Songs of the Dead (22 page)

She smiled the smile of someone doing a check raise in poker, and said, “At least in this country, the rod of Hermes is commonly mistaken for the rod of Asclepius, the Greek god of healing and medicine (and of healing dreams). Asclepius's wand isn't winged, and has only one serpent, but most people don't know that. It's entered our consciousness enough, I think, for it to become a symbol.”

What she said made sense.

She continued, “In the Hermetic tradition, the caduceus is a symbol of spiritual awakening. It's also a symbol in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and India, where it's
always
a symbol of harmony and balance.”

“So what does all this mean?”

“Don't ask me,” she said. “Ask the snakes.”

I did. I still didn't get anything. Maybe I just don't yet know how to listen.

sixteen

colleen

Jack Shoemaker has a wife. Her name is Colleen. She often visits her parents, the Mondors, in Boise. Jack never brings home women unless Colleen is away. And she is away, so Jack is bringing one home. Her name, she said, is Missy. She has hair all the way down her back. Jack hit her too hard. She is bleeding too much. Not enough to kill her, but enough to make Jack uncomfortable.

That's not all Jack has to worry about. He's been wondering if Colleen has a boyfriend. What would this be: the twenty-five year itch? His suspicions are based on nothing dramatic, but instead an accretion of many subtle things: a look away at the dinner table; her habit of carrying packages or her purse on the side closest to him as they walk, as though she were trying to keep a barrier between them. While it used to be that on the nights they scheduled sex she would come to bed without any clothes, she now keeps on her nightgown until he asks her to remove it. And when he does enter her, she no longer opens her legs. She says it's because it feels better this way, but he knows that's not it.

He's never told Colleen about the women. He doesn't think she would understand. If he thought she would understand he would tell her. He's not ashamed of it. He's not ashamed of anything. It's just there are many things she wouldn't understand, and this is one of them.

Jack stops at a light. He glances at the interior rearview mirror just to make sure Missy hasn't awakened, struggled free, and sat up. Not likely, but better safe than sorry. He sees nothing unexpected.

The light turns green. He accelerates.

He's still thinking about Colleen as he hits the garage door opener and turns into his driveway. He waits for the door to come to a stop, then pulls inside. He pictures her with someone else, pictures her talking, laughing, holding him, and has to hit the brakes hard when he notices he drifted too far into the garage. He considers backing up, but doesn't, since this just means he has to carry Missy's body that much less. He hits the opener again, waits for the door to close. He gets out, walks to the back, opens the shell and tailgate. Missy still sleeps. She still seeps blood. Her long hair hangs outside the tarp.

Jack hesitates. He wonders how Colleen met this man, wonders who he is. He wonders what the man does for a living. He mostly wonders what he—Jack—would do, and how he would survive, if Colleen left him. He doesn't like to think about how very much he needs her, how much he relies on her.

He reaches in, slides the tarp toward himself, picks up its contents to carry inside.

He doesn't know why Colleen would want someone else. Jack gives her everything she needs. Security, stability. When she asks, “Will you be with me forever?” he always answers, “Till the day I die.” And he means it. He will never leave. He could never leave.

Jack prides himself on his reliability, his solidity. He prides himself on being supportive. He bought this house for her. He buys her a new car every other year. He never makes her account for the money he gives her. She has no reason to leave.

Jack approaches the door between the garage and the house. It's shut. Normally he leaves this door slightly open when he goes on these trips—odd language, but what else should he call them: hunting? gathering? collecting? He likes
collecting
best: collecting data. But this time he forgot to keep the door open. He shakes his head. All this worry about Colleen has made him sloppy. No matter, though. He shifts the woman's weight higher on his forearms, slides his left hand out to the doorknob, twists, and pushes open the door. As he passes through the doorway, Missy stirs and her head slides out of the tarp. He shifts her weight again. Her long hair sways.

Jack wonders what it will take to keep Colleen from leaving. He's not sure what more he can give, what more she could want.

The door to the basement is already open. The light over the stairs is on. He takes her down, unrolls the tarp, uncuffs her wrists and removes the duct tape holding her ankles, puts her on the table. He cuffs her. Then he picks up the scraps of tape, meticulously folds the tarp, pulls a chair up close to the table, sits, folds his arms across his chest, and waits for Missy to awaken from the tap on the head and from the ketamine.

Jack always likes to be there when the woman wakes up. It's only partly to see the look on her face as she realizes what has happened to her—and what will happen to her—to see her unmasked, then unmasked again and again as successive waves of understanding pass through her. It's more because he is so interested—literally captivated—by those moments of transition, by boundaries. Wakefulness and sleep. Consciousness and unconsciousness. Life and death. And certainly in this case, the transition from free to caged, at least slightly saved to almost certainly doomed. There is tremendous power in all those moments.

Less personal transitions captivate him as well. The transitions, for example, from day to night and night to day. Dusk and dawn are times of great spiritual meaning. Or the moment when water freezes, or when it thaws. If you look under a microscope, you can actually watch water crystallize. Even though these liquids and solids are very near in temperature, they are worlds apart in form. Yet there is that moment—that precise moment—when those worlds join. That's the moment that captivates him. The same is true for combustion. One moment at one temperature the paper is white and smooth, but increase the temperature slightly and the paper browns and curls. Increase it again and flames appear as if from nowhere—or not
as if
, but actually
from
nowhere, unless of course the flames
were
somewhere else waiting for conditions to appear here that would call them into this world. But it doesn't really matter whether the flames are formed in that moment or whether they seize that moment to push their way past boundaries keeping them out of this world: the point is that those moments of initial conflagration are always times of unimaginable import.

And there are the boundaries between a person and the world. So sharp. So clearly defined. Skin here, air there. Person here, no person there. Life here, no life there. That's one reason he stabs the women, one reason he often stabs them slowly: so he can see that point where the knife just begins to penetrate the skin, so he can clearly observe the breaking—the passing, the violation—of that boundary. There is great power in that moment—and at that physical junction—as well.

The boundary is what's important, and even more important is the breaching of that boundary. The
moment
of the breaching of that boundary. The
moment
of transition, from one state to another.

And so Jack will wait here to share—no, not share, but see— that moment of transition when Missy awakens not only from sleep, but to the knowledge that she will never leave this room. To see that realization enter her body—enter her body as surely as the knife that will, too, eventually find its way inside—is to witness—to cause, in this case—a breaking of a boundary that though emotional is just as real, just as detectable, just as penetrable, as skin.

Colleen is beginning the long drive home from her parents. She's on I-84. She left several days earlier than anticipated. Not because of her parents—she was actually having a decent time—but because of Jack. She wants to surprise him, to show him that she really does appreciate him, that she really does want him.

It's hard, mainly because she doesn't want him.

She doesn't know what's wrong with her, what has been wrong with her for a very long time, maybe forever.

She wouldn't say precisely that she has lost interest in Jack— by which she doesn't just mean sexually, although that was gone even long before they got married—but more that she has lost interest in everything. Even that, though, might not be precise: doesn't losing interest imply that you had it to begin with?

She remembers a conversation with her mother when she was about fifteen. She asked if it would be better to marry for love or money. Her mother said, “Security, because love doesn't last.” At the time she took that as an authoritative statement, rather than a comment on the relationship between her parents.

Colleen never had that choice. She doesn't think she's ever felt the depth of love she was taught—through books, movies, songs—was out there, the sort of love that would complete her, the sort of love that would transform her and her life into whatever it was that she and her life were supposed to be. Or perhaps she met the man and didn't know it. Or perhaps she'd just been lied to.

She followed her mother's advice. Jack was very secure. He was never rich, but rich enough. She has never wanted for things. But she soon learned—though she learned too late—that things don't fill gaping holes inside any better than do phantom—nonexistent—lovers. She has long suspected that there are no lovers who would suffice to fill those holes. She discovered far too late that if the path of true love completing her was a fairy tale, then the path of security was a waste of time.

She doesn't know when she first realized she was hollow. Was it in second grade, when she caught herself pretending not to know answers on tests so she wouldn't show up boys sitting next to her, or was it in fourth grade when she no longer noticed she was doing that? Was it in sixth grade, when she couldn't have outscored them if she tried? Maybe it was in high school, when a counselor asked her what she wanted in her life, and Colleen froze. The counselor said, “Look within,” but when she tried she found all those doors locked. She pried one open and peered inside. What she saw horrified her. She saw . . . nothing. She slammed the door, locked it, nailed it, and never looked back. Or tried not to.

Colleen no longer knows what it means to lie. If you have nothing inside, can anything you say really be considered a lie? By the same token, can anything you say really be considered the truth?

She still resents the fact that before they were married, Jack used to take her dancing. It ends up he never liked it. She didn't find that out till they were married. That's okay, though, because she never liked science, and never liked sex. She tried in both cases, but the passion never developed.

She loves her mother, but she resents her for the bad advice she gave, and she resents her mother and her father for not teaching her by example how to be anything but hollow. She doesn't think their own emptiness bothers them at all. Of course she can't remember the last time she saw her father smile—and his grins at football scores and jumps in the Dow Jones don't count.

A few years ago Colleen found an old photograph that perfectly portrays her mother. Colleen is maybe six years old in the photo. She is sitting on the floor wearing pajamas. It is Christmas. Her mother—auburn hair, slender, beautiful—is handing Colleen a gift, and smiling. But the smile is not just a smile. It is a desperate plea for her daughter to love her. And the gift is a prayer: if I give you this thing, will you love me? My prayer is that this thing is good enough to
make
you love me. The smile is a wide open window into nothingness.

Colleen is glad she is on the interstate. Sometimes on two-lane roads she has to fight hard not to steer into oncoming traffic. Sometimes she wants to drive over a cliff. Sometimes she thinks she already did, and she just doesn't know it yet.

She drives. She tries not to think. She wishes the question had never occurred to her, as she presumes it has never occurred to either Jack or her parents: “How did life turn out so bare?” It's almost as though she found the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and it turned out to be empty. Or maybe it was full, but she found you can't eat gold. Or maybe there had never been a pot, never even been a rainbow. Maybe all there ever was, was her and Jack and all their emptiness.

She knows what the problem is. She has never felt loved. Not by Jack. He tries. But she doesn't think he knows how. And she has never been able to teach him because she doesn't know how either.

Lately he's gotten into his head the idea that she's having an affair. If he thought clearly about it even for a second he would realize how silly that is. It's not just that she doesn't like sex with him. She doesn't like sex. And why would she want to try to start any sort of relationship—sexual or otherwise—with someone else? The thing Jack absolutely cannot understand is: she doesn't know how.

Colleen won't be back for several days. Jack is going to drag this out. Or he will if Missy ever wakes up. It's getting late, and he has sat here for hours. He's touched her a few times, poked at her, but she hasn't come to. Perhaps she is extra sensitive to the ketamine. That's one reason he prefers to stun the women and then drug them instead of merely knocking them out with the blackjack. One time he did hit a woman too hard, and she never woke.

Jack sits. He waits. He sits. He gets tired. He gets bored. Still he sits. His eyes start to lose focus. His face gets heavy. To wake himself he goes upstairs, into the garage, and shuts the truck's shell and tailgate. He comes back inside, closes the door to the garage, goes back downstairs to check on Missy one more time. Still out. He's going to bed. She'll still be here in the morning.