Fear itself: a novel (24 page)

The worst beating of Simon’s life begins then and there, as Nelson scrambles for his clothes and dashes out of the house half-naked, past an openmouthed Missy and a frowning Ganny Wilson. Not that old man Childs would dare lay a finger on
him
—
his
father’s a lawyer and none too fond of his neighbor. Nelson is barred from the premises forever, though, and Simon is forbidden to contact him—also forever.

Forever lasts two days, which is how long it takes for Simon to recover enough from the beating to be able to leave his bedroom. They meet in Nelson’s old tree house; Simon shows him his bruises and makes him swear an oath of revenge. It’s all very dramatic, but a little hard for Nelson to take seriously.

Not Simon, though: Simon is deadly serious—
and
he has a plan. Everybody has a weakness, he tells Nelson, a crack in their armor; everybody’s afraid of something. In the old man’s case, it’s fire: Grandfather Childs is deathly afraid of fire. They’ll have to be very, very patient, though, Simon informs him—they’ll have to wait two whole weeks, until Missy goes home with Ganny for her pre-Christmas sleepover.

Lying in the bathtub thirty-six years later, Nelson relives it one last time. He’s in his own bedroom, waiting for Simon’s call. He’s trying to study, but his eyes skim the print of his American history textbook uncomprehendingly. The phone rings; he snatches it up before his parents can answer. “Hurry up,” says Simon—that’s all, just the two words and the click of the receiver in Nelson’s ear.

The onset of Nelson’s acrophobia is still a few years off; he has no trouble climbing out his bedroom window, cutting through the backyard and across the patio to Simon, waiting at the back door.

“He’s in the shower,” Simon whispers urgently. Everything’s ready—they’ve dry-run it a dozen times in the last two weeks, when the house was empty. As they race through the kitchen, Simon grabs the box of safety matches from the drawer next to the stove; Nelson grabs the big turkey-roaster pan from the cabinet under the counter and the newspaper from the kitchen table, and races up the wide stairs after Simon, who’s already emerging from his room carrying his straight-backed metal desk chair. They hurry down the hall and through the open door of the master suite. The moment is electric; even Nelson is more excited than afraid as he helps Simon jam the chair under the knob of the bathroom door; on the other side of the door he can hear the shower running.

“Care to do the honors?” Simon whispers. Nelson shakes his head. Simon gives him a suit-yourself shrug and takes the newspaper from him, rolls it into a cone, lights it, and as it begins to catch, carries it over to the wall socket where Grandfather Childs’s prize Tiffany lamp is plugged in. After unplugging the lamp, scorching the plug, the wallpaper under the socket, and the socket itself, Simon retraces his steps, scorching the carpet until he reaches the bathroom door again. He holds the torch to the crack under the door until the fire threatens to burn his hand, then, with a conjuror’s flourish, drops the flaming
Chronicle
into the roasting pan.

And as the sound of the running water stops abruptly and the room begins to fill with smoke, Simon backs away to join Nelson over by the doorway. Together they watch, wide-eyed with excitement as the doorknob begins to turn as if by magic, then rattles frantically. A moment later—bam!—the door shudders, the chair wobbles. Bam, bam, bam again; Nelson pictures the old man throwing himself against it. A shiver of fear runs through him, but the door holds, the chair holds. Nelson can hear the old man screaming now:
eeee, eeee, eeee
—a high-pitched, keening sort of sound.

“Listen,” giggles Simon, putting his arm around Nelson’s waist, giving his love handle a little squeeze; “listen, he’s squealing like an old woman.”

“An old woman,” Nelson agrees. “C’mon, let’s—”

But before they can carry out the rest of the plan (ditch the ashes, put the matches, the baking pan, and the chair back where they belong, then take a powder before the old fart figures out the bathroom door is no longer mysteriously jammed; old fart, old lamp, old wiring, electric fire—hey, it happens, you know?), the door stops shuddering, the sound of the old-womanly keening dies away, and they hear a heavy, meaty thump, followed by a breathy, gasping gurgling, followed in turn by…

By nothing. By the soft crackling of the newspaper in the roasting pan. But from inside the bathroom, not another sound, until they are standing together in the bathroom doorway a few minutes later, looking down at a bald old man lying in a pool of blood, his throat cut from ear to ear, and a straight razor clutched in his lifeless hand, at which point Simon turns to Nelson, and in a voice filled more with awe than with fear, guilt, or rancor, says, “Sometimes you get lucky, Nellie—sometimes you just get lucky.” And sometimes you don’t. Something drags Nelson out of his hypnotic doze. Pain—it’s pain: his right leg, glued slightly higher to the side of the tub than the left, is beginning to work itself loose. He is encouraged briefly—then the pain begins to build. It’s a whole new order of misery, exfoliation by gravity, the fine hairs on the side of his calf being ripped out in agonizing slow-mo. He tenses the leg, holds it up against the pull of gravity for as long as he can, breathing shallowly through his nostrils. Eventually, though, the muscles tire, the leg sags, the torture begins again. Tears swim in his eyes, blurring the midnight blue wall tiles, but even the release of a good cry is denied to Nelson—if his nose stops up, he will surely suffocate.

Finally he can bear it no longer. Summoning all his courage, and the strength of despair, with one convulsive effort Nelson manages to yank the leg free of the porcelain, leaving a patch of hairy, bloody skin the approximate size and shape of a Dr. Scholl’s insert adhering to the inside of the tub. But the pain, at its flood stage, is worse than he could have imagined, and even after it begins to ebb, he knows he will never be able to summon either the courage or the strength to face it again.

And with the departure of that last, forlorn hope—that he might somehow be able to free himself, a limb at a time—comes a sudden clarity. But even though Nelson knows what comes next, the life force is still surprisingly strong within him—if it hadn’t been, he’d have ended his own life years ago, ended it a hundred times over. So as he uses his free heel to kick down the lever that closes the drain, then to nudge open first the right-hand tap, then the left, he tells himself he’s only running a bath. For the warmth. And maybe the water will melt the glue before…

The running water is the first sound Nelson has heard since Simon left, except, of course, for the high-pitched squeal of his own stifled screams. He closes his eyes. The water rises, rises; it covers his ears, muffling its own roar. It sounds like a distant cataract now, and Nelson is floating downstream toward it. It’s all very peaceful, in a hallucinatory sort of way, until the first trickle of water tickles his upper lip. He tries to raise his head, is almost surprised to find it held fast.

Not like this, he thinks. Death, yes: being dead meant you didn’t have to be afraid anymore. Funny that hadn’t occurred to him before. And drowning, sure: there was supposed to be some kind of reflex that kicked in after your lungs filled with water, that made it a much more peaceful way to go than most people thought. But not slowly, not like this, not a trickle at a time. Then the trickle becomes a steady flow, and the flow a warm, choking flood; Nelson flails wildly with his free foot, trying to find the taps again, trying to find the drain lever as the warm water begins to close over his head.

Say what you will about the inconvenience of being hunted for capital crimes, it not only kept the blind rat at bay almost as efficiently as the most elaborately planned session of the fear game, but was a liberating experience as well. There was no need for Simon to dispose of Zap Strum’s body, or even hide his own culpability—they could only execute you once, only incarcerate you for a single lifetime.

On the other hand, it was Simon’s understanding that every web site or e-mail address, every keystroke recently accessed on a computer, could somehow be recovered from the hard drive. Which meant that somewhere in this rat’s nest of a loft was information that could not only tell the cops (and when Simon thought of cops now, it was Pender’s face that came to mind) where Simon had been, but might also tip them off as to where he was heading.

“Can’t have that,” Simon explained to Zap, still slumped in his expensive chair, as he rolled the Aeron out from in front of the command post and tipped it forward to empty it. The dreadlocked corpse hit the floor with a meaty, tumbling thud—a gratuitous discourtesy on Simon’s part, as it turned out, the blood-soaked seat back and cushion rendering the chair unsittable.

Undeterred, Simon dragged the saddle-shaped leather foot-stool over to the desk, straddled it, and began tapping the keyboard randomly—he assumed Zap’s own system had a poison pill or fail-safe device similar to the one Zap had installed on Simon’s. Sure enough, the screensaver—a blond woman with breasts larger than her head, performing an endless striptease—fragmented into hundreds of tiny ASCII characters; a few seconds later the screen went dark.

Just to be on the safe side, though, Simon decided to go lowtech for backup. He ducked under the desk, unplugged the CPU box from the surge protector, and proceeded to dismantle, not just that CPU, but every computer and Zip drive in the apartment, then take a ball peen hammer to every silvery disk he found. There was also a small box of floppy disks—these he incinerated in Zap’s toaster oven, along with a videocassette he’d ejected from a deck that looked as if it might be connected to the security camera monitoring the vestibule.

Fifteen minutes later, just as the first wisps of oily, pungent, probably toxic, black smoke had begun to issue from the counter-top oven, Simon located Zap’s stash in a false-front bookcase, behind a dummy set of vintage
Encyclopaedia Britannica
s. “Mercy buckets, dude,” he muttered, as he stuffed a few prebagged ounces of sinsemilla into his satchel, along with an eclectic, rainbow assortment of uppers, downers, and the milder psychedelics he preferred.

Then, after a short wait in the downstairs vestibule until the sidewalk was clear, it was sayonara Zap, sayonara SoMa, and sayonara San Francisco as Simon, his getaway satchel bulging with cash, drugs, and most important, the Pender printout, pointed Nelson’s Volvo toward the shadowy lower deck of the Bay Bridge, in the direction of Concord, sanctuary, and one final reunion with a bathtub-bound childhood friend—his last surviving friend, it occurred to Simon.

It was a bittersweet realization, a little sad, a little lonely, and as intensely liberating as being hunted for murder. With Missy and Ganny gone, once Nelson was out of the way, Simon would be alone on this earth. Except, of course, for the old woman in Atlantic City who called herself Rosie Delamour, but she didn’t really count. Screw her and the horse she rode out on, was Simon’s motto.

But even thinking about
her
could degrade a bittersweet mood down to just plain bitter. And bitter was no way to be when you were about to bid farewell to your oldest friend, thought Simon as he pulled into Nelson’s driveway and used the remote clipped to the Volvo’s sun visor to open the garage door, then close it behind him.

Inside the garage, all was peaceful again—at least after Simon had treated himself to a few tokes of Zap Strum’s finest. Dim gray light, smell of old oil stains and cement dust; the only sounds were the hum of the water heater inside its cozy blanket of insulation and the distant, homey gurgle of water through overhead pipes, which reminded Simon of Missy and her endless bath. A little catch of a sob caught in his throat, even as the memory brought a smile: the bittersweet feeling was back.

Not for long, though. As he let himself into the house, it suddenly dawned on Simon that there shouldn’t have been any water-heater hum or homey gurgle in the pipes—there shouldn’t have been any water running anywhere in that house, unless a pipe had burst or Nelson had somehow—

But no, that was impossible. Had to be a pipe, he thought, stepping back as a drop of water fell past him and hit the already saturated hall carpet with a fat plop, then looking up to see the dark, continent-shaped water stain spreading across the underside of the ceiling, a nipple-shaped drop gathering at its center. Simon hurried down the hall into the living room, saw that the flood in the hallway was relatively minor compared to the cataract sluicing down the narrow enclosed stairway from the second-floor landing, as if the staircase were a salmon ladder cut into the side of a dam. He splashed up the stairs two at a time, careened around the corner, raced through Nelson’s bedroom, and skidded to a halt at the bathroom door, the heels of the hard-soled black loafers he’d borrowed from Nelson that morning kicking up tiny rooster tails in his wake.

And although Simon had not knowingly been afraid of water since Grandfather Childs had cured him of his fear of drowning nearly half a century ago, he found himself frozen in the doorway, unable to move, watching helplessly as the torrent poured full-throated from the tap, noisily churning the surface of the bath and overflowing the side of the tub like a miniature Niagara. All he could see of Nelson were a few strands of blond hair waving like tendrils of seaweed in the roiling water.

“Coward,” he screamed, as much at himself as at Nelson; Simon could forgive himself anything except cowardice. “You yellow coward.” The shoes were soaked, his feet wet to the ankle, but the phobia had him in its grip, and he knew that until he had mastered it again, he would be unable to either retreat or advance.

You can do it, he told himself. You’ve done harder things than this in your lifetime; you’ve overcome more than this. You can do it, you can do it, you can do it. And if he concentrated, if he listened hard, in the human-voiced burble of the running water he could hear Missy singing to encourage him, singing that song she sometimes sang to encourage herself:
“Cinderelly, Cinderelly, you can do it, Cinderelly.”