The Devil's Alphabet (9 page)

“Oh! Here we go,” the district attorney said. “Yes, ‘killed herself.’ Exact words.” He pushed the sheet across the table.

“What kind of operation did she have?” Rhonda asked the sheriff.

Deke looked at the mayor. She wore a concerned expression that was very convincing.

“Uh, female problems,” Roy said. “A hysterectomy.”

“I see,” Rhonda said.

Deke glanced at the reverend, then back to Rhonda. Both these women knew that Jo had had an abortion a month before the hysterectomy, and Dr. Fraelich had helped with both procedures. Rhonda was fishing to find out what Fraelich had told the police.

The sheriff said, “Hormonal adjustment is how the doctor put it. She said it was perfectly normal in women to experience periods of depression after the operation.”

Deke said, “She’d stopped taking those pills months ago.”

“You know this for a fact?” the sheriff said.

“Maybe that was the problem: She’d stopped taking them,” Downer said. “Anyway, we’ll have the drug report this week and we’ll know if there was anything in her system.”

The sheriff said, “We know she was distraught. Her daughters said she’d been upset that night. Crying and whatnot.”

“Upset about what?” the reverend asked.

“They didn’t know.”

Downer said, “I got the impression it was just general weeping. Something she did a lot, evidently. If these kinds of hormonal problems affect menopausal women, who knows what affect it would have on a, a woman in Ms. Whitehall’s condition?”

The reverend leaned back in her chair. “What condition would that be?”

“I think he means the beta condition,” Rhonda said.

“No!” Downer said. “I didn’t mean to imply anything of the sort. It’s just, I mean, even normal women—”

Rhonda raised her black-penciled eyebrows. “Yes, Roy?”

The DA stopped himself before he began sputtering. He’d learned at least one thing since the Sherilyn Manus case, then.

“I think we’re done here,” he said. “If we learn anything new, of course we’ll call you.” He started closing down the laptop. The sheriff stood, hands at his sides.

The reverend said, “The ruling, then, is that this was a suicide?”

“That’s what the coroner’s report says,” Downer said. “I can’t see any reason to overrule it.”

“What about the note?” Deke asked.

“Pardon?” Downer said.

“If it was a suicide, you’d think there’d be a note.”

“Not always,” the sheriff said. “Sometimes it’s impulsive.”

“Did you check her laptop?” Deke asked.

Downer looked up. “The laptop … yes.” He looked at the sheriff.

“We don’t have a computer listed on the report,” the cop said. “And I didn’t see one.”

“It was a Mac,” Deke said. “A little white one with a fish bumper sticker on it. She used it all the time.”

“It’s probably in the house, then. Of course we’ll look at it.”

As they left the conference room Rhonda took his arm and let the reverend walk out ahead of them.

“What’s that look about?” she asked. “You’ve got your Chief face on.”

“I don’t know,” Deke said. “The laptop. Plus Dr. Fraelich didn’t tell them—”

“Shush. Your voice carries like a foghorn. Tell you what: Why don’t we stop back at my office. I’d like to talk to you about some things.”

“I’ve got some errands to run,” he said. “Up in Knoxville.”

“Oh, of course,” she said, as if she knew exactly where he was going. Maybe she did. It was near impossible to keep a secret from Rhonda. And if she knew a secret, she never let you forget it. “I’ll just nab you when you get back, then.”

They passed the cop Deke had seen on the way in. The man watched them as they crossed the lobby. Deke ignored him.

When they were outside Deke said, “Nab me about what?”

“Paxton’s going to sign the papers for his daddy.”

She looked at him, waiting. She wanted to know if Deke was going to fight her on this.

“P.K. has to make up his own mind,” he said.

“I was hoping you’d say that,” she said. “Once I showed him the Home—”

“Either way,” Deke said firmly. “Either way, it’s his own decision. If he backs out, he backs out.”

“Well of course, honey.” She patted his arm. Her lipstick smile was unwavering. “You enjoy yourself in Knoxville, now.”

University Hospital was a maze of hallways like one of those haunted houses thrown together by the Jaycees every Halloween. Except he was the monster. When people caught sight of him they jerked in surprise and looked away. Deke resisted the urge to yell,
Boo!

He followed the signs to the elevators. Not that he was going to take one. The carriage might be able to take his weight, but he’d have to squat on the floor to fit. He found the stairwell door next to the elevators and ducked inside.

The fertility clinic was on the eighth floor. The two women at the front desk greeted him by name. How was traffic? How’s Donna doing? Deke and Donna had been coming here twice a month for two years, and the staff was still trying hard to be as pleasant as could be.

“Sorry I’m late,” Deke said. “I had to ask three different women to get a sample.”

The youngest woman blinked at him, not sure if he was joking, then decided that he must be. “Oh, you,” she said. She whisked the bag off to the back of the lab. The other woman took a key ring from the wall and said, “I think the room is free.”

“Sure hope so,” Deke said. “Hate to walk in on somebody.”

She led him down the hall and unlocked a room. At the door she handed him a cup and lid that was a lot like the one Donna had filled, as well as a plastic, insulated sack to put it in. “Okay then!” she said, and closed the door behind her.

Well, he thought. Here we are again. Ready for romance?

The room contained a stand-alone wardrobe on wheels, a brown plaid couch, a coffee table, and a reading lamp. A door led to a small room with a toilet and shower. The drapes were closed, but bright sunlight peeled the edges.

He turned on the lamp, opened the wardrobe. Three of the shelves were piled high with magazines. He knew from past explorations that most of them were Playboys, some of them nearly a decade old. The kind of porn women would buy. A few Hustlers hid in the mix, probably left behind by clients who couldn’t get inspired by the vanilla stuff.

On previous visits he’d tried looking through the magazines. All the girls looked like marshmallow-and-toothpick manikins: bulbous heads on spindly necks, massive doughy breasts, claw-hands tipped with red fingernails. And those mouths, Jesus Christ. Lips like red rubber suction cups, and tiny pink tongues lapping over sharp white teeth. The girl-on-girl pictorials were almost too much to bear.

On the floor of the wardrobe were a stack of hand towels and an industrial-sized bottle of sanitary gel, the same stuff they rubbed on Donna’s belly during sonograms. He took the bottle and one of the towels back to the couch, set it on the coffee table. Then he reached into his breast pocket and took out a folded envelope.

Like everything else in the argo world, what didn’t exist you had to make yourself. Donna had been happy to do her part. She’d even gone to buy the digital camera and the printer that made little Polaroid-sized pictures. He removed the pictures from the envelope and laid them out like he was dealing solitaire.

He laughed to himself. Solitaire. That was the game, all right.

———

When he delivered his cup the nurses thanked him as if he’d brought them donuts. “Don’t use it all at once,” he said.

“Pardon?” the young woman asked.

“Never mind.” He waved good-bye and left his boys in their care. The UT doctors would count and evaluate them—were their heads properly bulbous, their tails sufficiently whiplike? did they swim like salmon, or laze about like carp at a dock?—and then ship them off to Boston and Barcelona. Once a month Donna came in for a date with a long needle, and the extracted eggs would be mailed off too. Sperm and eggs would rendezvous at a swank petri dish in a foreign city, where the close quarters and forced intimacy would hopefully lead to wanton permeability and penetration. So far the orgies had been a bust. Either his boys lost their nerve or Donna’s girls rebuffed their advances, or something went wrong down the line. The few times when fertilization had taken hold, the subdivision had ground to a halt a few hours later. No one could tell them why.

He clumped downstairs, crouched to make it under the exit door, and walked out into sunlight. He should be thankful that anybody at all was taking an interest in their problem. Two different research teams were working on argo fertility. The geneticists had figured out ten years ago that while none of the clades could cross-fertilize with unchanged people, the clades could breed with their own kind. So chubs made more chubs and blanks pumped out two or three bald girls at a time—but argos remained as barren as winter trees.

It was becoming clearer and clearer that nobody had the slightest clue about how to fix the problem. TDS had rewritten
their genes, and nobody knew how to read the new language. Deke and Donna were considered “mature onset”—the Changes had caught them after they’d gone through puberty—so maybe the problem wasn’t that they’d been changed, but that they hadn’t changed enough. The younger argos had grown taller, stronger, more “purely” argo. Maybe their odds of reproducing would be better. But so far only two other argo couples had volunteered for the fertility study. The costs were tremendous, and the young couples either couldn’t afford it or weren’t desperate enough yet. The old ones, the people over forty who’d spent most of their lives as normals, had no desire to make more freaks.

He paid the parking lot attendant, a black kid about twenty years old who didn’t look too happy either. Deke thought about saying,
So, this troll walks into a bar and the bartender says, Hey buddy, why the long face?
And then the kid could tell him a nigger joke, and they’d share a big oppressed-minority laugh.

Sure, it would go just like that.

The argos weren’t a minority—you had to be human to be part of that pie. Down deep the normals understood that they were a separate species altogether, a race of predators, and any one of them could slaughter a human with a swipe of an arm. The humans knew it, and no argo could afford to forget it either.

He drove fast, anxious to get home. He was happy to have the wind beat him around the head.

Not long ago he couldn’t understand why Donna wanted to go through all this fertility nonsense. They didn’t need children to
be fulfilled
, did they? Couldn’t he and Donna be happy on their own? Lots of normals went their whole lives without
making babies. So why the hell were they pining for a person who didn’t exist? Might never exist.

But he came to share the ache. Maybe it was the species thing. Something in his cells that demanded to go on, to not let the humans win.

Jo Lynn had given him a picture once, something she’d found on the web and printed out for him. She’d given it to him and said,
This is your future
. And even though the picture was a fake, one of those Photoshop jobs people liked to put on the web, he’d folded it up and kept it with him, tucked away like—

“Shit!”

The photographs of Donna.

He slapped his shirt pocket, dug into his pants pockets as best he could while keeping the Jeep on the road, but of course the pictures weren’t there. They were laid out on the donation room coffee table. He swung into the left lane and braked hard. He dropped the Jeep into the wide, shallow ditch dividing the interstate, turned around, and accelerated hard to rejoin the traffic heading back into town. Maybe the nurses hadn’t gone into the room yet. Maybe they’d gone to lunch.

Twenty seconds later he saw the lights flashing in his rearview mirror and he swore again.

T
HE MOSQUITO, INVISIBLE
in the dark, tiptoed across the skin of his biceps.

Pax sat on the front stoop, all the house’s lights turned off, and stared at the moonlit tops of the trees, waiting. When the bite came he didn’t flinch. It was a kind of pleasure to keep his arm perfectly still, to let the little thing insert its needle snout and drink from him. He could almost feel its tiny body fill up with blood.

Behind him his father’s snores augered through the walls. Last night the sound had gnawed at him, keeping him awake until the early morning. Pax didn’t fall asleep so much as lie still until sleep fell on him. Now the snoring seemed less like a personal attack. Not quite background noise yet, but getting there. A couple more nights, Pax thought, and he wouldn’t be able to sleep without it, like those people in Chicago with their bedrooms next to the El.

A couple more nights. He hadn’t called his manager to tell him he wasn’t coming back soon. He knew he should call in, negotiate for more time. But fuck it, his father was sick, and if they didn’t give him his shitty job back when he got back to town, well, there were plenty of shitty jobs.

So instead of thinking about his nonlife in Chicago he’d
spent the day doing everything required of a dutiful son. He made Harlan breakfast, helped him to the toilet, even finished cutting his hair. His father’s size complicated everything. The quarter ton of flesh didn’t seem to be part of his father at all, but some great cargo he was forced to carry, a penitential weight. Pax knew that his body was an effect of the Changes, a symptom as inarguable as Deke’s powdered skin, but he couldn’t stop himself from thinking, Jesus, Dad, how did you let yourself get like this?

Pax helped him navigate back to the living room. Every movement had to be strategized, paced, evaluated. What would happen if he fell? There was no way Pax could get him up on his own. Finally he settled onto and into the creaking couch. Another task accomplished, another checkmark in Paxton’s column. When I leave, Pax thought, he won’t be able to say I didn’t help him. He won’t be able to say I didn’t try.

Harlan napped, and then in the afternoon Pax sat beside him and they watched TV together the way they always had, talking only during the commercials and saying nothing of consequence. His father liked the Discovery Channel. Animals killing animals and being killed, having sex, raising animal babies.