He had truly absorbed the Wildings’ horrific travails as his own.
Only days before Tristen and Allegra met their defeat on that foregoing field (now months ago), he received an unexpected call.
“It’s Frank. I’d like to buy you lunch — just us boys.”
Jeremy’s brain glitched at the demotic, seductive proposal — his mind frantically searched for Franks in his ample database of old hookups — before confirming the mumbleboomy voice as none other than Franklin T. MacKlatchie’s (Esq.). He wondered why he would use that name. To Jeremy’s ear it sounded like, “When I con that one, I call misself ‘Sir.’ When I con you, I use ‘Frank’!”
They met at a coffee shop in the shopping center by the Colony. The Minnesotan magus was in fine spirits. He kibitzed with a waiter about a football game and did a hail-fellow-well-met with all who crossed his path. After a while he sobered up, so to speak, and sunk deep within himself as he drew the invitee into his confidence game.
“I’m going to tell you some things that I’ve kept from the girl — which I have decided to share because I’m leaving soon. Devi doesn’t know that yet, nor do I wish her to. So we agree this shall be strictly entre nous?” He clasped his hands together like a devout and humble man about to embark on a great voyage. “From everything the girl has told me, and all I’ve observed misself, I believe you to be a most sensitive, trustworthy soul. Am I correct?”
“Well, I have been called sensitive. ‘Trustworthy’? That’s something I aspire to. But I think it may be prudent to leave my soul out of the discussion.”
MacKlatchie roared — the reply had the effect of a magical password, and he tucked into his monologue with the same gusto as those drumsticks on that Sub-Zero beach house night.
“Devi and I did meet in the manner — the exact manner she described. It is true that for many weeks I made my home on the walkway outside Mandry’s, dependent on the goodwill of its employees and the civility of passersby — when at last we crossed paths, she was in the midst of one of those constitutionals wherein she strove so valiantly to distract herself from the cruel eventualities of that dear, tragic little angel’s fate — her wilting flower, her Bella. You see, we were two dislocated creatures, destined to meet! And we’ve had an extraordinary time, oh just marvelous. We’ve had adventures. I could never repay her for the kindness she’s shown, the companionship and trust. Well, I could, I have, in my own humble way. And I hope I’ve done no harm.
“Jeremy, at this juncture, there are two things imperative for you to know — though she likes to call you Jerome, doesn’t she? — very well then, Jerome, here is the first (he leaned in to deliver what followed): Everything she told you about my gastropub ‘sojourn’—the bouncer’s harassment, the lawsuit, the buying of the place, the role-playing — was a lie. Nothing but legend and folk myth! All lies… well, not everything. I did have a wife and son. And was — still am—a man of vast, inherited wealth. (I was born into it but under my supervision it went forth and multiplied.) But the rest is pure fiction! And lest you rush to judgment, allow me to inform that Devi believes all of it to be true. All of it, and then some! In other words, she knows nothing of my subterfuge. She is faultless and pure, an angel just like her Bella.”
Jeremy practically choked on his frittata. “But… why?”
“Because the truth would have been too much for her.”
He thought he might die if he couldn’t hear more; he thought he might die if he heard one more word. He fought the urge to bolt.
“The truth, dear friend, was that I had a wife and son. An autistic son, as our faithful Devi so delicately described.” The giant hands clasped together again. “And I murdered them both.”
Jeremy’s heart screeched and fluttered like a defenseless thing set upon by a cat. He made lightning escape plan calculations and rejected them with the same speed; to outrun this cunning figment was a foolish, impossible enterprise. The man would hunt him down for sport.
“And after that deplorable act, I felt a rush of freedom! Some of that sense of release, no doubt, I attribute to complete shock—the shock of excitation that I was able to go through with such a thing at all, after having thought about it for so many years… you see, the thrill wasn’t in the getting away with it, but in the doing. There’s no point in speaking to the details that drove me to commit the act. Suffice to say that little Jim—‘Jimbo,’ my son — had become savagely, incurably violent, and my Margot — well, he’d effectively destroyed her, enlisted her, and now both were actively conspiring to destroy me.”
For a long moment, his gaze turned inward. The heavy, hooded lids blinked and flirted with his eyes, promising the opiated sanctuary of sleep — but were spurned.
He resurfaced and became present once more. “And when it was finished, I wondered — not What have I done? but rather What else am I capable of? Oh, that query possessed me! What else was I capable of that was beyond my power to imagine? Not in the sense of the monster-hunter becoming the monster, or the abyss staring back into me… You see, I had always favored the ‘mystical,’ Jerome — in my teenage years I was of the type who haunted the metaphysical section of booksellers, those traders who were moribund even in pre-Internet days… Well, an answer to that came (in the form of another question): Am I capable of enlightenment? And am I a “candidate”? It was a thought that was actually in the back of my mind a long, long while. Could murder—might murder — for me—might it be the avenue of that first step of the journey to moksha, kaivalya, nirvana? I’d read certain parables that seemed to assert an ‘enlightened murderer’ was no oxymoron, and the so-called liberated state may soon be attained through the homicidal act itself. If that were true, imagine how one’s odds at being liberated would be increased by the killing of those whom one loves and protects, one’s very own blood! Isn’t that what Krishna counsels Arjuna? That not to kill those kings and fathers — in my case, mothers and sons! — was to be impotent by sheer weakness of heart? That not to kill would incur sin? Is it not written in the Gita? The ingenious hypothesis was simple, and only in want of a ‘test phase’ to prove or disprove its worth. And I’m no sociopath, lad, far from it! Though I know the declaration encourages the rejoinder, Thou doth protest too much.