The Octopus on My Head (15 page)

Hardly had Lavinia fingered the bell button on this building than the door flung wide open to reveal a perspiring Eritrion Torvald. His hair was tousled, his sallow complexion flushed; he wore a pinstriped dress shirt, tail out and like himself much worn, like himself unwashed. His bridge, consisting of four upper front teeth, was askew, and there was fervor in his eyes. His shoelaces were loose, his fly half open, and he had a keyboard synthesizer under one arm.

“Mr. Torvald?” Lavinia said, a tad disconcerted, “I'm Lavinia Hahn, from Kramer's World of Sound? We … met once before.” A strange look darted through Torvald's eyes, which I interpreted as a gleam of triumph. It faded when Lavinia added, “This is Curly Watkins, my associate.”

Torvald peered up at me nearsightedly. “Well if it isn't the brother from Philadelphia.” This perspicacity came my way unexpectedly, and he knew it. I bade him a good evening. Torvald didn't acknowledge the greeting. He adjusted his bridge, which decreased his overbite, and let his lower lip dip into a smile. Abruptly the muscles around it went slack and the smile concentrically dissolved, as if sinking into the quicksand of his face.

Lavinia said, “Your tenant, Angelica Stepnowski, is expecting us. Is she here with you, by any chance?”

Torvald took a step back into the room, away from the door, but did not usher us in, saying. “She's been spending a lot of time with me, poor thing. Such a shock. You heard about her husband?”

“We heard,” Lavinia said. “On behalf of all of us at the World of Sound, I'd like to express our sympathies.”

“The poor thing. Such a nice boy, too. I've always liked musicians. Rented to a lot of them over the years. Surfers, too. They always have nice girlfriends. Some of them can cook. You know, like, Hey Daddy, what's cooking!” He showed a completely mechanical smile of mostly false teeth. He hadn't shaved, and the stubble was the dirty white of over-the-hill tile grout.

“Yeah,” Lavinia said without enthusiasm. “Cooking.”

“I've just come from the apartment.” He showed us the keyboard. It was a Kurtzweil, a fancy item with lots of buttons, a built-in hard drive, and fifty-five keys that, I happened to know, have a grand piano feel to them. A power cord and a couple of MIDI cables encircled it. “Angelica asked me to retrieve it for her.” He looked at Lavinia uncertainly. “She said you would bring it back to the dealer?”

Lavinia nodded. My rôle as The Muscle was to remain in the background, silent and ominous, but I nodded, too.

“You can trust the King,” Lavinia assured him.

Especially, I thought sourly, if you're Angelica Stepnowski.

Torvald bowed in a courtly manner entirely out of keeping with his physical appearance. By a bum out of Beckett, the gesture might have been funny. By Torvald it was almost unnerving. When he straightened up, he cradled the synthesizer like a toothy papoose. “Angelica said Mr. Kramer would refund the down payment so she'll have enough money to cremate poor Stefan. Is that so?”

Lavinia was at a loss to respond to this. How were we to know what kind of story Angelica had cooked up for the old man? “Five hundred dollars,” I said, “regardless of the amount of the down payment.”

Torvald blinked as if he'd forgotten I was there, and fixed his stare on my boots. From there he let his eyes crawl up me like a pair of snakes re-entwining a caduceus. When they met mine, he said, “…Cremate…”

Lavinia spoke. “I guess you have all experienced quite a … an unpleasant shock, Mr. Torvald.”

As if eagerly, he smiled in her direction. “Yes,” he said, a little saliva moistening his fricatives. “A shock.”

“We have the refund,” Lavinia said, “in cash. But I need to hand it over to Mrs. Stepnowski in person, and she needs to sign a receipt.”

Torvald was stealing glances at Lavinia, trying not to show too much interest, but in fact appraising her much in the way a needy teenager might, who had a compulsive imagination fueled by unlimited access to internet pornography. I was beginning to see what Lavinia saw in him.

“I'm sure
….
” He stopped and cocked his head, as if listening. He looked behind him. He shifted the synthesizer under one arm. He fumbled in the breast pocket of his shirt and came up with a rectangular metal tin. He thumbed open the hinged top and extended it, still looking over his shoulder. “Care for a mint?”

Lavinia, again, seemed at a loss for words. I said, “No thanks.” Lavinia nodded faintly, but she said, “No, thank you,” too.

Torvald pinched out a mint for himself, capped the tin, and replaced it in his breast pocket. He set the mint on his tongue, already whitened by earlier mints, and closed his mouth. His cheeks hollowed as he began to suck, looking thoughtfully, now, at Lavinia.

“Uh,” Lavinia said, “you say that Mrs. Stepnowski is here? With you?”

A fierce draft of chill wind blustered down the street behind us. It ruffled the pair of tapered junipers flanking the front door and peppered the backs of our legs with particles of sand.

“Damn,” Lavinia shivered, “I'm dressed for Oakland.”

Torvald squeezed his eyes nearly shut and relinquished one hand from the synthesizer to grasp the stile of the front door, to keep it from crashing against the hinge jamb. For a moment it seemed as if he were about to close the door behind him and leave us shivering on the sidewalk. Whatever he was thinking, he suddenly recollected himself. “Angelica's lying down in the guest bedroom.” He stepped aside, gesturing with the keyboard. “Please. Come in.”

Despite the cold Lavinia hesitated, clutching the lapels of her blouse to her throat.

Torvald bowed slightly, looked up at her, and smiled politely. “Please. We're all a little out of sorts this evening.”

Lavinia wavered, then stepped over the threshold.

I followed.

Torvald closed the door behind us.

I heard the click of the dead bolt. An urban reflex on Torvald's part? But across the room on a low cabinet stood a very large television monitor, perhaps four feet on the diagonal. It was on and it depicted a bare room with beige walls, badly lit. The camera angle shot up from the floor, not ten feet from a woman with cornrowed blonde hair, who was strapped to an unpainted wooden throne in the center of the shot. She wore only shreds of undergarments. Though her head had sunk to her chest, bobbing slightly with her breathing, it was plain to see that a gag encircled her head. Her skin glistened with sweat.

Lavinia saw this too. It was impossible not to see it. In the stunned silence strange sounds came from a pair of big speakers flanking the television. The bound woman was mewing, like a kitten.

I spun to face Torvald, but he was ahead of me. I had time to see his move but no time to react. Already the synthesizer had been in full swing, impelled by all the strength he could lend it at arms' length, arcing like a baseball bat, and it cracked the side of my head with enough force to fell me like a lamppost struck by lightning.

“Congratulations!” Torvald spat out the mint and his incisors with the word, upended the keyboard, and tamped my head against the floor, with prejudice. As my senses swam like so much spilled beer through the fibers of the carpet pile, he thanked me for delivering to him the “final woman,” and hit me again.

The last thing I heard was Lavinia's scream.

Chapter Fifteen

E
RITRION
“A
RI
” T
ORVALD WAS A NICE MAN UNTIL HIS WIFE
,
Malita, died.

Then he became nicer.

Until you got to know him.

Weekly, Torvald hosed down the two patches of pink cement that flanked the path from the sidewalk on Anza Street to his own front door. Then he hosed down the brick walkway to the two story bungalow next door. “Income property,” he called his bungalow. “Aprons,” he called his pink patches. “Washing my aprons,” he would say, “rinsing my assets,” and he would touch an eyebrow, as he surveyed his property, preening before his real estate as if it were a reflective window. Inquiries about the ruined birdbath met with a sad, “Malita loved it so.”

The rental unit, social security, and an out-of-court disability settlement reached nearly four years after a ballpoint pen fell twelve stories onto his head as he was walking past a building full of non-profit art organizations on New Montgomery Street—these covered all his needs, as well as those of his lawyers, and then some. Torvald was one of those people who makes both money and trouble by apparently doing nothing. Nothing, that is, if you don't count Torvald detailing his Mercedes with a toothbrush every Sunday morning. Nothing, that is, if you don't count Torvald busing downtown to the Department of Parking and Traffic with a fold-up aluminum walker every business day for two months until the harried bureaucrat he had zeroed in on, a woman—whose husband disappeared after refinancing their house, cleaning out the bank account, and cashing in their life insurance policy, sticking her with their Down's Syndrome two-year-old and a mortgage payment equal to thirteen-sixteenths of her annual salary—who, desperate to rid herself of Torvald, issued him a blue disabled parking placard to dangle off the stalk of the rear-view mirror of his Mercedes, enabling Torvald to violate municipal parking statutes throughout the stat of California with impunity.

Nothing, unless you count his secretly, by night, renovating the basement under his house. Minor excavation was required. San Francisco is a sand dune. Torvald transported some of the excavated sand to the parking lot below the Palace of the Legion of Honor and dumped it off the cliff there, scooping out four five-gallon buckets, the most he could get into the trunk of the Mercedes, a single one-pound coffee can's worth at a time, like a man feeding pigeons. He also dumped sand at Chrissy Field while it was being restored, and at the Giants' new baseball park while it was under construction. But it was the mammoth Catellus Project, nearly four hundred acres in the heart of the city, that received the majority of the sand. Nobody noticed the difference. Everybody thought Torvald was busy doing nothing.

Nothing, that is, unless you count the meticulous, incremental, glacial in pace, glacial in ineluctability, conversion of his basement taxidermy lab into two sound-proof rooms, which, as he almost let slip to the one neighbor who asked what was going on, just before that neighbor moved without leaving a forwarding address, Torvald intended to be a recording studio. Hence all the sound-proofing: fiberglass acoustic bats between staggered studs behind triple-sandwich walls—one layer each of plywood, fiberboard, and sheetrock glued and held in place with screws until the glue dried; then the screws were backed out and their holes caulked and sanded smooth; the entire wall covered with a special acoustic fabric—with a one-inch air gap between the sandwich walls and the surrounding eight-inch concrete retaining walls; ‘floating' concrete floor; a ceiling built much like the walls, except it was suspended from the ground floor by special isolators, each carefully calibrated as to the amount of load it would be expected to carry.

Quite a project to have been carried out almost entirely in secret, entirely at night or on weekends, by a man who, to all outward appearances, did absolutely nothing the whole time.

Absolutely nothing, that is, unless you count the compulsive repetition of viewing and reviewing a meticulously curated collection of videos, some two thousand and forty hours of them, the temporal equivalent of one year's attendance at a regular job, cataloging them by date, length and number of cassettes constituting each volume, and alphabetically, too. Each volume had a name associated with it, although two of them had the same name, purely a coincidence of course, for the name, Sheila, was common enough, which Torvald had resolved by the simple expedient of labeling the respective productions “Sheila I” and “Sheila II”. Torvald also indexed the collection as to male or female, race and age, stages and degrees, types and frequency of practices, as well as to his estimation of overall artistic value, both intrinsic and relative; as indicated by three to five stars.

Inferior material, of zero to two stars, he deleted.

Doing nothing, that is, unless you consider Torvald's ultimate ambition: editing the highlights of his collection into the greatest snuff movie the world would ever see, the raw material to be discovered in a pseudonymous safe deposit box long after his demise, coevally long after a Trojan horse, which he'd downloaded off a hacker site, had propagated his feature-length triumph world-wide in its entirety, all hundred and twenty-one compressed minutes of it, by capitalizing on a virtually unknown but chronic weakness specific to Microsoft Corporation's monomaniacal conflation of their own Internet browser with their own operating system.

These feats Eritrion “Ari” Torvald had nearly accomplished, and he had done so entirely in the guise of a man who never accomplished anything at all, of a man who wasted days wandering the aisles of hardware stores and plumbing supply warehouses and lumber yards and electrical wholesalers, of a man who had nothing to do.

If Torvald had delusions of grandeur relative to the success of his film, he had next to none when it came to its production. Lately he had transferred hundreds of hours of his early career from beta and VHS to digital media and, in this regard, part of the secret ultimately revealed to his disappeared neighbor was true. There
was
a recording studio under his house, whose sole double-paned window looked onto a soundproof room with a wooden chair against one wall and two video cameras on tripods with a third stedi-cam, and a floor that subtly but surely and very accurately sloped concentrically down to a four-inch drain in its center.

The drain, being far below grade, had necessitated a sump pump, which, activated by a switch on a float in a sunken barrel, rapidly evacuated whatever flowed down the drain whenever the contents of the barrel reached a certain level. Sometimes this barrel took a long time to fill up. Other times, like when Torvald hosed out the studio, or when he heavily employed the mess-hall-grade garbage disposal to which removal of the plate covering the floor drain gave access—at such times the barrel filled again and again, and the pump kicked in and out with great frequency.

Torvald had a lot of trouble with this pump. After much research he'd purchased a model that could handle anything—the volume of a hundred-year storm or a glutinous bolus of machine-masticated gristle—but after the pump was buried deep below one of the two pink patches in front of his house (both of which he'd torn up and repoured to ensure an accurate color match), when it lifted effluent up to the level of the sewer line under Anza Street, a construction project Torvald could hardly have conducted in secret, but managed to accomplish on four consecutive weekends while Mr. Tweedy, the nosy neighbor, was fly-fishing with his grandchildren in New Zealand, and while the Department of Building Inspection was locked up like it is on any weekend, fifty-two weekends a year, Torvald discovered that, despite its flawless performance, the pump made too much noise. Specifically, the float-activated relay that triggered the pump voltage emitted a click, inexplicably audible from anywhere along the sidewalk in front of Torvald's house.

Having allowed a decent interval for grief—after Torvald began telling the two or three people who asked why they hadn't seen his wife lately that Malita had vanished while on a trip to Mexico; presumably, if unobserved, having fallen off the stern of the night car-ferry between Mazatlán and La Paz while Torvald was in the foredeck bar trading shots of mescal with a one-armed bullfighter—Mr. Tweedy began to nag him about the strange clicking and humming noises coming from beneath the patch of pink concrete abutting their common property line.

Torvald explained to Tweedy about how PG&E appeared and dug up the street in front of their houses while Tweedy was on that fly-fishing trip to new Zealand two years ago with his grandchildren, though he had no idea what for and hadn't given it much thought at the time. But he, Torvald, had also noticed the funny noises and having assumed that it had something to do with the uninterrupted flow of electricity and/or gas to and/or from the Outer Richmond, found himself having gotten so used to the noise he didn't even notice it anymore, which, as Torvald wound up his yarn watching Mr. Tweedy with a certain look in his eye, a look he'd formerly been accustomed to focusing on his wife the last few months of her life, would be, he broadly hinted, Mr. Tweedy's first best course.

In fact it was true that Anza Street had been repaved while Tweedy was gone, so Torvald thought his exegesis had a good chance of skirting Tweedy's radar. But Tweedy was another of these guys you see around the Outer Richmond who apparently have nothing to do all day but detail their car with a toothbrush and groom the hedges framing the perimeter of their parcel with cuticle scissors and wash the street-facing windows weekly. It took Tweedy almost three months to do it, but one day Torvald hearing muted conversation parted the curtain of his parlor window to find a little blue PG&E truck parked in front of Tweedy's house and Tweedy standing on the property line with a PG&E engineer who held an unfolded blueprint, both men staring down at the patch of pink. Torvald let the curtain fall back into place and stood there, as if in repose, until he heard the engineer's pickup truck drive away.

Torvald knew that PG&E had no jurisdiction over whatever it was that might be under his front yard. But the very fact that Tweedy had managed to pester the vast PG&E bureaucracy until it relented to the extent of actually disembarking a human representative to appraise a situation that, in any case, must have seemed vague to them in the first place and beyond their purview in the last, demonstrated at a stroke to Torvald that Tweedy was possessed of a tenacity which occluded even that which had fomented the coup of Torvald's handicap parking placard. It was at that exact moment, not one second before and certainly not one after, that Tweedy transmogrified into a walking dead man.

The slow-motion denouement of that transmogrification is, and remains, recorded as Torvald's third video, a volume entitled “Calvin.” “Calvin” was pretty good, too; although, as went Torvald's career, no production ever eclipsed the savagery of “Malita.”

Not quite three volumes later, when Tweedy's grown grandson and the young man's wife made the sad trip all the way from New Zealand to see Tweedy declared legally dead and his estate probated, Torvald expressed sympathy without being too nosy, and made them a fair offer on the house, which, if they accepted, would save them the trouble of cleaning it up and selecting a real estate agent, putting it on the market and sorting through the offers, accepting one and waiting through escrow, closing, and so forth. They refused. Torvald began to look at them in a funny way. But after a moment's consideration he relented. One thing about Torvald, he was not a stupid man. Far from it. It was probably too obvious a setup, he reflected, for him to buy the house and rent it out to young girls, one at a time, who would then disappear, one at a time, and whom, after due diligence, he would then replace one at a time. Cool idea, bad execution. What Torvald wanted was good execution. Torvald reasonably presumed that eventually some cop or relative would come along and figure things out. As a force of nature, that was the job of inevitability. Even though Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, had disproved the theory that inevitability doesn't need any help, by the same token Torvald was in no hurry for the inevitable to happen to himself. But it was precisely this fundamental awareness, that it was inevitable that he get caught, that enabled Torvald to engage his ambition with such virtuosity as he brought to bear. Because he knew that in the fullness of things he would be caught; for, in fact, if he was successful, his work would come into the light of the world by design. He would have to be caught. This rationalization of the fear of inevitability, itself a triumph of logic the test of which his nerves would welcome, a fear which moreover he came to consider a mere titillation, enabled Torvald to focus the full amperage of his intelligence on his aesthetic achievement. As a side effect, his quiver acquired the dichotomous pincers of bold finesse, efficient recklessness, patience that could spring into celerity, and brazen stealth. It was like having a tool box full of complicitous scorpions—efficient, servile, and alacritous.

A week later the grandson and the wife came back with a real estate agent and accepted his offer. He walked through the two-story cottage with them. It was the first time he'd ever been in Tweedy's home, and everything remained as Tweedy had left it. Torvald was amused to find a photo of Tweedy's long deceased wife in a cheap frame on the mantel in the living room. Torvald had a similar photo of his own deceased wife, on his own mantel, to keep up appearances. But Tweedy's mantelpiece also displayed pictures of the grandson and the boy's father, who had married Tweedy's daughter thirty years before. There was a photo from that wedding, and another of the grandson at his own wedding, with Tweedy in both. Torvald heard that day, for the first time, of the deaths, years before, of Tweedy's daughter and her husband in a plane crash, which occurred in the course of the pursuit of their Christian mission in Burma.