And Sarge grabs a tissue and dabs his eyes.
Then the young cop turns fast, grabbing me under the jaw and jamming me up against the wall. My back and legs against the cold concrete. With my head pushed up and back, the young cop's hand squeezing my throat, the cop says, "You don't give the Sarge a hard time!" He shouts, "Got that?"
And the Sarge looks up with a weak smile and says, "Yeah. You heard him." And sniffs.
And the young cop lets loose of my throat. He steps back toward the door, saying, "I'll be out front if you need . .. well, anything."
"Thank you," the Sarge says. He clutches the young cop's hand, squeezing it, saying, "You're too sweet."
And the young cop jerks his hand away and leaves the room.
Helen's inside this man, the way a television plants its seed in you. The way cheatgrass takes over a landscape. The way a song stays in your head. The way ghosts haunt houses. The way a germ infects you. The way Big Brother occupies your attention.
The Sarge, Helen, gets to his feet. He fiddles with his holster and pulls out his gun. Holding the pistol in both hands, he points it at me and says, "Now get your clothes out of the bag and put them on." The Sarge sniffs back tears and kicks the garbage bag full of clothes at me and says, "Get dressed, damn it." He says, "I came here to save you."
The pistol trembling, the Sarge says, "I want you out of here so I can beat off."
Chapter 42
Everywhere, words are mixing. Words and lyrics and dialogue are mixing in a soup that could trigger a chain reaction. Maybe acts of God are just the right combination of media junk thrown out into the air. The wrong words collide and call up an earthquake. The way rain dances called storms, the right combination of words might call down tornadoes. Too many advertising jingles commingling could be behind global warming. Too many television reruns bouncing around might cause hurricanes. Cancer. AIDS.
In the taxi, on my way to the Helen Boyle real estate offices, I see newspaper headlines mixing with hand-lettered signs. Leaflets stapled to telephone poles mix with third-class mail. The songs of street buskers mix with Muzak mix with street hawkers mix with talk radio.
We're living in a teetering tower of babble. A shaky reality of words. A DNA soup for disaster. The natural world destroyed, we're left with this cluttered world of language.
Big Brother is singing and dancing, and we're left to watch. Sticks and stones may break our bones, but our role is just to be a good audience. To just pay our attention and wait for the next disaster.
Against the taxi's seat, my ass still feels greasy and stretched out.
There are thirty-three copies of the poems book left to find. We need to visit the Library of Congress. We need to mop up the mess and make sure it will never happen.
We need to warn people. My life is over. This is my new life.
The taxi pulls into the parking lot, and Mona's outside the front doors, locking them with a huge ring of keys. For a minute, she could be Helen. Mona, her hair's ratted, backcombed, teased into a red and black bubble. She's wearing a brown suit, but not chocolate brown. It's more the brown of a chocolate hazelnut truffle served on a satin pillow in a luxury hotel.
A box sits on the ground at Mona's feet. On top of the box is something red, a book. The grimoire.
I'm walking across the parking lot, and she calls, "Helen's not here."
There was something on the police scanner about everybody in a bar on Third Avenue being dead, Mona says, and me being arrested. Putting the box in the trunk of her car, she says, "You just missed Mrs. Boyle. She ran out of here sobbing just a second ago."
The Sarge.
Helen's big, leather-smelling Realtor's car is nowhere in sight.
Looking down at her own brown high heels, her tailored suit, padded and tucked, doll clothes with huge topaz buttons, her short skirt, Mona says, "Don't ask me how this happened." She holds up her hands, her black fingernails painted pink with white tips. Mona says, "Please tell Mrs. Boyle I don't appreciate having my body kidnapped and shit done to me." She points at her own stiff bubble of hair, her blusher cheeks and pink lipstick, and says, "This is the equivalent of a fashion rape."
With her new pink fingernails, Mona slams the trunk lid.
Pointing at my shirt, she says, "Did things with your friend get a little bloody?"
The red stains are chili, I tell her.
The grimoire, I say. I saw it. The red human skin. The pentagram tattoo.
"She gave it to me," Mona says. She snaps open her little brown purse and reaches inside, saying, "She said she wouldn't need it anymore. Like I said, she was upset. She was crying."
With two pink fingernails, Mona plucks a folded paper out of her purse. It's a page from the grimoire, the page with my name written on it, and she holds it out to me, saying, "Take care of yourself. I guess somebody in some government must want you dead."
Mona says, "I guess Helen's little love spell must've backfired." She stumbles in her brown high heels, and leaning on the car, she says, "Believe it or not, we're doing this to save you."
Oyster's slumped in her backseat, too still, too perfect, to be alive. His shattered blond hair spreads across the seat. The Hopi medicine bag still hangs around his neck, cigarettes falling out of it. The red scars across his cheeks from Helen's car keys.
I ask, is he dead?
And Mona says, "You wish." She says, "No, he'll be okay." She gets into the driver's seat and starts the car, saying, "You'd better hurry and go find Helen. I think she might do something desperate."
She slams her car door and starts to back out of her parking space.
Through her car window, Mona yells, "Check at the New Continuum Medical Center." She drives off, yelling, "I just hope you're not too late."
Chapter 43
In room 131 at the New Continuum Medical Center, the floor sparkles. The linoleum tile snaps and pops as I walk across it, across the shards and slivers of red and green, yellow and blue. The drops of red. The diamonds and rubies, emeralds and sapphires. Both Helen's shoes, the pink and the yellow, the heels are hammered down to mush. The ruined shoes left in the middle of the room.
Helen stands on the far side of the room, in a little lamplight, just the edge of some light from a table lamp. She's leaning on a cabinet made of stainless steel. Her hands are spread against the steel. She presses her cheek there.
My shoes snap and crush the colors on the floor, and Helen turns.
There's a smear of blood across her pink lipstick. On the cabinet is a kiss of pink and red. Where she was lying is a blurry gray window, and inside is something too perfect and white to be alive.
Patrick.
The frost around the edges of the window has started to melt, and water drips down the cabinet.
And Helen says, "You're here," and her voice is blurry and thick. Blood spills out of her mouth.
Just looking at her, my foot aches.
I'm okay, I say.
And Helen says, "I'm glad."
Her cosmetic case is dumped out on the floor. Among the shards of color are twisted chains and settings, gold and platinum. Helen says, "I tried to break the biggest ones," and she coughs into her hand. "The rest I tried to chew," she says, and coughs until her palm is filled with blood and slivers of white.
Next to the cosmetic case is a spilled bottle of liquid drain cleaner, the spill a green puddle around it.
Her teeth are shattered, bloody gaps, and pits show inside her mouth. She puts her face against the gray window. Her breath fogging the glass, her bloody hand goes to the side of her skirt.
"I don't want to go back to how it was before," she says, "the way my life was before I met you." She wipes her bloody hand and keeps wiping it on her skirt. "Even with all the power in the world."
I say, we need to get her to a hospital.
And Helen smiles a bloody smile and says, "This is a hospital."
It's nothing personal, she says. She just needed someone. Even if she could bring Patrick back, she'd never want to ruin his life by sharing the culling spell. Even if it meant living alone again, she'd never want Patrick to have that power.
"Look at him," she says, and touches the gray glass with her pink fingernails. "He's so perfect."
She swallows, blood and shattered diamonds and teeth, and makes a terrible wrinkled face. Her hands clutch her stomach, and she leans on the steel cabinet, the gray window. Blood and condensation run down from the little window.
With one shaking hand, Helen snaps open her purse and takes out a lipstick. She touches it around her lips and the pink lipstick comes away smeared with blood.
She says she's unplugged the cryogenic unit. Disconnected the alarm and backup batteries. She wants to die with Patrick.
She wants it to end here. The culling spell. The power. The loneliness. She wants to destroy all the jewels that people think will save them. All the residue that outlasts the talent and intelligence and beauty. All the decorative junk left behind by real accomplishment and success. She wants to destroy all the lovely parasites that outlive their human hosts.
The purse drops out of her hands. On the floor, the gray rock rolls out of the purse. For whatever reason, Oyster comes to mind.
Helen belches. She takes a tissue from her purse and cups it under her mouth and spits out blood and bile and broken emeralds. Flashing inside her mouth, stuck in the shredded meat of her gums are jagged pink sapphires and shattered orange beryls. Lodged in the roof of her mouth are fragments of purple spinels. Sunk in her tongue are shards of black bort diamond.
And Helen smiles and says, "I want to be with my family." She wraps the bloody tissue into a ball and tucks it inside the cuff of her suit. Her earrings, her necklaces, her rings, it's all gone.
The details of her suit are, it's some color. It's a suit. It's ruined.
She says, "Please. Just hold me."
Inside the gray window, the perfect infant is curled on its side in a pillow of white plastic. One thumb is in its mouth. Perfect and pale as blue ice.
I put my arms around Helen and she winces.
Her knees start to fold, and I lower her to the floor. Helen Hoover Boyle closes her eyes. She says, "Thank you, Mr. Streator."
With the gray rock in my fist, I punch through the cold gray window. My hands bleeding, I lift out Patrick, cold and pale. My blood on Patrick, I put him in Helen's arms. I put my arms around Helen.
My blood and hers, mixed now.
Lying in my arms, Helen closes her eyes and grinds her head into my lap. She smiles and says, "Didn't it feel too coincidental when Mona found the grimoire?"
Leering at me, she opens her eyes and says, "Wasn't it just a little too neat and tidy, the fact that we'd been traveling along with the grimoire the whole time?"
Helen lying in my arms, she cradles Patrick. Then it happens. She reaches up and pinches my cheek. Helen looks up at me and smiles with just half her mouth, a leer with blood and green bile between her lips. She winks and says, "Gotcha, Dad!"
My whole body, one muscle spasm wet with sweat.
Helen says, "Did you really think Mom would off herself over you? And trash her precious fucking jewels? And thaw this frozen piece of meat?" She laughs, blood and drain cleaner bubbling in her throat, and says, "Did you really think Mom would chew her fucking diamonds because you didn't love her?"
I say, Oyster?
"In the flesh," Helen says, Oyster says with Helen's mouth, Helen's voice. "Well, I'm in Mrs. Boyle's flesh, but I bet you've been inside her yourself."
Helen raises Patrick in her hands. Her child, cold and blue as porcelain. Frozen fragile as glass.
And she tosses the dead child across the room where it clatters against the steel cabinet and falls to the floor, spinning on the linoleum. Patrick. A frozen arm breaks off. Patrick. The spinning body hits a steel cabinet corner and the legs snap off. Patrick. The armless, legless body, a broken doll, it spins against the wall and the head breaks off.