“Dear Pahrump — been through quite a misery. He had a cancer. I was almost going to say, ‘You wouldn’t wish it on a dog,’ but…I thought you were from the bank.”
“No, though that wouldn’t be so bad.”
“I’m waiting for them.”
“I’m waiting for those people myself.”
“I’ve had lots of visitors lately. I just spoke to my daughter — she was on her way over but she had to go out of town.”
He nodded. “You take care now. I think they might be ready for my close-up. Or the dog’s, anyway.”
“Thank you again,” said the old woman as she went back in.
“You take care.”
She didn’t take the paper.
RAY was tuckered out when he got home. He went to see Ghulpa, but she clammed up. The cousins said she was crying all day. Back in the living room, he finally extracted the story.
Detective Lake had dropped off “a care package” that included a videotape of The Jungle Book with the actor Sabu. (A few weeks ago Staniel and Ray had talked about Rudyard Kipling, and how he was a mutual favorite.) The cousins watched the movie with Ghulpa, which turned out to be a big mistake. In the 1st half hour, a baby boy’s father was killed by the man-eating Bengal, the infant lost in the jungle and raised by wolves. 12 years later, the wild child stumbled into the village and was soon cornered. One of the villagers remembered the lost boy and suggested he was the tiger-abducted son of a woman who still lived there — he was — but the woman said no, that simply couldn’t be. Still, her heart went out and she invited him to stay with her until his “true mother” was found.
The cousins reported that BG had been quite disturbed by the production, to put it mildly, and had shrieked, even after the tape was ejected. It took Ray another half hour but he managed to get them to confide that Ghulpa had fallen into some kind of trance, interpreting the narrative as a horrible “prefiguration,” a foretelling that the old man wouldn’t live long enough to see the birth of their son — and that the boy himself was doomed to a peripatetic, troubled life. Ray couldn’t help but laugh. The whole thing reminded him of the movie they saw at the Bollyplex.
He went to the bedroom. For the 1st time, she let him rub her feet. He noticed that Ghulpa had taken her L O V E clock off the wall and put it on the nightstand, for comfort. The face of the “Super Time” formed the heart-shaped O in L O V E — the clock was actually a novelty invite she’d received for an NRI’s wedding (Non-Resident Indian) back in the days when she worked for Pradeep. It was her lucky charm.
“Why would he bring over such a terrible film?” she asked. “I thought he was a nice man.”
“Listen, Gulper, I hate to break it to you, but did you know there’s hardly any tigers left in India but in the zoos? They’ve all been poached.”
“I am not going to speak with you of tigers.”
“I went on the Google with Aradhana. Or whatever the hell they call it. There was a long article on how they searched the main park — now, I can’t remember where it was, honey, but Aradhana can tell you, it was a big, big park — and they searched it for 2 whole weeks and couldn’t find not a one. Evidently, the Chinese kill em and sell their body parts.”
Unsuccessful at having the effect he desired, Ray asked if she wanted some fruit or ice cream. BG was inconsolable — she wasn’t even interested in knowing about the Friar and his television debut. Hoping to distract her, the old man offered that everything had gone extremely well, and with the Dog Whisperer’s help (she wrinkled her nose at the appellation) “the 2 mutts” were on their way to becoming fast friends.
“You cannot whisper to Durga,” was all she said, with that eerie, bobbleheaded solemnity.
Ray let that one go. He did say that Cesar Millan’s wife was called Illusion, and if they had a girl, it might be a grand name. Ghulpa muttered “Maya,” and Ray wasn’t sure if she was using a Bengali word to rebuff him. Seeing his confusion, she repeated it, Maya, informing him that it was a name, and while it sounded South American to Ray’s ears, he thought it pretty as can be. He was surprised she even allowed him to entertain the idea of having a daughter.
But maybe she meant “ma,” which is what the cousins called each other. Everyone — every girl — was “ma,” even babies.
LXIII.Chester
MAURIE was transferred to St John’s.
His mother was dead and his father somewhere in Oregon. The sister, Edith, flew in from Milwaukee, but said she couldn’t stay very long.
Laxmi bunked at Chester’s. The 1st week after Maurie’s return from the desert (by ambulance), they lived like people who’d lost everything in a storm or a fire. The apartment was untidy. It was as if they had the same terrible flu. She often dissolved into tears, without warning. Chess was in a world of shock but couldn’t share the deeper source of his panic.
During visiting hours, he held his paralyzed friend’s hand and prayed, observing his own emotions with a new and special kind of agony, both exquisite and excruciating. A part of him hoped Maurie would die; a part was filled with self-loathing for allowing that thought. A part of him prayed with vehemence that Maurie was at least incognizant of what had befallen him; a part, with the nonhuman stinging energy of a hornet or wasp, dared insist the Jew deserved everything he got, but then the cycle of self-loathing started anew — like being tortured on the wheel or the rack — each and every siege causing Chess more psychic damage. (A damage that felt real-time and intensely chemical.) Again and again he thought of turning himself in but what good would that do, if Maurie wasn’t going to recover? What good would it do if Maurie did recover? He willed his friend to “snap out of it.” He willed himself to snap out of it: for the onerous trampoline of reality to bend and warp and spit them up, fluttering the pair down in some other place and time. The doctors refused to give out information because they weren’t family, so Laxmi and Chester had to rely on the sister, who wasn’t the communicative type, and regarded them with thinly veiled scorn and suspicion. None of her reports sounded good. I am a murderer, thought Chess. No: I’ve consigned him — and myself—to a fate worse than death. A double murderer. He wondered if he should make “bedside confession” but immediately rescinded the thought as self-serving and possibly sadistic because of the very real chance that Maurie Levin could understand everything being said all around him, and was, in fact, completely sentient — yeah, probably exactly the case, because Chester’s karma (Maurie’s too, right?) was and had always been so fucked.
This isn’t about me.
When not obsessing, he monitored his own neuroskeletal pain, the scale of which seemed absurd next to anything Maurie was going through, but still, it was there, it was authentic, and this man, afterall, had caused it. No way around that one. What if he, Chester Herlihy, needed surgery related to the FNF fiasco, what if something went wrong with the anesthesia or scalpels and Chess wound up in the same condition? He knew it sounded like an elaborate justification yet what if what had happened to Maurie was a macabre preamble to the very fate that awaited him? Maybe Maurie was a kind of burnt offering. He would be damned if he’d let someone put him under, slit his flesh open with a rongeur, and remove the soft discs between bony vertebrae before fusing everything together courtesy of a titanium cage. Fuck that.