The Octopus on My Head (17 page)

One of the curious aspects of Torvald's madness was its hermeticism. Reality seeped in once in a while, like a shaft of late afternoon sunlight over the valence of a curtain. Take the two cops who had visited to inquire after Kerry, for example, three years before. Torvald's imaginative world had graciously accommodated them, yielding to their foray like a body of water yields to the bow of a ship, permitting, even abetting the ship's passage, marking it with a pretty wake, and, sooner than later, smoothing until not a trace of the incursion remains. Not a mark of the trowel, as it were. If flights of fancy occurred once in a while, well, perhaps they were … inevitable. His current fascination with metaphor, for example. For a long time his lucidity had given him to think that a craving for power was at the root of his dominance over his victims. Their loudest scream and feeblest whimper nurtured this belief, both reflected and reinforced it. Certainly power, and gratification, and dominance, and sadism, not to mention blood lust, and, yes, the puerile craving to be the center of attention, all of these figured into the construction of the railroad that had conveyed Torvald from a quiet middle-class homeowner, mandatorily retired after seventeen years of supervising the flatness of floppy disks manufactured by a small plant in South San Francisco, all the way to what he had become today, which was … what? A purveyor of metaphor, who carried a certain meaning in his blood, much as others carry a virus? A connoisseur of simile, much like others cultivate the taste of Cuban cigars? An
eminence
of psycho-historic proportions? It all seemed too obvious, in retrospect. So … inevitable. Much as, a mere eighteen months after his retirement, Malita just had to go.

A killer with sand, as in mettle. His mind lingered over the volumes of cassettes, CDs, CD-ROMs and DVDs aligned along the walls of the subterranean control room. The net result would serve individual psyches in the way that war serves nations: it would make one or two and break the rest.

Not a killer, but one of the killers. Not an indefinite article, but the genuine article.

Torvald sighed. Given the times, seventeen people didn't seem like so many. The ways in which they expired, however, were systematic yet multifarious. These distinctions aggregated to his credit. And to his record of them.

The iBook had fallen asleep. Torvald frowned and keyed it awake. Bored, bitch? Typing key combinations as automatically as a doting mother dialing her son's telephone number, he started a slide show program which enabled him to select and organize, size and crop and rotate and view any number of images he wanted. He could control gray scales, he could control gamma saturation, but most facilely he could manage the rate of presentation with a preset toggle or merely by touching the space bar, to pause or unpause an image or clip, to page or dawdle through the sequence of scenes, as he liked. Torvald had worked a long time at this particular edit. At fifteen seconds per exposure there were nearly two hours of viewing comprised of some four hundred and eighty images. As far as Torvald was concerned, this slide show documented the reinvention of his life. At first, when the number of images was limited, he'd intercut them with highlights from the first and only movie he'd shot on film, the black and white 16 millimeter documentary
Zero Tolerance: On Ensuring the Planar Regularity of Digital Storage Media
. But the result had proved too … successful. It was too affecting. Its platinum banality detracted from Torvald's real accomplishment. It was pornography with a plot, and its failure was precisely that.

He had cut the final product drastically. Every scene involving floppy disks was excised. A lot of work to undo. But now, after man-years of work, he was proud of the result. His achievement would stand for a long time, perhaps forever, as an aesthetically meticulous archive of his endowment to mankind, which, as he earnestly hoped, might stand as a clairvoyant metaphor for mankind's endowment to itself.

Many are the monsters of history. Torvald had made a study of them. He'd turned three walls of his basement control room into a floor-to-ceiling library, and the subjects of this library were the monsters and the monstrous acts of history, including himself and his own.

Among his favorites Torvald numbered Gilles de Rais. Gilles de Rais started out in history, and remains there, as one of Saint Jean d'Arc's staunchest supporters. But at some point he quit the young visionary and retired to his castle. There, over the next several years, he conducted human sacrifices, practiced cannibalism, and perpetrated heinous outrages upon his victims, torturing them to unconsciousness and reviving them only to torture them to death. Almost all of Gilles' victims were children. By the time a cardinal showed up at the head of an army to arrest him, it was said that the countryside surrounding Gilles de Rais' castle was bereft of children for fifty miles in any direction.

A full confession was tortured out of Gilles de Rais, and it makes for interesting reading. Torvald possessed a facsimile of the original as well as all translations into English he'd been able to find. He'd even commissioned his own translation. He had not permitted this particular interaction with a scholar of medieval French to become a reckless exposure, however; rather, that personage, long since terrorized by the horrors of the
Confessions
, had every potential to evolve into one of Torvald's most eccentric productions: Volume XII, “Freddy.”

But the translation was so good, Torvald let Freddy live.

In the end, however, no matter what Gilles de Rais had achieved, it
wasn't on video
. There were
words
but there was no
footage
. Words have their place, but this is the twenty-first century. The word is kaput. Frames per second reign.

The reflected images cascaded over the features of Torvald's face. Occasionally he resisted the impulse to delete one. The edit had been locked and compressed. He had learned from experience that if he wanted to meddle with this carousel of images, he needed to save it under another name, leave the original intact, and tweak the copy. So meticulously had his work built up over the years that a whimsical cut or spontaneous rearrangement of its chronology would subsequently seem awkward. The concentration necessary to perform an edit at this advanced stage was enormous; at times he thought it might now be beyond his capacity to improve the current version. His energy was waning. He knew it. His bloodlust, while not sated, was losing its focus. This, too, he sensed as symptomatic of the yin and yang of inevitability.

Torvald keyed the space bar to accelerate the progression of images. When Kerry appeared he slowed the procession. What a beauty
….
How she squealed and squirmed and wept
….
So full of life
….
So much energy
….
She almost took his eye out with that kick
….
And paid for it here. Click. Here. Click. And here. Click, click, click
….

Even so, Torvald's mind wandered. It was almost as if energy had its own life, as if its human form were merely borrowed. That Stepnowski, for example. Short work. A mere pistol—his own pistol. Yet the man shirked off his mortal coil—or vice versa—as if sick of it and good riddance, as if Torvald had shorn him, as it were, of his suffering rather than the gift of life. There'd been no time to convince him otherwise. In fact, there had been no time for the loppers. Then the truth would out. He'd found garden tools as effective as they are innocuous. The loppers, the hedge shears, the limb saw. Get it? Physically as well as psychologically, garden tools are so…hyperbolic. Grossly banal. But he'd had no time for the heinous hirsute beer belly on such a little man. Grotesque. What had his pulchritudinous wife seen in that swine of a husband? Torvald glanced over his shoulder. Still passed out. Boy, could he wake her up. Volume XIX, on the floor behind him, would watch Volume XVIII in production. There is no garden tool so tortuous as the imagination; of that, he had made a certainty. But even that, he'd been through. Been even there, done even that. Torvald suppressed the intimation of panic brought on by any hint of inadequacy. He glanced toward the body near the door. There had been a time, not so distant, when Torvald might have gotten aroused for a guy like that. Put him through his paces just to keep in shape. But six foot and two or three inches? With a shaved head? And the octopus?

Later.

Way later.

Torvald turned back to the computer screen. Idly, he took a mint. He looked at the slides without really seeing them. He turned around again.

It might make a good picture, he thought, as the blade goes in.

He tapped a thoughtful fingernail on the lid of his mint tin.

Multi-camera coverage, slow motion, sound of course.

He adjusted the crotch of his trousers.

Cameras on the floor, on the windowsill, on top of the TV. Every angle. Close. Zoom. Long.

He sucked on the mint. He repositioned his bridge with the tip of his tongue.

One foot on the head. The axe comes in … axially. Ha! Actually
….
Axial Actualization: get it? This
ennui
comes in waves. Forgot the guy's name. Detail. The brother from Philadelphia. What did he take me for? I might have known he'd come back with her. Delicious, though. Worth the trouble. Let him remain anonymous. He'll be the interlude, an interregnum, between XVIII and XIX, the exception that proves the rule, with a music box playing Brahms'
Lullaby
. That's the stuff. Wait:
Cranial Croquet
. That waxes it; I'm a genius. Not losing the old touch. Not yet anyway. Not just yet. Far from it, one might say. My god, what a relief.

His spirit renewed, slaked at the well of creativity, he turned to watch the computer screen. Colors washed over his face. His jaw trembled. The images meant nothing and everything to him. His lower lip quivered. A tear coursed over his cheek.

Goddamn, goddamn, goddamn, Torvald thought, I might get it up after all
….

Chapter Seventeen

A
FEW HOURS BEFORE DAYLIGHT, ALMOST ANY NIGHT, THE
Avenues of San Francisco are quiet. Sound is discrete. But fog manipulates sound deceptively.

That scratching is the junipers, flanking the front door.

That tapping is a computer keyboard. Unmistakable. In another part of the world, however, it might pass for the sound of quail pecking at seeds on the roof.

A steady sibilance, barely perceptible over the sound of the junipers abrading the facade of the house, might well have been a dry-cleaning plant, far down the block. But no; rather, it was the hiss of a forced-air respirator, breathing for someone who couldn't breathe on his own.

The bass moan would be the “moaner,” a loud
basso profundo
foghorn, on the south tower of the Golden Gate Bridge.

The drool on the rug below a lower corner of the respirator's mask accrues in silence, tinged with blood.

Stuffed birds flew along the wall to the right of the front door, above the stationary heads of several cats and one dog.

A robin. A mockingbird. A pair of house finches, the male more rubicund than the female. Five pigeons. A golden crown sparrow. A vireo. One raven. Two crows.

There's something these birds are trying to tell me. What could it be? He adjusted the strap on the respirator mask and touched the tip of the needle to a vein in the top of the hand. Answer, as the needle sank, They're all endemic to Golden Gate Park. A red contrail bloomed in the plastic barrel. Does that include the tomcat? He depressed the plunger. Yes, but that's no tomcat, son. That's calico. Only the female occurs as calico.

Torvald's mind responded to itself, in an exaggerated falsetto, I didn't know that. Say, Uncle Torvald, are you boning me? How many times have I told you? Don't bone me. Wavering tone, there. Torvald sighed. He was too worn out to take it from the top. In the old days, he would have worked it until he got it perfect. But what difference could it make now? The castrato tittered. Why would I do that?

To … confuse me? Now the falsetto mocked itself. The Torvald tittered aloud and covered his mouth with his fingertips, a habit he'd developed after the flailing elbow of Vol. XIII knocked his front teeth out. Oh, we wouldn't want that. We find it's best when you know exactly what's going on. It's more … efficacious.

He unseated and reseated the bridge with the tip of his tongue. Efficacious…?

For me, of course, he answered silently. Not for you, necessarily.

He stood behind Philadelphia, who lay on the floor facing away from him, feet toward the front door and head not a yard from the big television. Whatever it was about efficacious, it would be his, Torvald's, engineered efficacy. Not this kid's. Not by a long shot.

Torvald set the syringe on the rosewood secretary, alongside the iBook, and pulled up the chair.
How diverting it sometimes can be
, he typed into his computer journal,
when, in the attempt to forestall the inevitable, they bring all their intelligence to bear. It's too bad curare doesn't allow you to talk.

“…Is that a pit bull?” he said to the screen, as if trying out the line.

On the other hand
, Torvald typed,
there are the ones who accept their fate without a word, as if they deserve it. Query
. He paused.
Which is the more courageous?

Staffordshire terrier?

“
Charmant
,” Torvald typed and said, as though responding to somebody who had spoken aloud.

Endemic to the park, too, I suppose.

Torvald stopped typing and said, “All predatory.”

He looked to one side of the computer screen, “The pit bull preys on the cats,” and looked to the other. “Correct.” He looked up, “The cats prey on the songbirds,” and down, using the falsetto: “Ditto.”

“But the songbirds prey on…?”

“Insects.” He giggled. “Too tiny for taxidermy.”

“Oh.” After a pause, “And the crows? The ravens?”

“Garbage.”

“But … the insects feed on garbage, too, don't they?”

“Garbage breeds them. Maggots, flies, even mosquitoes, happily enough.” He cleared his throat.

“What about … the rats? Where do the rats come in?”

“There are at least three species of hawk that live in the park and prey on the rats that prey on the garbage. They are magnificent to observe, but hard to catch.”

“Not impossible to catch?” queried the falsetto,

“Nothing,” Torvald declared with an imperious roar, “is impossible to catch.”

He added with a flourish, using the voice of Omniscient Narration, “And before the kid could point out the squirrel, his larynx seized.”

Torvald laughed. He was enjoying himself. Sort of. In truth he felt awkward. This angered him. He beamed testily, though smug. The kid lives on, but quietly. Almost a minute passed, into the silence of which the greater silence of the Outer Richmond rushed like a tide. The junipers out front maintained their rhythmic sweeping of the little bungalow's façade. The breathing of the woman on the video screen labored irregularly. Barely discernible, a sound separated its identity from the random noise. Gradually it took on a life of its own, as well as an identity. It was a siren. Far away. Torvald paused to listen. The wail increased in volume; its pitch waxed and waned. “That siren is coming this way,” Torvald whispered.

There are three types of siren in San Francisco. One is common to ambulances, one to fire trucks, and one to police cars. Torvald listened. By its siren, this is a police car.

It was far away, but onward the siren came. The wail held its pitch for a moment, as if hesitating. It seemed that the siren had to have turned north on 32nd Avenue, which bounded the west side of George Washington High School, a mere four blocks east of Torvald's bungalow. And then, abruptly, the siren leapt a quantum in volume. Its vehicle had turned in front of the high school, which interrupted Anza for a block, and now it was on Anza Street. Heading west. It had to be. Towards me. Toward us. Towards the beach, too. But if it really wanted to get to the beach in a hurry it would stay on Fulton Street, with its synchronized lights and two lanes in each direction, three blocks south of Anza. But on it came, louder and louder, until all the other sounds were occluded by its ululation, until it virtually encompassed Torvald's doorstep, and careened past the pink concrete aprons and westward, towards the beach, diminishing.

The siren's pitch lowered, precisely according to the Doppler effect, as it sped away. The siren faded until, as if all too soon, reduced below a certain threshold, it was gone. He realized that, even though he was sitting down, most of his weight was on one foot.

Well, thought Torvald, redistributing his weight, that was a thrill. He cleared his throat.
Oh
, he typed,
to control and predict access to the thrill of fear
….

From among the shadows cast by the flickering video onto the east wall of the living room, the snouts and beaks of Torvald's taxidermy overlooked the scene, like nocturnal forest creatures eavesdropping on a hiker transfixed by his campfire.

The insects and the garbage are your friends
, Torvald typed.
The only creatures that will survive the human endowment to the planet. In that context of utter depredation, they will thrive. But what about machines or robots? Or clones?
he queried thoughtfully.
How about bad, self-replicating software? And nanobiobots?
He sniggered. After some consideration he dismissed these and wrote,
Artifacts of the human presence. Inanimate trash. Bad software destroys itself.

“They're different from garbage?” he asked himself aloud.

Mere anomalies of the futurescape. Undefined bulges in the jungle, overgrown and forgotten, like temples of the Maya.
Torvald pinched a mint out of the tin next to the syringe and typed authoritatively,
Garbage is
alive
!

Tell him about it. Garbage is alive and paying property taxes in the Avenues. But now something was developing on the video feed. He turned to face the screen. The woman tied to the wooden chair in the cinderblock room had begun to wake up. Her labored breathing had become labored whimpering. She struggled against her bonds, which were a broad black belt with brass grommets in two parallel rows around her middle, from which two straps rose over her shoulders and buckled to the back of the chair. Except that it was leather, it might have been a safety harness—safely harnessed, hah hah! Each ankle had a smaller belt and buckle fastening it to a leg of the chair. A similar arrangement applied to each thigh and forearm.

Struggle as she might, she wasn't going anywhere. Having realized her predicament, the woman raised her head to look around.

Torvald's breath quickened. His face became brittle. He sucked the mint hard. He remembered the name.

Lavinia.

Her voice found no articulation. How could it? A harness of black straps, fitted over the top and back of her head, trapped a bright crimson ball between her lips, half in and half out of her mouth. Cry out as she might, and now she tried, mere inarticulate whimpers would be audible, only. Mucus trickled over her upper lip; the exposed hemisphere glistened with it.

The woman's frightened eyes enlarged, revealing much white and their unusual color, violet, as they swiveled around the room. Up, down, left, right, she craned to look over her shoulder but the harness prevented this. It didn't make any difference. There was nothing back there but a sound baffle covered in a beige fabric that looked like corduroy.

“There's probably software out there,” Torvald said quietly to the screen, “that would enable me to control your environment from this keyboard.” He touched the computer behind him. “A fiber optic cable, an interface in the control room
….
Unfortunately, I lack the time to research, let alone master, this technology.”

He paused to gauge the crescendo of Lavinia's panic.

Let her macerate.

After a long minute, Torvald turned to the computer.

Strange to declare, but the time is nigh. I can feel it. True, I have more on my plate than I can reasonably handle. Foreboding but undeniable, as with “Angelica,” I can evince none of the passion of yore, nor the resulting—and requisite—attention to detail. Am I so jaded? I don't think so. The simple truth is, I have explored these avenues before, and they have yielded up all the secrets they have to offer me. I know them well, too well, and the supply of energy for such explorations is too limited to repeat them unnecessarily. What is at work is mere habit, which manifests itself through lack of discipline. My plate is not only full but, by the virtue of the peccancy of gluttony, it is overflowing.
The Virtue of Sin,
surely someone must have written that book? Here on the heels of eighteen, Volume XVIII, yes, I burden myself with two more potential studies. It is too much. I fly, I faint, I fall. Simply put, I weary.

For the first time since the translation of
The Confession
I have let slip the guise. Inconsequential as this may yet prove to be, I perceive it as erratic development, and I evaluate it not as lack of vigilance, but as stress fracture. The time has come to wrap up the field studies. Will I be afforded the energy, the time, the concentration necessary for a final cut? Time waits for no fiend. On the contrary, time copulates and breeds and feeds its own progeny to itself. The real-time of Lavinia ticks away, but her convulsive pules are less than heart-rending.
What's that? The chair recognizes the floor.

Baldy tried to scream, the falsetto snitched, but his voice is an empty paper bag blowing across a deserted parking lot.

Torvald spoke to the computer screen. “You have merged with the floor; you have become seamlessly integral with it; it's as if the carpet sprouted from your head and died. Your mouth is filled with uncooked liver, formerly your tongue. Your interrogatives surf garbled saliva. Modulations from the thinnest string on the violin have become your inner voices. Content yourself with telepathic invective which, as you'll find, works much in the same way that prayer works. That is as much as to say, telepathic invective is futile.”

Torvald rolled the syringe with a forefinger. “Tubucurarine chloride
….
What? Do I roger your telepathic vilification?” He cocked his head as if listening for the siren. He aligned the syringe just so, equidistant between the iMac and the mint tin. “If you're a bear or an otter or even a human, it's a fine product. All your loco-motor functions—arms, legs, voice—even your eyelids—are kaput. You can't even blink.” Torvald shrugged modestly. “And anybody can buy it on the Internet.”

He checked the gauge on the oxygen tank, on its own little handtruck by the window; he checked the transparent tubing for kinks; he snugged the straps on the mask. “A humanitarian would have some eyedrops to stave off desiccation.” Torvald clasped his hands behind his back, leaned over Philadelphia, and smiled. “And, ultimately, blindness.
Nota bene
.” He opened his mouth and exhaled. “Spearmint. Like it? Doesn't it remind you of a leading brand of spermicide?” He stood again, beaming. “Yes, while you do not retain your sense of humor, kiddo, you do retain your sense of smell. I chew these mints out of courtesy and precaution because, some years ago, I began to emanate a curious odor. People noticed it. The stench of evil.” He laughed without mirth. “No doubt. When you think of it, however, Dorian Gray must have begun to smell strangely, most strangely, long before his decomposition became apparent to the outside world. Hmm? Rotted from within. Yes. Pheromones of decay. Those of fear, you know about. You generate them yourself. Mine are the reciprocal. Hah. Had I not sampled them with my own nose, I wouldn't have believed it.”