A heap of snapshots surrounded his fancy boots with the high Cuban heels. The flash pulsed again, and another picture fell into the pile.
I took a small step into the bedroom. Even that required too much coordination for a shambling slob like myself, and the party gun clicked against the doorframe. The sound of it made me want to cry, but the Phoenician didn’t look my way, so intent was he on his work.
The camera whined and snapped. Shelly tried to raise her hand to shield her face again.
“No, bitch,” he said, and grabbed her wrist, and shoved her hand down. “What did I tell you? No covering up.”
“Stop it,” I said.
It was out of my mouth before I knew I was going to speak. It was the way he kept shoving her hand down. It offended me. Does that make sense? I wanted more than anything to run, but I couldn’t, because I couldn’t bear the thought of him touching her like that. It was indecent.
He glanced over his shoulder without any real surprise. Flicked his gaze down at the party gun and snorted softly in contempt. It wasn’t fooling anyone.
“Oh, look,” he said. “It’s the fat boy. I thought the old bastard might send someone around to sit with her. Of all the people in the world, if it could’ve been just one person, I would’ve picked you, fat boy. I’m going to remember the next few minutes with great pleasure, all the rest of my life. I am—but you aren’t.”
He turned toward me with the camera. I jerked up the gun. I’m sure I meant to throw it, but instead my finger found the trigger.
The air horn shrieked. Confetti exploded in a shower of glitter. The flashbulbs kapowed. The Phoenician went backward as if someone had struck him in the chest. His high right heel came down on that little pile of photographs—those slick plasticky squares—and squirted out from under him. The backs of his legs thumped an end table. A lamp toppled, hit the floor, and the bulb exploded with a sharp pop. He jumped forward a step, and Shelly reached out and grabbed his pant leg and yanked. He stumbled, with his eyes shut—right toward me.
He made a sound between a snarl and a roar. Glitter spackled his cheeks, flecked his eyelashes. He even had some in his mouth, bright gold flakes on his tongue. He cradled his camera to his chest like a mother with her infant and reached for me with his free hand. In that moment I found a decisive grace I’d never known before and would never know again.
I stepped into him, knowing he couldn’t see me, had been blinded by the flash. When we thudded together, the Solarid slipped. My knee found his groin, not a good hard thump but a weak jostle that made him instinctively clamp his knees together. He bobbled the camera, and I lifted it right out of his hand. He choked on a scream and grabbed for the Solarid. I handed him the party gun instead. He caught it by the trigger, and it went off with another loud squawk. I kept going, was past him in two steps, and then I was behind him, next to the bed.
He stumbled almost as far as the bedroom door before he realized what had happened. He put out his free hand and steadied himself against the doorframe. He blinked rapidly down at the party gun with complete bafflement. He didn’t drop it. He threw it onto the floor with a crack and kicked it away.
A hand stroked the outside of my leg, gently patted my knee. Shelly. She had relaxed and gazed up at me with a dreaming affection.
The pale, colorless worms of the Phoenician’s lips flexed in a look of rage masquerading as humor.
“You can’t imagine what I’m going to do to you. I’m not going to kill you. I’m not even going to hurt you. Either would be showing you a respect you don’t deserve. I’m going to fucking erase you.” His dark eyes shifted to the camera in my hands, then went back to my face. “Put that down, you fat piece of shit. Do you have any idea what that does?”
“Yes,” I said in a shaking voice, and lifted the viewfinder to my eye. “Yes I do. Say cheese.”
9
THERE ARE A LOT OF things I don’t understand about that night.
I took photo after photo of him. The Solarid pictures fell, one after another, into a pile at my feet. A standard Polaroid cartridge contained twelve pictures. The extra-large cartridges allowed you to take eighteen photographs. But the Solarid never needed to be reloaded, and it never ran out.
He didn’t come get me. The first picture dazed him, just as it had dazed Mat. It seemed to put him back on his high Cuban heels, his eyes blank, staring far away at some distant view he would never see again. He stood there fixed in place, a computer trying to boot up. But he could never get unstuck, because I kept firing the camera at him.
After the first dozen photos, he did finally move. But not to charge me. Instead he carefully, almost daintily, crossed his ankles and then slid to the floor to sit like a disciple meditating in an ashram. After another twenty snapshots, he began to tilt over to one side. Ten pictures later he was curled in the fetal position on the floor. In all this time, a sly, subtle, knowing smile remained on his face, but at a certain point one corner of his mouth began to glisten with drool.
Shelly stirred from the narcotic fog created by the Solarid and was able to sit up, blinking sleepily. Her hair floated in bluish tangles around her shriveled-dumpling face.
“Who’s that?” she asked, looking at the Phoenician.
“I don’t know,” I said, and took another picture.
“Is it Alamagüselum? My father says Alamagüselum lives in the walls and drinks tears.”
“No,” I said. “But maybe they’re related.” I don’t think the Phoenician drank tears, but I believe he enjoyed seeing them quite a bit.
Maybe fifty photos in, the Phoenician’s eyelids sank halfway shut and his eyes rolled back to show the whites, and he began to shiver. His breath shot out of him in short, harsh bursts. I lowered the camera, scared he was going to have a seizure. I regarded him carefully, and after a minute the tremors began to subside. He was rag-doll limp, and his face had assumed an expression of forlorn imbecility.
It was perhaps like electroshock therapy. You could fry the brain for only so long before you risked overloading the system and stopping the heart. I decided to give him a chance to get his breath back. I bent and grabbed a fistful of the pictures on the floor. I knew it would be a mistake to look at them, but I looked anyway. I saw:
? A crying man, mid-fifties, on his knees in a gravel driveway, fleshy and naked and holding out a pair of car keys in a desperate offering. He was cut all over, lots of fine red slashes trickling blood. The big white Caddy—the one the Phoenician went around in—could be seen in the background, parked under a willow, so shiny and clean it might’ve just rolled out of a 1950s-era magazine ad.