“Did you even look at her face?” Astor said. “When I described her, did she sound like she was six foot and blond with shoulders like something out of a fucking comic book?”
Jamie tried to stand up and Astor tapped his forehead with the rifle barrel. He slid back down into the loveseat. The two boys in the corner were shivering. Astor hadn’t raised his voice. The room was quiet. It was too cold for any birds to begin chirping at the sun outside.
“We went through all the stupid file cabinets and that’s what we found,” Al said. “And we found these kids too, and they were fucking everything up.”
“I asked you if you thought that was her,” Astor said. His teeth clicked together.
“It’s fucking her, all right. It’s Destinii,” Al said. “It’s the goddamn girl, all right? We found her. So give it up.”
This time the bullet didn’t ricochet. Jamie felt the air blast into his left eardrum as the slug burst from his father’s Remington and into the center of Al Vine’s face.
The back of Al’s head burst outward due to the incoming force of the lead and the imbalance of pressure within his forty-five-year-old skull. As it bored through bone, blood, and the soft tissues of his brain, Al Vine lost consciousness and the ability to feel that little cylinder of metal ripping open his skull, splattering his fine motor skills and spatial sense across his brother’s face.
Jamie wasn’t sure who started screaming first, but even with his eyes closed, he knew Astor Crane was the only one in the room smiling. Elvira’s screams were the loudest until she slammed the bathroom door behind her. There was a thud as the bowling ball hit the floor and Tommy grabbed his brother. He kept tugging on Al’s beard.
“It’s not her. You got that, Tommy?” Astor said. He kept his voice level. “Not her. That’s the wrong one, like usual. What do we do? Any ideas, Tommy? Any ideas, anyone?”
Tommy Vine could easily have plucked each limb off of Astor like chicken wings. He could have licked the bones and asked for seconds without even straining his gut. He didn’t, though. Tommy lay in the corner with his brother and kept slapping the corpse’s head. Al Vine did not respond. An artery between the two had been snipped, something no one else could see.
“I ask for one thing to get done and they can’t do it right,” Astor said. “You can’t trust the paperwork. Hospitals screw up all the time. Wrong photo with the wrong patient.
“I gave them a description. Short, dark hair. Lots of scars up and down her arms, and one fucking missing cheek. See her sometimes downtown, but she doesn’t recognize me. And they bring me some woman from the jungle who isn’t wearing any panties.”
Tommy Vine moaned by the door and began to bash his head against the wall.
“What is he doing?” Jamie said.
“Relax, Jamie. Just be glad you didn’t spend three years sitting alone with your brain in a hole. They say it hurts the smart ones worse, so maybe you woulda had nothing to worry about in solitary. Lose all ability to connect with that outside world. Only thing keeping each of them alive was the other.”
“Aren’t you going to stop him from doing that?” Jamie asked.
“One down, the other follows. Dominoes. They used to tap messages at each other through the walls. Apparently they had a very intricate language all their own.”
Tommy wound up his head and smashed it into the wallpaper. He left a bright rose behind on the wall before he wound up again and reapplied the pattern. Astor strutted over and poked at Tommy with his gun. The big bearded man was focused on the wall, didn’t acknowledge the barrel probing his ribs.
“And you’re just going to…”
“Oh, come on, no one heard it,” Astor said. “Even if they did, who’s going to say anything? I could rent out this whole place for the next year or so if I really wanted. But that would draw too much attention. Somebody dropped a case of beers, that’s what I’ll tell them. No one else is even on this floor. It’s the fucking honeymoon suite.”
Moses and B. Rex lay very still on the carpet. They were covered in specks of Al Vine.
“Remember when you were a kid?”
The rifle was poking at Jamie’s crotch now, sorting through the wet patch Jamie had created when the gun went off. Someone handed the scarecrow a brain in the blue glow of the screen.
“Everyone was a kid once. No one comes out of the womb smoking and cursing their mother. So you were a kid once. We all were, even that blubbering asshole over there.”
Jamie stared at Astor Crane’s heart-shaped slippers and tried to think of Kansas.
“I remember hearing some other kid crying. The kind of stuff that makes you want to look away or pretend it’s not happening,” Astor said. “The horrible deep-rooted kind of shit you see at really bad funerals for babies. Never go to those, by the way.
“So I’m maybe nine and I’m listening to this crying. And it fucking hurts me to hear that crying. It drives something inside me like a splinter right under the tip of a nail. And I can’t fish it out, stomp it out, chop it off. It’s inside me and it burns and I can’t do anything about it. What am I supposed to do? It makes you feel helpless. You are nothing in that moment. You are the speck in a world that fucking hurts. You are that speck, you understand?
“And I’m listening to this fucking kid wail his lungs out and I’m imagining what that feels like and I know that if I could take that pain away from him, I would. I would take it, and I would put it inside me, I would swallow it fucking whole and let him walk away from the whole thing unscathed. Un-fucking-touched. And now I don’t have that feeling anymore. You know that movie, the one I told you about? NeverEnding Story?”
“I don’t think I’ve seen it.” Jamie coughed. “I don’t really watch a lot of kids’ movies. Astor, you don’t need to — you could just let me and Elvira and whoever else leave.”
“No, you see the movie is kind of fucked for a kids’ movie. I mean, most kids’ movies are, when you get down to it, but in this one, the villain is just the Nothing. Nothing. Non-being. And so I was lying there watching this mystical shit, and I was thinking that’s where that feeling went. The Nothing has swallowed it all, but you can build it again, the fucking princess in the movie says. And I’m lying there with holes in my gut and too much opiate in my brain, and I want to burst, and I know where that feeling went. And I know I gotta remake it. Remake it like the stupid kid did in the movie.
“I was going to have a kid once, but I didn’t want one. Who wants a fucking kid? But maybe with a kid that is how it works, that is how you take that pain and swallow it and make it fucking new, because in fact you are so much bigger and so much stronger and you know what the world has in fucking store, and it’s nothing good. So, I don’t have that kid, but I could. And I got those idiots to go out looking for the mom-to-be.
“Her name was Destinii. Who the fuck names their kid that?” Astor said. “It wasn’t like she picked it. Her parents named her sisters Johanna and Rachel. I guess they got bored, that musta been the thing. Years ago we fucked, and boom. Pregnant. Scary shit. You know anything about that, Jamie? Get a girl pregnant? Fuckin’ end-of-the-world shit.”
“No…well, there was a scare one time,” Jamie said. “But no, I don’t really have any kids.”
“I did not want the baby. She fucked this Condom kid I had working for me, nothing major. I don’t even know if he could get it up, dumb as fuckin’ bricks, but loyal. And so I start saying, hey, maybe it’s his kid, maybe you should be with him.
“We get them a place, we get everything nice and cozy, but she doesn’t want to be with him. She wants me, and guess what? Next thing I know she’s bouncing down an escalator and loses half her face. They take her off to the asylum, and then boom, no more baby. And no more nothing. And I wasn’t happy like I thought I would be. You understand this?”