Pharmakon (34 page)

None of it made any sense to me. If they waited until I was four and a half to tell me I had a brother who’d drowned in a birdbath, waited until I was seven to let me know there was a killer after us, what else hadn’t they told me? If I couldn’t trust my parents or Fiona or Willy or even Lucy (who liked me enough to share her last Tootsie Roll with me, even when she had to take it out of her mouth to do it) to tell me the truth, who could I trust? Lazlo? Sure, he came to my birthdays, gave me cool presents, but he hadn’t warned me. If I knew someone wanted to hurt Lazlo, if his name was on a death list, I’d have told him. My seven-year-old mind boggled at the deception of life.

As Willy and Lucy fought over command of the electric windows, I turned around in the backseat and stared out the rear window, looking for Casper.

We got to New York just in time to see the city get out of work: 5:05
P.M.
, and suddenly they scurried and ran and tripped and bolted out of office buildings and skyscrapers, hitting the summer streets in a frenzy, as if they had just been sprung from a giant trap. I don’t know how the others saw it that day, but it made me think of a nature show on TV called
Wild Kingdom,
hosted by Marlin Perkins. Anyway, he was always catching wild animals in the wilderness only to put metal bracelets on their paws or radio collars around their necks, so that when they were set free, they’d think they were free, but really weren’t.

The sidewalks were a grim, haphazard migration. I’d never known there were so many different kinds of people in the world. Only when I looked at them all at once, they didn’t seem like people. The way they pushed and jostled each other, some running for cabs, others charging, heads bowed, toward the subway, some thundering east, others stampeding west, all anxious in their hurrying, as if they were being stalked by a predator they could smell but not identify.

It made me lonely to think of people like wildebeests. So I tried to concentrate on faces, pick out individuals to focus on who were heading in our direction as the limousine inched its way east, crosstown on Forty-second Street. The trouble was, when I looked at them one at a time, people looked even more like animals. A little woman in a blue-and-white polka-dotted suit clutched her pocketbook to her breast with both hands and darted through the crowd like a mouse who feared she might be mistaken for a piece of cheese. A tall woman made taller by a blond beehive and high heels bounded into traffic to escape in a taxi like an albino gazelle. A lion with a briefcase, a jackal sipping a paper-bagged beer waited for his moment in the cool shadow of a marquee.

Not wanting to be any more scared of the migration we were on than I already was, I made myself stop thinking of a wild kingdom and concentrated on the familiar—a businessman whose seersucker suit rumpled just like my dad’s, a mother with four children had the same distracted smile my mother wore when she couldn’t hold everyone’s hand in a crowd—yes, they looked normal, safe and human. But so had Casper.

The scariest thing of all about this first inkling of the wild wideness of the world around me was that none of the people I was watching had any idea I was thinking about them. And because they didn’t know I was alive, they would not know I was dead. Unless they read about it in the papers. Which made me think of Casper again.

I’d been quiet for a long time. Lazlo asked me to push in the lighter and inquired, not unlike my father would have, “What are you thinking about, Zach?”

“Our dogs.” Fiona was reading
The Scarlet Letter.
Lucy sat in the jump seat and leaned through the divider and made small talk about Yugoslavia with the bodyguard who looked like Bill Holden. Willy was eating Oreos.

“What about them?”

“Who’s taking care of them?”

“Your father checked them into a pet motel . . . what do you call it . . . ?” Lazlo inhaled a filterless Lucky and searched for the word “kennel.” Suddenly his nostrils flared so wide you could see the hairs in his nose. “
Scheisse,
what is that stink?”

Lucy interrupted her conversation with Stane (that was the Yugo Bill Holden’s name) long enough to bellow, “Jeez Louise, Willy, put your sneakers back on.”

“I can’t help it, I have athlete’s foot.”

Fiona punctuated the command by smacking Willy on the back of the head with the flat of her book.

Lazlo sniffed the air and grimaced. “No athlete’s foot smells that foul. Is like the shit of a dog that eats cat shit.” Everybody thought that was a scream. It had been a long drive.

“What’s
scheisse
mean?” I asked.

“How you say ‘shit’ in German.”

“How do you say ‘shit’ in Yugoslavian, Stane?” If my parents had been in the car, they would have stopped the limousine to wash Lucy’s mouth out with soap.

“No such language. In Serb, ‘shit’ is
govno.
” Suddenly, even though we were being chased, we felt free.

“Or
sranje,
which is a dirtier kind of shit.” The way Slavo said it, you could almost smell it.

“In French, it’s
merde.
” Fiona thought it was juvenile to talk about shit, but she couldn’t resist an opportunity to flex her French.

“What’s it in Czech, Lazlo?”

“
Hovno.
The Hungarians have a wonderful word for it:
székés.
”

Willy rolled down the window. “Hey
hovno
-head! Go eat
székés
!” It actually was funny the way he said it. Everybody laughed. Willy could be a real card. And so, as we made our way downtown through the canyons of the city, Lazlo taught us how to say “shit” in every language of the free world.

Home for Lazlo was a townhouse on Horatio Street in the heart of Greenwich Village. He had four floors all to himself. From the outside, I expected something ye olde, but when Lazlo opened the door, it was like stepping into the Jetsons’ living room.

The staircase was just boards sticking out of a wall. And all the furniture was curvy and backless and shaped like amoebas, and there was a see-through, kidney-shaped bar that made the bottles and glasses look like they were floating in midair. And everything was white, even the floors. And instead of rugs, there were zebra skins. And coolest of all to a seven-year-old who had no idea Lazlo had stolen the aesthetic from Hugh Hefner, there was a remote-control panel built into the coffee table that, at the push of a button, lowered the shades, dimmed the lights, and made the stereo play Frank Sinatra, “Life’s a wonderful thing, as long as I hold the string.”

In short, it was the most ill-designed house possible for children. Without my parents there, I was free to spin myself around on the bar stools and run up and down the railingless stairs without my mother tripping up my enthusiasm by shouting, “Stop that before you fall and break your neck.” Which was always the surest way to make me fall.

“Does everybody in New York live like this?” I was trying out a chair that looked like a giant egg.

“Just short, ugly men who want girls to like them.” Lazlo ordered Slavo to stand guard on the front steps. Stane took a bottle of Coca-Cola and his revolver out behind the house. We hadn’t forgotten about Casper; we just weren’t talking about him.

“Why do you want them to like you?” I asked.

“So they’ll . . .”—Lazlo was distracted. Willy had commandeered the control panel and was raising and lowering the shades in time to the music—“. . . do things for me.”

“Where’s your powder room, Lazlo?” Lucy was trying to sound grown-up for Stane, who winked at her as he took off his shirt.

“What sort of things?” I persisted.

Lazlo was regretting babysitting us even before Willy broke the remote control. “Make goulash.”

Stane thought that was hilarious. The lights were dimmed, the shades down, the ambience stuck on cocktail lounge.

“You’re not going to tell my dad I broke it, are you?”

“I am many things, but not a squealer.”

“What’s so funny about goulash?” I asked.

Fiona closed
The Scarlet Letter.
“It’s a metaphor for sex, Zach. Lazlo means that he does all this to get women to sleep with him.”

“A good goulash is much harder to obtain than sex. Twenty-seven kinds of paprika.”

I opened the bathroom door. Lucy held up her finger to her lips. She was stuffing toilet paper in her brassiere. “Sorry, Luce.” My sisters were acting very strangely.

Having broken the control panel, Willy announced he was hungry. Lazlo had more kinds of ice cream than Howard Johnson’s. A quart of chocolate chocolate chip in one hand, a fresh bag of Oreos in the other, Willy called out, “I got dibs on the color TV.” Lazlo pointed to the den at the top of the stairs, relieved to have made one of us happy.

Lucy emerged from the bathroom two cup sizes larger and joined Stane in the garden. “How many tattoos do you have?”

“Four that you can see.” Stane shrugged off the look Lazlo gave him.

Fiona had her own agenda. “I think I’ll go up to Bleecker Street and check out the guitar store.” She’d learned the expression from Maynard G. Krebs on
Dobie Gillis.
Fiona reached for her purse.

Lazlo took it out of her hand.

“What are you doing?”

“Tomorrow, maybe.”

“My parents said we could see the sights.”

“They meant you can see them later. Maybe, it depends.”

“My parents don’t lie.”

Lazlo was running out of patience. “Everybody lies.”

“My mother and father are not liars.” Suddenly, Fiona was crying.

“Fiona, give me break. You know why we’re here. You know what has to happen before we can go outside and have fun. Once they call me, I don’t give a shit what you do. As long as you don’t rat me out.”

Lucy called out from the garden, “Lazlo doesn’t mean they lie about important stuff.” Fiona was crying harder than ever. I’d never seen her cry like that. When she fell on her chin skating, she’d had to get eight stitches. She hadn’t shed a tear. But now she was bawling about Lazlo saying the obvious. I liked her more for crying, and yet I wanted to make her stop.

Fiona grabbed the telephone on a long cord and locked herself in the bathroom. I listened at the door. She called the hotel my parents were staying at in Philadelphia. They hadn’t checked in yet. Fiona left a message anyway. “Please tell them that one of their children has a problem.”

I waited until she’d hung up to tap on the door. “Fiona, let me in.”

“Use another bathroom.”

“I don’t need to pee, I need to tell you something.” She let me in. “It’s going to be okay.”

“That’s what you came in here to tell me?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re seven years old, what do you know about anything?”

There was only one thing I knew more about than any of them. “Casper told me so.”

“What did he say?”

“He said he’s not going to hurt anyone ever again.” He’d said nothing of the kind.

“Why didn’t you tell Dad that?”

“Casper said Mom and Dad would never believe him. He just escaped to check on us, to find out if we were happy.” Saying it out loud made me feel almost like it was true.

“What’d you tell him?”

“I said everything was great.”

Fiona blew her nose and put her arm around my shoulder. “So you lied.”

It was at that moment I began a lifelong bad habit of laughing at things that made me want to cry.

By the time Fiona and I came out of the bathroom, Lazlo had already sent Slavo out to the guitar shop, where he’d bought a Gibson six-string and a songbook that showed her all the chords, and she said “thank you” about a hundred times and began to practice “Wimoweh.” Already being able to play the piano, by the time Lazlo ordered in Chinese, she was strumming and changing chords and singing “In the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight” over and over again. And instead of chanting “Wimoweh,” we all chanted in unison, “Please shut up, please shut up, please shut up. Please shut up . . .”

Lucy was jealous of Fiona’s guitar and would have shown it if she hadn’t had Stane to play with. I watched them from the kitchen window after dinner. In broad daylight, Lucy looked older than fifteen. But with her brassiere stuffed with toilet paper, hair teased up, and face painted with the lipstick, eye shadow, and mascara my mother forbade her to wear back in Greenwood because my father said it made her look cheap, Lucy, in the moonlight of the city, suddenly looked to my seven-year-old eyes grown-up and expensive next to Stane, with his tattoos and broken English.

I got the idea that Lucy was trying to look older, but I didn’t understand why, if that was how she wanted to misrepresent herself, she was leaning close and talking to Stane in a breathless, little girl voice. “I’ve always wanted to go to Yugoslavia,” she proclaimed with childlike innocence.

“Why is that?”

“Because I’m a communist.” The only two places Lucy had told Lazlo she wanted to see in New York City were Saks Fifth Avenue and the Plaza Hotel.

“You don’t look like a communist.”

“My whole family are communists. Did you ever get to meet Marshal Tito?”

“How do you know about Tito?”

“Being a communist, I find him very attractive.”