The Captive Condition (20 page)

“I'm sure everyone is wondering to what great excesses of mental torture I'm going to subject you. Never fear. Today, I'll refrain from using academic jargon or delivering a long-winded lecture. But I would like to talk about the supernatural because I do believe quite strongly that there is a supernatural element at play in the process of creating a work of art. First, you'll forgive me if I profane a sacred symbol, but I am of the opinion that this sculpture of Shiva is a rather simple mnemonic device to aid the common people. It helps them grasp the awesome and incomprehensible power that revels in the total annihilation of a universe that has grown weary of its own folly. But the philosophers tell us that to plunge joyfully into the abyss, to celebrate and embrace the dance of death, is to act in accordance with one's true nature.
Tat tvam asi.
”

Religious icons, she argued, were too conventional, too
collective
in their character to properly convey a sense of the supernatural, the transcendental, that which was beyond all categories of thought. Only individual artistic genius could accomplish such a task, someone with the singular vision of, say, Caravaggio with his fondness, or perhaps fetish, for severed heads—John the Baptist, Holofernes, Medusa, Goliath—and as the hour drew to a close, Marianne Kingsley showed her students a series of gruesome paintings. The Gonk found the image of Goliath, with his gaping mouth and mop of wild black hair, not only intriguing but unnervingly familiar, almost like gazing into a mirror. The great Philistine warrior stared into the void beyond the frame, a pale specter whose malevolent eyes drifted in different directions, his expression one of insanity, confusion, unutterable misery.

At the goriness of these images, Mrs. Kingsley sighed as though in the throes of an ecstatic trance. “Caravaggio created canvases of startling originality,” she said, “each one a chronicle of private mythologies and collective anxieties. He always insisted that the greatest human potential was not in the giving of oneself to another, but in one's willingness to participate fully in the game of life right up until the bitter, terrible, despicable end, the moment when one was forced to confront death and stare it directly in the eye, a strong and unfailing commitment, even at the final hour, to fully engage in this mysterious experience we call existence. And certainly Caravaggio met this challenge head-on, as it were.”

The Gonk, making frenzied sketches in his notebook, tried to tune out her bad puns and soporific droning, but Marianne Kingsley had a foolish tendency to creep up behind her students and whisper in their ears.

“Such sublime beauty, such irony,” she said to him, breathing warmly on his neck. “I've been quite impressed with your work for this class. Those steel fish you make, they're so—oh, how should I describe them?—so wonderfully, so scintillatingly
repulsive.
” She reached into her blouse and presented him with a card. “Here's something that may interest you. On New Year's Eve at Belleforest I'm hosting a retrospective on Colette Collins.”

The Gonk shoved the invitation into his pocket and fought the urge to bat her away like a fly. “I have plans that night,” he said, his face remaining imperturbable as a waxen mask. “Important plans that can't be changed.”

“I see. Well, in the unlikely event that your plans
do
change, please feel free to stop by the bistro for a cocktail. I think you would appreciate the artistic sensibilities of someone like Ms. Collins.”

The Gonk cracked his knuckles. “Maybe so.”

She touched his arm and moved on to the next student.

The Gonk chuckled quietly to himself. If only she knew what he had in mind for New Year's Eve, Marianne Kingsley would have revoked the invitation and recoiled in horror. He found this ironic since, strictly speaking, his vision was just as deeply religious as those depicted in the chiaroscuro light of Caravaggio's canvases, religious because of its epic violence and moral necessity and because it bestowed upon the true believer a sense of vindication.

Later that evening, as the cold winds picked up and the static clouds blanketed the autumn sky, the Gonk sat alone on his cottage porch. After finishing a second jar of moonshine, he gathered up his tools, and with a kerosene lamp swinging from his fingertips he descended the steps. He had to get cracking before winter arrived and the ground became iron hard.

In the field just beyond the cemetery, a pack of coyotes pushed through the broomstraw and peered through a curtain of grass blades, but they dared not venture any closer, maybe because they sensed something peculiar about the new caretaker, who, grappling with his unwieldy array of shovels and spades and hoes, looked not unlike that six-armed sculpture of Shiva with its ancient outlook on the rhythmic cycle of creation and destruction. The Gonk saluted them, and the coyotes pricked up their ears and bounded away. From the safety of the woods they observed him as he began to dig deep into the earth, and they howled their awful cadenzas of approval as he kicked away a few loose clods of dirt and endeavored to make the hole perfect in its proportions for what would prove to be the cemetery's most magnificent interment in more than a century.

The nights were much cooler now, the late October sky hardening into an impenetrable slab of steel, and as I walked to my car after working overtime, I lowered my head into a wicked wind that numbed my nose and cheeks. Around the empty parking lot the bare branches of the weather-whitened trees rattled together and cast idiot shadows across the dented hood of my silver sedan. Miserable with the knowledge that it would not survive a harsh winter and that soon I would need to find alternative forms of transportation, I climbed inside the car and went through my usual ritual: I whispered a prayer, pumped the accelerator three times, the magic number, and then with my eyes closed turned the key in the ignition. The battery cranked, the dying carburetor gurgled and wheezed. After two or three tries the engine rumbled loudly to life, but before I could put the car in drive and pull away, I heard a high-pitched squeaking sound. Worried the fan belt was slipping, I began calculating repair costs, but then in the rearview mirror I saw a bicycle flying under the malfunctioning gas lamps that flickered and blinked. The bike's rusty chain screamed against the gears, and the glimmering spokes ground up the brown leaves, scattering them in the rider's wide wake. I eased my foot down on the gas, and the sedan lurched forward.

I often observed Lorelei cruising around campus on that rattling whirligig with two wobbly wheels, and every time I saw her in the golden sunlight of an autumn day or under the long rags of purple clouds, I momentarily lost myself in an egregiously shameful fantasy. A lot of college girls were pretty, but Lorelei was a raving beauty, exquisitely designed, precisely built, and it was easy for me to understand why Morgan was so drawn to her. Instead of an ordinary townie, her body ruined by a steady diet of sugary soda and fast food, Lorelei was a daring succubus brought low by indigence and unyielding despair. Judging from the expression on her face, it wasn't difficult for me to imagine how she'd been mistreated over the years by friends and family alike and how in the years to come she expected to be mistreated by countless others, the betrayals, the broken promises, the abandonments she would later use to convince herself that she deserved such deplorable treatment. Ah, yes, Little Morty, he sure knew what he was doing when he hired her. Always on the lookout for young talent, he scoped out the campus for new inventory, a fresh batch of truly impressive specimens, freaks of nature really, gorgeous mutants with bodies for which men were willing to pay good money.

Imbued with the undying spirit of hope, I pulled alongside Lorelei and rolled down my window. “Excuse me, miss. Would you like a ride?”

Never taking her eyes from the street, she answered, “Thanks, I can manage.”

“Really, it's no trouble. I can fit your bike in the trunk.”

She peered through the window and regarded me with deep suspicion. “What the hell happened to your eye?”

The black patch and the gathering dusk did little to conceal my squashed and purple face. “Work-related injury,” I said.

“I thought I saw you mopping floors tonight. You have a job on campus, don't you?”

“That's right. I work at the Bloated, er, at the Department of Plant Operations.”

“Then you know him.”

“Know who?”

“The Gonk.”

I waved my hand and smiled. “Aw, sure, everyone knows the Gonk! Helluva guy, too. Do anything for you.” When I saw the alarm in her eyes, I quickly added, “But I used to be a student at the college. Actually, Professor Kingsley was my faculty adviser.”

Lorelei didn't seem to believe me and began to pedal faster.

I said, “Do you think someone in your condition should be riding a bicycle?” I thrust a hand outside the window and tried to grab her arm.

“Don't you touch me,” she said in a grating voice, her mouth drawn down in a rictus of anger. “Yeah, now I know who you are.”

I felt my stomach tighten.

“Morgan told you about me, didn't she?” I said. “Showed you some pictures, I bet. She still talks about me all the time, right? Well, I suppose that's only normal. She can be a little obsessive. But you're probably tired of hearing her stories.”

“Morgan?” Lorelei's laughter was cold and sunless. “I saw you at the cabaret. Another sexually repressed loser. A lonely little deviant, living all by yourself. I bet you want to screw every girl you see on campus, don't you? I bet you fantasize about it every night. You fantasize about me, about sticking it in my ass.” She cut across a pedestrian walkway, vanishing behind a cluster of buildings.

I gripped the steering wheel with both hands. I wasn't about to take that kind of shit, not from some hick, no way, no how. I smashed the gas pedal flat against the floor. The needle of the speedometer jumped wildly, the tires kicked up loose dirt and stone, but the car wheezed pitiably and jerked forward, dark and empty as a hearse. From the open window, with the wind roughly slapping my face, I shouted, “Come back! Do you hear me?”

For almost thirty minutes, I patrolled the campus. When I found no sign of her, I raced across the bridge and headed toward the square. With all of the potholes and large pools of standing water, the streets of the town had become a veritable obstacle course, and my car jounced and complained as I circled the dilapidated gazebo. From the marquee outside the cabaret, a thousand tons of neon light came crashing down like a rose-colored comet, and on the corner an army of restless, undead Don Juans shambled blind with drink on a quest to see a naked girl straddling the brass pole before last call, the cock's crow, when the law commanded them back to the crypt of their dismal trailers, studio apartments, dormitories.

Anderson Boulevard took me past the row houses, and still I did not see her. I drove beyond the town limits, and soon the scattered lights of the square blinked out one by one. Infuriated and disheartened, lost under the unfathomable logic of cold constellations that would never offer me any satisfactory answers to the impenetrable mysteries of the female heart, I turned down a dirt road that dipped and pitched and rose again past the low hills before it switchbacked along the forested ridge overlooking the wide rip of the valley. The clouds parted and a full moon crested the treetops, burning a huge hole in the sky and giving the needles of the swaying pines a dangerous and metallic glister. In the moonlight I searched for a lone bicyclist, but when the car took a plunge into the yawning darkness, I had to focus entirely on the road. After negotiating a series of sickening sharp turns, I was able to straighten out the wheel, and saw the reflection of nocturnal eyes glowing in a thicket of nettles. I drove another mile before I finally caught sight of Lorelei hovering above a perfectly smooth ground fog that came up to her knees and swallowed the tires of her bicycle. When she heard the belching engine and saw the high beams cutting through the mist, she glared at me and hissed like a teakettle. She no longer looked like a college student but an old woman with inscrutable eyes, dead and dusty as marbles. In the tall weeds near a creek, she ditched her bike and then melted away into the gloom.

“What the hell is this place?” I said, but when I saw those two iron gates I knew precisely where I was, and against my better judgment I stopped the car, killed the engine, and opened the door.

At night the sounds of the forest changed, and I noted how the pleasant daytime chirping of migratory warblers had been replaced by the distressed cries of a baby bird calling to its mother. A forked tongue of drifting mist, dull and slate gray, curled gently around my throat, and for the first time since coming to Normandy Falls I passed through those ominous gates and into a land that looked like a monument to death, a place of dark and draggling horrors thick with spirits, each with its own secret and malicious intentions.

Short grass, stiff with frost, crackled underfoot and then turned into a grasping autumn ooze. My boots, slathered with mud, broke through a thin scum of ice, and I hopped from one cracked paving stone to the next. Just ahead, no more than one hundred yards away, I could see the silhouette of what I remembered to be an abandoned barn. In the window near the peak a dark figure looked down at me.

I cupped my hands around my mouth and called into the night, “You should never have come back here, Lorelei! You should have taken Morgan up on her offer!”

As I waited for her response, for her
surrender,
I listened to the wind rumble through the long, narrow trench of the valley. And then I heard a loud explosion like the boom of a cannon. My days on the mean streets around the Jesuit school had given me some experience with the sounds of distant gunfire and of the bloody carnage that often followed, and in a panic I tried to turn around, but my rundown boot heels were fastened to the earth as though trapped in quicksand. I stumbled over a broad hummock and fell into the wet grass. There was another sharp crack, only this time I felt something go whistling by my ear. The thought of death wasn't an entirely unpleasant one, and maybe with luck a bullet to the brain would end a pathetic life characterized by disaffection, longing, and boredom. It would also silence forever the alluring voice that spoke to me whenever I was alone.