Helen appears in the doorway to the hall.
My foot aches, and I ask, has he considered taking up a hobby?
Maybe something he could do in prison.
Constructive destruction. I'm sure Helen would approve of the sacrifice. Condemning one innocent man so millions don't die.
Here's every lab animal who dies to save a dozen cancer patients.
And the race car guy says, "I think you'd better leave."
Walking out to the car, I hand Helen the daily planner and tell her, here's your Bible. My pager goes off, and it's some number I don't know.
Her 'white gloves are black with dust, and she says she tore up the culling song page and dropped it out the nursery window. It's raining. The paper will rot.
I say, that's not good enough. Some kid could find it. Just the fact that it's tore up will make someone want to put it back together. Some detective investigating the death of a child, maybe.
And Helen says, "That bathroom was a nightmare."
We drive around the block and park. Mona's scribbling in the backseat. Oyster's on his phone. Then Helen waits while I crouch down and walk back to the house. I duck around the back, the wet lawn sucking at my shoes, until I'm under the window Helen says is the nursery. The window's still open, the curtains hanging out a little at the bottom. Pink curtains.
The torn bits of page are scattered in the mud, and I start to pick them all up.
Behind the curtains, in the empty room, you can hear the door open. The outline of somebody comes in from the hallway, and I crouch in the mud under the window. A man's hand comes down on the windowsill so I pull back flat against the house. From somewhere above me where I can't see, a man starts crying.
It starts to rain harder.
The man stands in the window, leaning both hands on the open sill. He sobs louder. You can smell the beer inside him.
Me, I can't run. I can't stand up. With my hands clamped over my nose and mouth, I crouch inches away, squeezed tight against the foundation, hidden. And hitting me as fast as a chill, me breathing between my fingers, I start to cry, too. Sobs as hard as vomiting. My belly cramps. My teeth biting into my palm, the snot sprays into my hands.
The man sniffs, hard and bubbling. It's raining harder, and water seeps into my shoes through the laces.
The torn bits of the poem in my hand, I hold the power of life and death. I just can't do anything. Not yet.
And maybe you don't go to hell for the things you do. Maybe you go to hell for the things you don't do.
My shoes full of cold water, my foot stops hurting. My hand slick with snot and tears, I reach down and turn off my pager.
When we find the grimoire, if there is some way to raise the dead, maybe we won't burn it. Not right away.
Chapter 29
The police report doesn't say how warm my wife, Gina, felt when I woke up that morning. How soft and warm she felt under the covers. How when I turned next to her, she rolled onto her back, her hair fanned out on her pillow. Her head was tipped a little toward one shoulder. Her morning skin smelled warm, the way sunlight looks bouncing up off a white tablecloth in a nice restaurant near the beach on your honeymoon.
Sun came through the blue curtains, making her skin blue. Her lips blue. Her eyelashes were lying across each cheek. Her mouth was a loose smile.
Still half asleep, I cupped my hand behind her neck and tilted her face back and kissed her.
Her neck and shoulder were so easy and relaxed.
Still kissing her warm, relaxed mouth, I pulled her nightgown up around her waist.
Her legs seemed to roll apart, and my hand found her loose and wet inside.
Under the covers, my eyes closed, I worked my tongue inside. With my wet fingers, I peeled back the smooth pink edges of her and licked deeper. The tide of air going in and out of me. At the top of each breath, I drove my mouth up into her.
For once, Katrin had slept the whole night and wasn't crying.
My mouth climbed to Gina's belly button. It climbed to her breasts. With one wet finger in her mouth, my other fingers flick across her nipples. My mouth cups over her other breast and my tongue touches the nipple inside.
Gina's head rolled to one side, and I licked the back of her ear. My hips pressing her legs apart, I put myself inside.
The loose smile on her face, the way her mouth came open at the last moment and her head sunk deep into the pillow, she was so quiet. It was the best it had been since before Katrin was born.
A minute later, I slipped out of bed and took a shower. I tiptoed into my clothes and eased the bedroom door shut behind me. In the nursery, I kissed Katrin on the side of her head. I felt her diaper. The sun came through her yellow curtains. Her toys and books. She looked so perfect.
I felt so blessed.
No one in the world was as lucky as me that morning.
Here, driving Helen's car with her asleep in the front seat beside me. Tonight, we're in Ohio or Iowa or Idaho, with Mona asleep in the back. Helen's pink hair pillowed against my shoulder. Mona sprawled in the rearview mirror, sprawled in her colored pens and books. Oyster asleep. This is the life I have now. For better or for worse. For richer, for poorer.
That was my last really good day. It wasn't until I came home from work that I knew the truth.
Gina was still lying in the same position.
The police report would call it postmortem sexual intercourse.
Nash comes to mind.
Katrin was still quiet. The underside of her head had turned dark red.
Livor mortis. Oxygenated hemoglobin.
It wasn't until I came home that I knew what I'd done.
Here, parked in the leather smell of Helen's big Realtor car, the sun is just above the horizon. It's the same moment now as it was then. We're parked under a tree, on a treelined street in a neighborhood of little houses. It's some kind of flowering tree, and all night, pink flower petals have fallen on the car, sticking to the dew. Helen's car is pink as a parade float, covered in flowers, and I'm spying out through just a hole where the petals don't cover the windshield.
The morning light shining in through the layer of petals is pink.
Rose-colored. On Helen and Mona and Oyster, asleep.
Down the block, an old couple is working in the flower beds along their foundation. The old man fills a watering can at a spigot. The old woman kneels, pulling weeds.
I turn my pager back on, and it starts beeping right away.
Helen jerks awake.
The phone number on my pager, I don't recognize it.
Helen sits up, blinking, looking at me. She looks at the tiny sparkling watch on her wrist. On one side of her face are deep red pockmarks where she slept on her dangling emerald earrings. She looks at the layer of pink covering all the windows. She plunges the pink fingernails of both hands into her hair and fluffs it, saying, "Where are we now?"
Some people still think knowledge is power.
I tell her, I have no idea.
Chapter 30
Mona stands at my elbow. She holds a glossy brochure open, pushing it in my face, saying, "Can we go here? Please? Just for a couple hours? Please?"
Photographs in the brochure show people screaming with their hands in the air, riding a roller coaster. Photos show people driving go-carts around a track outlined in old tires. More people are eating cotton candy and riding plastic horses on a merry-go-round. Other people are locked into seats on a Ferris wheel. Along the top of the brochure in big scrolling letters it says: LaughLand, The Family Place.
Except in place of the a's are four laughing clown faces. A mother, a father, a son, a daughter.
We have another eighty-four books to disarm. That's dozens more libraries in cities all over the country. Then there's the grimoire to find. There's people to bring back from the dead. Or just castrate. Or there's all of humanity to kill, depending on whom you ask.
There's so much we need to get fixed. To get back to God, as Mona would say. Just to break even.
Karl Marx would say we've made every plant and animal our enemy to justify killing it.
In the newspaper today, it says the husband of one of the fashion models is being held under suspicion of murder.
I'm standing at a public phone outside some small-town library while Helen's inside trashing another book with Oyster.
A man's voice on the phone says, "Homicide Division."
Into the phone, I ask, who is this?
And the voice says, "Detective Ben Danton, Homicide Division." He says, "Who is this?"
A police detective. Mona would call him my savior, sent to wrangle me back into the fold with the rest of humanity. This is the number that's been appearing on my pager for the past couple days.
Mona turns the brochure over and says, "Just look." Braided in her hair are broken windmills and train trestles and radio towers.
Photos show smiling children getting hugged by clowns. It shows parents strolling hand in hand and riding little skiffs through a Tunnel of Love.
She says, "This trip doesn't have to be all work."
Helen comes out of the library doors and starts down the front steps, and Mona turns and rushes at her, saying, "Helen, Mr. Streator said it was okay."
And I put the pay phone receiver to my chest and say, I did not.
Oyster is hanging back, a step behind Helen's elbow.
Mona holds the brochure in Helen's face, saying, "Look how much fun."
On the phone, Detective Danton says, "Who is this?"
It was okay to sacrifice the poor guy in his race car boxer shorts. It's okay to sacrifice the young woman in the apron printed with little chickens. To not tell them the truth, to let them suffer. And to sacrifice the widower of some fashion model. But sacrificing me to save the millions is another thing altogether.
Into the phone, I say my name, Streator, and that he paged me.
"Mr. Streator," he says, "we'd like you to come in for questioning."
I ask, about what?
"Why don't we talk about that in person?" he says.
I ask if this is about a death.
"When can you make it in?" he says.
I ask if this is about the series of deaths with no apparent cause.
"Sooner would be better than later," he says.
I ask if this is because one victim was my upstairs neighbor and three were my editors.
And Danton says, "You don't say?"
I ask if this is because I passed three more victims in the street the moment before they each died.
And Danton says, "That's news to me."
I ask if this is because I stood within spitting distance of the young sideburns guy who died in the bar on Third Avenue.
"Uh-huh," he says. "You'd mean Marty Latanzi."
I ask if this is because all the dead fashion models show signs of postmortem sex, the same way my wife did twenty years ago. And no doubt they have security camera film of me talking to a librarian named Symon at the moment he dropped dead.
You can hear a pencil somewhere scratching fast notes on paper.
Away from the phone, I hear someone else say, "Keep him on the line."
I ask if this is really a ploy to arrest me for suspicion of murder.
And Detective Danton says, "Don't make us issue a bench warrant."
The more people die, the more things stay the same.
Officer Danton, I say. I ask, can he tell me where to find him at this exact moment?
Sticks and stones may break your bones, but here we go again. Fast as a scream, the culling song spins through my head, and the phone line goes dead.
I've killed my savior. Detective Ben Danton. I'm that much further from the rest of humanity.