The Natural Order of Things (11 page)

Exhausted and dizzy from the absinthe, Claude rolls the corpse into the pit and then begins to fill the hole. He wonders how his old friend will take the news of Gonzago’s passing. Edward has been behaving rather erratically of late, and there is a distinct possibility that in his unbearable grief he will dig up the corpse and rock it back and forth in his arms, trying to grasp the enormity of his loss. “Why?” he might whisper, “why?” Because asking why—why this course of action and not some other—well, those are the kinds of questions men of his station often ask, men who have grown accustomed to success and balk at any event that veers radically from the script they have meticulously crafted. How they abhor change and deplore the ubiquity of life’s impermanence. But erosion takes its toll on all things, reveals complex rows of strata and
substrata below the surface, so that over the slow course of time, the souls of these men, petrified like fossils encased in layers of stone, are finally exposed, extracted, put on display for all to see. Change is inescapable, it unites rich and poor alike, the mindless cosmic constant that converts all things into unidentifiable heaps of dust and bones.

Claude taps down the dirt, throws the shovel aside, and returns to the house, but before heading upstairs to join Elsie in bed, he pauses in the den, takes one last look around. The bottle of absinthe and the vial of poison are still on the table beside the armchair. A peculiar feeling comes over him. The branches of the elms and maples clatter against the windowpane, the moon drifts behind a cloud, the wind whispers its secrets and then goes silent; in short, the globe continues to spin in its usual manner, but Claude has the sensation, an acute
awareness
, that he is not, and perhaps has never been, the protagonist of this drama but is merely a supporting player, one who appears briefly on stage to recite a few modest lines before retreating to the wings to wait for the spectacular, dazzling, grisly finish.

He pours three drops of poison into the bottle, not enough to do any harm really, just enough to course through the sinister alleys of Edward’s soul and make him a little light-headed when he gets back from his “business trip.” Then quietly, almost reverentially, Claude returns the bottle to its proper place in the liquor cabinet, and in a voice solemn and clear, he speaks the little Latin he can still recall from his days as a schoolboy with the Jesuits.

“
Consummatum est
.”

For in truth it is a consummation devoutly to be wished.

It’s Saturday morning, the Halloween party ended only a few hours ago, and dozens of costumed figures, nuns and priests and a red-robed inquisitor, are sprawled across the dirty hardwood floors. In time they will all come back to life, stagger to their feet, ransack the bathroom cabinets for bottles of aspirin, and thrust their pounding heads into the sink to gulp warm water straight from the tap, desperate to dilute the draft beer swirling inside their stomachs, anything that might alleviate the agony of another crushing hangover, but of course no medicine can ever match the anesthetic of deep, death-like sleep.

William de Vere tip-toes around their inert bodies and, in the first portent of light, discovers a note that the landlady has slid under his door. He reads each line with growing unease and, because he is a musician, is able to detect a lunatic cadence in the words, something manic and vulgar, like lyrics set to a grotesque polka played on a rusty squeezebox, “Who Stole the Keeshka” sung by a corpulent hobgoblin in a ratty, green robe who yearns to dance with him, feverish with lust. The demented melody, sung in Mrs. O’Neill’s orotund voice, rings in his head and makes his two-bedroom apartment seem like a demon-haunted music hall, complete with squeaking hinges, hissing radiators, inexplicable pockets of icy air that whistle through the bare rooms. Unlike the other notices that demand immediate back payment of rent, this one simply informs him that he has twenty-four hours in which to vacate the premises—the police will be summoned otherwise—and at the bottom of the note, scribbled in red ink, are the explicit and unalterable terms of an offer that will allow him to stay on for another month.

Like a morose child, Will slumps on a folding chair near the front window and gazes at the street below. Hard bullets of freezing rain strike the dirty panes of glass. Dead, yellow leaves gather around the twisted trunk of a chestnut tree, their coarse-toothed edges disintegrating into muck. Above the nearby shipyards, coppery clouds of coal-fire soot circle the sky and then, like the practiced fingers of a magician, jab suddenly at a row of abandoned brownstones. But in this forsaken quarter of the city, where the luckless denizens have resigned themselves to the maddening routine of minimum wage work, the only real magic comes in the form of a pint of strong IPA at the local brewery or a double shot of espresso at the café where the lovely and exotic barista anticipates a stunningly horrific demise—or is it a blessed cessation?—to all of her woes.

Will smashes the note into a ball and considers holding a match to it, but he is a showman, an entertainer, and no matter how foul his mood he must always wear a cheerful smile just in case his guests begin to stir. To ease his nerves, he opens a warm beer and turns on the TV. A marauding band of B-movie mercenaries appears from out of the wobbling dust spouts of a vast desert plain. With the creak and clink of saddles and the high, wild cries of pillage and slaughter, the horsemen sweep through the shimmering streets of a post-apocalyptic city. The camera zooms in on a machete-wielding maniac with large yellow eyes like corona flames, his teeth filed to sharp points. Murmuring a deliciously foul prayer to the gods of war and conquest, the man pursues a little girl down a dark alley and, urged on by her screams, hacks wildly at her scalp. He seizes the child’s
limp body, raises the bubbling chalice of the skull to his dry, leathery lips, and slakes his desperate thirst on blood thick and black as crude oil seeping from the cracks in the earth.

Though he finds these images repellent, Will cannot turn away from the TV, but at the sound of approaching footsteps, he jumps with alarm. He peers into the pale morning light and sees the figure of the great muscled Minotaur coming through the hallway, a fabled creature that no filmmaker could ever dream up. Like so many of Will’s acquaintances, the Minotaur inhabits a parallel universe where there rages an intellectual Dark Age absent of books and music and challenging ideas. His head has been bashed and battered so many times, his brain has sustained so many contusions, that he barely responds to anything other than the harshest external stimuli, the most severe forms of pain and pleasure.

Eager to have a bit of fun, Will decides to torment the beast. “Good morning, Sunshine! Care for a little hair of the dog?”

The Minotaur, ashen-faced and sweating, manages to shake his head and points to the letter in Will’s hand.

Will tosses it to the ground. “Another eviction notice! So how’d it go last night?”

The Minotaur rubs his temples, blinks back his pain and stark incomprehension of the world, but before he can summon the willpower to stumble down the stairs and into the freezing rain, he leans heavily against the doorframe and takes several deep breaths.

“Everything went real good,” he rasps. “Helluva party.”

“Well, I’m awfully glad I could be of service.” Will grins. “With Tamar you don’t have to worry about catching the clap. It’s the
plague
you have to worry about. Ha!”

The Minotaur blinks in dumb incomprehension, his hand drifting down to adjust his balls.

“Hey, Slick, you
do
know what day it is, don’t you?”

“Yeah, I know …”

More screams from the TV. A cackling bandit decapitates a one-eyed cat and devours its dripping innards.

“It’s the first of November,” says Will. “The Day of the Dead. A day to build altars and shrines honoring the souls of the dearly departed. A day to drink and laugh and join hands in the Danse Macabre. Because no matter one’s station in life, the dance of death unites us all. Yes, we all dance to the same tune.”

The Minotaur gives him a look of terror, sputters something unintelligible, and then bolts out the door.

Will leans forward on the folding chair to watch his guest stumble through the desolate streets. Along the windowsill, the tawny soot and grit of the city collect into shallow pools, tinting the world with what looks like long trails of blood spilled by the movie mercenaries who drag their prey back to a lonely desert hideout where the gruesome feast continues with wild abandon until the film’s final frame.

The apartment at the Zanzibar Towers & Gardens has become Will’s last refuge. After months of what he thought were empty threats, his mother and father have kicked him out of the house once and for all and, maybe because they are so fond of melodrama, have even vowed to disinherit him, their only child, just for good measure. Not that
there’s much left to inherit anyway. Like many members of the
nouveau riche
, they enjoy the finer things in life and seem to derive a kind of perverse satisfaction in impressing sycophantic “friends” with their largesse—holiday parties, benefit dinners, annual galas; it’s paying for it all that gives them so much trouble. His mother’s fashion sense, faux
haute couture
, and weekend shopping sprees to downtown boutiques, not to mention his father’s fondness for absinthe, hand-rolled cigars, and occasional peccadilloes in lavish hotel suites with distraught divorcées and young, money-hungry strumpets have made them big believers in debt management and the holy sacrament of confession, but if they attend mass on Sunday mornings, murmur “forgive us our debts,” it is only because they have confused their prodigal spending with piety. To atone for their sins, they help finance a new chapel and commission a local artist to design its giant stained glass window of Jesus, the boss’s son as it were, who looks with indifference upon the ruined city where drunks, whores, and madmen wait their turn to get into Paradise.

For years his parents sought happiness in these petty status symbols. Will has seen the bills and bank statements piled high on the kitchen counter, a Mount Vesuvius of delinquent loans with the whole works about to go up in one great cataclysmic bang, threatening to suffocate them all under an ash cloud of lawsuits and criminal investigations. The phrase “misappropriation of funds” is one that he has heard with increasing regularity from his father’s den. Since the outstanding balances are so insurmountable, Will feels no guilt about “borrowing” (as he later tries to explain it to them) one of their credit cards. He takes out a hefty cash advance to rent this modest apartment for weekend parties and to sleep with an occasional prostitute; treats himself to the steel-string guitar made of Brazilian rosewood that he has had his eye on for a few months now; buys a dozen shots of top shelf Tequila for the band after a gig one night; purchases sodium lights and bottles of mineral solution in order to cultivate his little garden of hydroponic dope, bright green and fragrant as a meadow at the height of summer, the kind of shit that makes you forget your troubles for awhile, provides inspiration for your inner genius. Writing songs for a death metal band requires loads of inspiration, after all. Will has to consider tempo and key changes, at what measure to include tremolo picking, blast beats, alternating rhythms, grunts, growls, snarls, wailing harmonics. There are subtleties, techniques of composition; craftsmanship is required, and super-strong weed helps assuage the serious bouts of writer’s block that have started to afflict him of late.

His parents find his musical aspirations contemptible; liturgical music is what they like best, a mollifying melody strummed on guitars by two Poor Clares, and after they discovered his larceny, his parents flew into a rage. Using her ferocious claws, his mother clamped onto his mop of greasy black hair and shook his head with such force that she chipped a nail and dislodged from the prongs of her ring the two-carat marquise-cut diamond—the envy of the parish ladies. Letting out a panicked snarl, she crouched on the floor and pawed mindlessly at the carpet.

“Well, don’t just stand there! Help me, damn you!”

This argument erupted just as his father was leaving on another “business trip.” From the old man’s suitcase wafted a fragrance so alluring that it must have belonged to a woman many years his junior, perfume so expensive that it had to be bottled by the ounce and dispensed with a medicine dropper. Why his father never bothers to disguise these gifts remains something of a mystery to Will. More mysterious still is why women find
him so appealing. Maybe it’s because he has an authoritative presence that intimidates subordinates, especially those confused and emotionally distraught assistants who shudder as his corrupt fingers dance like the legs of a millipede along their naked flesh. Though outwardly kind in the presentation of gifts (or bribes, depending on the circumstances), his father is also capable of inflicting pain, and at the sight of his son brazenly smirking at him, the old man tightened his fists and lowered the boom.

“You’re no son of mine!” he shouted with each blow. After awhile his mother joined in the refrain until together their voices sounded like a church choir belting out a deranged Kyrie.

Will cowered on the floor and through his swollen eyes could see the family portrait hanging above the mantle in his father’s den. Unlike his parents, Will is not lithe, tall, athletic, statuesque. In fact, he is quite plain, homely even. He has a weak chin and a thick lower lip that makes him look like a fish in profile, a wounded walleye flopping around in life’s cold waters. His legs are short and stocky, his nose flat and wide and speckled with blackheads. The photographer tried to disguise these unfortunate features with the dramatic use of chiaroscuro light, but anyone with a discerning eye could see through the shadows and fog, could distinguish between the freckles and unsightly acne scars, and Will, spitting blood and choking back tears, understood that he did not belong among those fine people, had never really belonged. He was not a part of the family. He was a bastard child, a monster, a freak of nature.