“And the gentleman?”
“He’ll have the same,” she said.
“Well?” Benek asked as the waiter took the menus and floated away.
“After we eat,” she said. “I’m dying of hunger and can’t think straight. You wouldn’t believe what I was thinking when I found you gone.”
“What were you thinking,” he said.
“That you’d be right back with a squad. Can you imagine what would have happened?”
Their salads came. She started in. He left his alone.
“Eat,” she said. “It’s expensive and good.”
“Yeah, I know,” he said. “I won’t be paying.”
“You’re not a gentleman,” she said. “We’ll go Dutch.”
“You pay it,” he said, “or we’ll both be washing dishes.”
She finished her salad and stared at him. “I’m not getting through to you, am I?”
“What are you trying to tell me?” he asked.
“Eat,” she said, and he noticed that she was thinner than he remembered.
He picked up his fork and took a bite of salad. She was looking around for the waiter. He caught her predatory scan, drifted over and filled their glasses with wine. She took a large gulp and set the
glass down clumsily.
“Soon?” she asked the waiter.
“About five minutes,” the man said and retreated as if he had lost a skirmish.
Benek took another bite of salad and pushed it away.
“You don’t want the rest,” she said, reached over and took his plate and continued with his salad.
The veal Parmigiana arrived, along with sides of pasta. Napkin-less, she started in, gulping more wine as she ate, and Benek felt ashamed of her; he was dining with a beast, eating in a way that he allowed himself only in private. He looked down at the plate she had ordered for him and felt ill; there had always been something about cheese that reminded him of rot.
“Well—eat,” she said through a happy mouthful.
“I’m not hungry,” he said.
Her eyes narrowed.
“Tell me what else you wanted to say,” he said.
Color was coming into her pale cheeks. She glanced at the next table, where the waiter was serving large plates of pasta. Another waiter was pouring red wine. An older gentleman was smiling at his youngish date, a redhead wearing a long, green dress with a bare back. Benek heard a clatter, and saw the woman’s face crash into her pasta plate. Both glasses of wine tipped over and a red stain was spreading across the white tablecloth around a lump in the center of the table. The older gentleman sat with his mouth open. Then he stood up and was motioning to the waiter. A woman screamed. “Is there a doctor in the house?” the old man asked loudly, and fell over.
Dierdre blinked and peered at her food. Her breath came quickly, Benek saw, and she closed her eyes, opened them, and he knew what she wanted him to think. A coincidence, he told himself, and she was making good use of it. She glared at him, perhaps frustrated by his unbelief.
Back at the next table, the waiter had lifted the woman’s head from her plate and was steadying her in her chair, but she would not stay up.
“See!” Dierdre hissed at him. “No one can see, no one can tell. Even you doubt that lump on the table. Do you think it’s bread?”
She closed her eyes, her face twitched, and the waiter collapsed next to the woman’s chair.
“You’re next,” she said softly, squinting at him as she licked her lips.
The trick had to fail at some point, he told himself. How many confederates did she have in the room to make him believe? What kind of fool did she take him for? What kind of fool would he have to be to be convinced that this was all happening?
Dierdre looked around the room. Two women and one man were getting up to leave. The man stopped suddenly, and sat down onto a bloody mass at his feet. The two women screamed and fled toward the exit.
Benek looked at Dierdre. Her eyes were closed. She was swaying in her chair. Her eyes opened and fluttered, and she tried to speak—
—and his body knew that it had to leave while she was in a weakened state, that she had lured his doubting brain here to die. She could do what she claimed, what he had seen her do in the basement, even as his reason denied it. He sat unmoving in his chair, as if all his voluntary motor connections had been severed.
“You’re useless to me,” she muttered.
Could he persuade her to stop? The impossible was all around him. People were shouting now, getting up to leave, as they became aware of the bloody masses on the floor.
“Useless...” Dierdre mumbled in her chair. “Can’t believe the eyes in his own head.”
He wanted his gun, which he tried not to carry. Could he strangle her in time? Melt her with a bucket of acid? “Bash her head in with a two-by-four,” his father’s voice said. “That’s what they all need.” Shoot her in the back of the head, he told himself. “You’re not mean enough to do that,” his mother whispered to him. “That’s why you didn’t bring your gun.” “Fuck’m and run,” his father said, “unless you want more mother-lovin’ sons like you’ve become. That’s why you’re here! That’s why she pulled you in. What she really wants are daughters. More of the same. Sure, they’re all witches. Look what they did to me!” “You did it to yourself, Pop,” he had said. “Don’t believe it, son. I had help. Believe me, I had help getting this way.”
Dierdre opened her eyes and looked at him. Benek watched her, expecting the darkness. She held his gaze, then blinked, and he realized that she was too weak, that she should have eaten earlier. A good breakfast would have seen her through.
Leave now, he told himself, before the food kicks in. He glanced over at the bloody lump on the next table. It was not bread.
She seemed to be asleep, but her eyes fluttered open and found him. He stood up on wobbly knees, realizing that he was still weak from his bedridden confinement. Wrestling with the brass bars had left aches in his shoulders and back, strange twinges in the joints of his fingers, and shooting pains in his elbows.
The restaurant was emptying. The manager had come out, looking confused and unable to see what was happening to cause all the shouting. Benek was about to go over to him, but Dierdre came wide awake and stood up, and he knew that he had only a moment left to flee. Even if the debate was not over, he could not afford to chance staying.
He felt a strange tingling on the back of his neck. Ahead of him, one of the hostesses collapsed and her brains smeared the pink wall behind her. Dierdre was reaching out to him, probing him. He stumbled out the door into the street.
He staggered down the street, glancing back, expecting to see her, then ran for the corner, crossed and kept on, telling himself that the fear pushing him had an impossible cause, that Dierdre had never existed, that the city had flipped over into its long threatening strangeness and become a mill readying to churn out monsters like Dierdre.
He hurried—and glanced back just as she came out of the restaurant with a crowd of people, stopped, and looked after him. He could not see her face in the dim light, and told himself that as long as their eyes failed to meet he would be safe within his skull.
13
Dierdre went back to her apartment and sat waiting in the living room, on the same large sofa upholstered in a fabric of yellow wildflowers to which she had retreated as a neglected child. She sat with her legs tucked under her, feeling invisible and safe within herself.
She still feared the strength she had discovered within herself on that morning two years ago, when she had awakened between cold sheets to see her lover’s brains lying like a monstrous red flower on the snowy cotton pillow.
At first she had not connected the warm bleeding mass with his body, remembering only that she had fallen asleep, exhausted after their lovemaking, thinking when she awoke that it was some kind of joke on Ricardo’s part—except that he rarely showed any sense of humor. He lay rigidly on his back, his eyes open to some fatal horror beyond the ceiling, his ears plugged with drying blood.
Her cat Atalanta had crept into the bedroom and begun sniffing around the blood-soaked bed. Dierdre had rolled off the bed and crawled to cower in the armchair across the room, shaking and still hoping to wake up from the nightmare. She had watched the feline’s explorations, sharing the animal’s sense of danger and confusion. Someone had done this to Ricardo, an enemy in his business, who might still be lurking nearby.
Then, when Atalanta started to lick the mess on the pillow, an uncontrollable fury erased the shock of Ricardo’s death, and she plucked the cat’s brain from its body, dropping the animal to its belly on the bed as its organ struck the headboard, stuck for a moment and then rolled down next to Ricardo’s brains.
Even then, staring at it, Dierdre had resisted the reality, unable to accept that she had somehow caused the event. Stunned, slowly realizing that she had somehow killed Ricardo in her dreams, she had dragged his body down into the second level cellar under the building, where a few of the rooms still had earthen floors, and buried him along with Atalanta in the same grave. She had thrown their brains into the oil furnace, where the organs had hissed for a few moments and she had feared that the burner might be damaged by the heat surge.
She had cried for Atalanta, demanding her return. If she had one unreasonable power, Dierdre had told herself, then raising a dead cat might not be impossible. She had chanted her plea to the nameless devils beyond her sight, but nothing had answered her, and she knew that nothing ever would.
Ricardo, a small-time money collector and enforcer from Avenue D, had been her lover for only a month, and she would not miss him as much as she would Atalanta. She had gone to bed with him partly because he had extorted protection money from her, freelancing, she had learned, rather than for his bosses; but mostly she had accepted him because his toughness had aroused her. She had also gained some protection. He had a wife and small child, with another on the way, and so was vulnerable to exposure, but he seemed unconcerned as long as he could have her on some regular basis, and said that he would make up his lost earnings elsewhere. His disappearance seemed to have silenced his masters. No one had come looking for him after his disappearance, but she knew what she would do if they tried to resume his collections from her. The alley tomcat who had come yowling for Atalanta she had silenced by splattering his brains against the tall fence in the backyard. The dark blotch was still there, and no one would notice or ever guess what had made it, or even wonder about it. Ricardo and the tomcat had been alike in some ways, independent but serving her needs.
Now, as she looked over her shoulder and down into the yard where she had played as a girl, she remembered how tall the wooden fences had seemed, rattling when she tried to climb them. She had cried with glee when her hands had slipped, bringing a rush of excitement as her feet hit the paving. Once in a while someone had thrown down hot dishwater and screamed for her to be quiet. Steam would rise from the wet slate, carrying with it a dusty smell. Her earliest memory was of being angry at people and wishing them dead.
It became her game to catch the screamer who lived on the top floor of her family’s building by calling up to her, to fool the old woman into leaning out far enough to fall out. But she never looked out, and had sometimes thrown out smelly old soup and bones.
Dierdre had become a fortress of helpless rage and sudden fevers as her family and their friends forced her to do their will—compelling her to go with them to the park, the beach, the movies, and to concerts that she was told were good for her, without ever asking if she was interested or wanted to go, with no regard for her
separateness
from them. She was their property, to do with as they pleased, no more apart from them than their hands or eyes. It had become an intolerable tyranny, with no way for her to strike back, much less topple it. She had even enjoyed some of the outings, but not being forced to go.
Why did there have to be other people at all? She was a world unto itself, and could imagine the others better than the realities they seemed to hold so dear. Perhaps they did not exist, except for the fact that they fought her. Alone, she would not have warred with herself.
“Why don’t you ask me what I want!” she had shouted.