espresso in front of St Peter’s in Rome . . . Her glossy nails knead the brocade. Where is he, why won’t he come? She knows, but she doesn’t want to know. Dammit, Harold Archambault, come here! Inheriting that fleshy white body, inhabiting the gold BarcaLounger, Dan Carteret moves through Lorna Archambault’s hopes into grief and staggering rage because in the posture of meditation, in the hyperbaric chamber of this still, hot room, he sees. In some way he can’t begin to comprehend, he and the dead woman are linked.

There are, however, things he can’t possibly know.

Sweating and stultified, hallucinating or mysteriously unleashed, Dan Carteret inhabits the old lady’s last night. Damn you, Hal Archambault, I didn’t have to wait up. I didn’t have to sit here for so God. Damned. Long, smiling like a painted fool . . . He plays out another scenario: My God, Hal what are you doing, dear God, please don’t light that match!

No. The husband was nowhere near. He had witnesses, the mistress, the night clerk at the beach. The girlfriend must be pretty long in the tooth by now, did she stay in town, can I track her down for an interview?

Wait, what if Hal got fed up with her whining and actually torched the place? Why would he, he had what he wanted, boffing his girlfriend 24/7 at the beach.

Don’t be disgusting.

Right. Hal doesn’t care if the she lives or dies.

Stop that!

‘All right,’ Dan shouts at her, ‘All right!’

One more sip and he’ll come. She is rocking and sucking on the cognac; if he comes in drunk all I have to do is touch that thing and he’ll beg me to drop the trip and stay with him. Even though it’s too late, she plans: I’ll pull him into this chair and vulgar as it is, I’ll show him around the world.

Time dies. Resentment catches fire. Forget me, will you, well, I’ll show you. Pills she needs in the pocket of her robe. He’ll come in and find me and then we’ll see who’s who and what’s what. Right, it’s logical, if not inevitable. Sitting with his hands open on his knees, Dan falls into her bitterness: Take the pills and when he finds me with my tongue out and my eyes rolled back, it will serve him God damned right. Resentment twists in her belly and ignites. Damn you, Harold Archambault. God. Damn you.

Something changes. She cries out in Dan’s voice: ‘What are you doing here?’ His head comes up so fast that his neck snaps. There is somebody new in the room. Astonished, Lorna hisses, You.

Dan lurches to his feet, blinking. He can’t see, but he hears:

Get out.

Shuddering, he calls, ‘Who! Who?’

How did you get in? She’s frightened. She’s furious. What are you doing here? Dan cracks his mouth wide, listening, but there is no hearing the other side of this dialog. His gut cramps as the old lady’s entrails knot. You have no right to be here. How dare you come here, making demands? Disappointment boils in her belly. Instead of Hal. There is shouting: not hers – someone else.

Troubled, Dan hears only Lorna, screaming, Get out. Shut up and get out. What are you . . . my God! Livid, rocking and furious, she sees it coming.

Whatever it is.

Dan doesn’t know. Then he does. In this room, someone else cries: ‘Dear God, watch out!’

She rasps, I will die before I let you take . . .

Someone who shouts, ‘It’s too late!’

Here in the room.

His voice. Whoever he is. ‘God damn you, old woman.’ The room shakes.

I’ll see you dead. Words boil out of her, leaving Dan riven and shaking. I’ll see you in hell. And in a plume of flames, she imagines it. She sees me writhing and howling in the heat. But who am I. Who am I? Rigid and furious, she envisions the murders – Hal, once she starts there will be no end to it, Eden Rowse. You. The ball of heat inside her grows; in the unlikeliest of cavities it flickers, getting brighter as she seethes in the depths of her recliner, unaware and unprotected, roaring, Who’s sorry now? Furious, she is too angry to comprehend the fire inside her, any more than she will know the exact moment that her soul explodes and flies out in a shower of sparks. By the time her body splits and flames shoot up there is nothing left of Lorna Archambault but the chair she sits in and the shell of her body in its melted shreds of lavender that she put on especially for him; everything else is consumed from within, everything but the husk. For a few seconds she flames brilliantly – gorgeous, Too bad Hal can’t see, and then collapses inward. What little is left of her curls back on itself and fuses with the melting fabric of the ruined chair. Only rage remains, a nugget of distilled evil so powerful that Dan yelps in pain.

The guilt.

Whose? ‘God.’ He lunges for the door.

‘God!’

The guilt is terrible.

How did this door close? Did I shut myself in? Did she? Drenched and shaking, he grapples with the knob and finally breaks out. He’s free, but the knowledge follows him out of the room. Changed by forces he doesn’t recognize and can’t name, he hurtles downstairs and out into beginning night.