Mindkiller Read online

  Norman was still smiling, but his eyes glistened in the lamplight. “Maddy, if you haven’t written much in ten years, you haven’t left any letters unanswered either. I have this crazy impulse to apologize because I didn’t pop up and see you when I was in Africa. I will confess here and now that if you had called ahead first, I would have tried to put you off. But the moment I recognized you, it came to me that you are all the family I have left in the world. As you speak, I realize that I need close family very badly now too. Please stay.”

  Relief showed in her face, and they hugged again, without reservation this time.

  “Have you eaten?” he asked, fetching his outer clothes from the hallway.

  “No. I showed the security guard downstairs—Julius, is it?—my identification and got him to let me in, but I didn’t feel right prowling around in your home while you—”

  “Our home. Let’s eat.”

  “Well—coffee? Black and sweet?”

  “And toasted English, lots of jam, Irish in the coffee.”

  “Merveilleux. Go ahead, I’ll join you in a minute.”

  She was true to her word; he had only just finished producing two cups of fresh coffee and toast, a sixty-second job, when she came into the kitchen, carrying a package of unmistakable shape: a disc.

  “A present for you,” she said. “It was quite a job getting it past customs.”

  Norman finished pouring hastily and unwrapped his present, wondering what program she had brought him. But it was not a floppy disc, but an old-fashioned vinyl audio-only record.

  It was a copy of Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross’s first Columbia recording, “The Hottest New Group in Jazz.” Not the 1974 reissue, the original. It was older than he was, one of the first stereo jazz albums. The cardboard jacket was also original, in impeccable condition.

  “Holy God,” he breathed.

  The inner sleeve was new, a paper-and-plastic disc preserver. He took it from the jacket and slid the record out with a practiced hand, touching it only at the rim and label. The disc was immaculate. It did not appear ever to have been played, it had that special sheen. He could not guess at its worth in dollars. Not many people bothered with the obsolete disc format for their music these days; simply as an artifact, the thing was priceless.

  She saw his awe. “I chose wisely, then?”

  “Dear God, Maddy, it’s—” Words failed him. “Thank you. Thank you. God, if they’d caught you at customs, they’d have had your bloody head.”

  “I remembered that you liked their music, and I didn’t think you had this one in your collection. I was certain you didn’t have it in disc form.”

  “I’ve heard it through twice in my life. It’s never been accessed. There might be half a dozen copies in North America, and none of them would be virgin. Maddy, where did you get it? How did you get it?”

  “A present from—from a friend. Forget it. Where do I sleep tonight, the couch?” She picked up her coffee and looked for sugar.

  He fetched it, and found that he was terrified of dropping his new treasure but could not bear to set it down anywhere in the kitchen. “Nonsense. I’ve got a bed set up in the den, I’ll doss there and you take the queen-size.” He went to the living room, stored the record safely by the antique turntable, looked at it and sighed, and returned to the kitchen. She had already demolished her English muffin and finished half her coffee. He thought: She was really hungry and she waited for me to get back home. Maybe this is going to work out okay.

  “Listen,” he said, “I don’t know how to thank you.”

  She smiled. “I’m glad you’re pleased.”

  Her smile seemed to fade a bit too quickly. “Hey, I’m sorry. You spoke of bed.”

  “Oh, I didn’t mean right now, necessarily…unless you—”

  “Wait a minute now, let me get the chronology straight. It’s—” He tried to look at his watch, but it was not there.

  “Ten o’clock,” she supplied.

  “Then it must be the middle of the morning by your internal clock. You must be dead on your feet…or have I got it backwards?”

  “Here, it’s simple. I left my apartment in Zurich at 4:30 P.M., flew straight to London, and caught an Air Canada flight to here. Total transit time, ten hours, eight of that in the air. I got here half an hour ago, at 9:30 Atlantic Standard Time. By my ‘clock’ it’s 3:00 A.M.”

  “Then let’s get you to bed—”

  “Hold it. First of all, my customary bedtime is about 2:00 A.M.”

  “But jet lag—”

  “—is not so bad traveling west as it is traveling east. I chased the sun all day, so for me it has only been a few hours since sunset. I’m not sleepy yet.” She finished her coffee. “But that’s not it. You don’t look at all sleepy…”

  He considered it. “No. Not at all.”

  “…and somehow I get the impression that you have a good deal on your mind that you want very much to talk about.”

  He considered that. “Yes, I do. How did you know?”

  She hesitated. “Well, partly from the fact that Lois isn’t here and there’s no trace of her in the apartment and you haven’t said a word about her.”

  He winced. “Ah, yes,” he said, in halfhearted imitation of W. C. Fields, but dropped it at once. “And there would, I suppose, be a general overall spoor of the bachelor male in his anguish about the place, wouldn’t there? Laundry all about, bed unmade, ashtrays full—”

  “—bottles empty,” she agreed. “If you’ve been having any fun lately, it hasn’t been here.”

  “It hasn’t been anywhere. Till you showed up.”

  “Norman, if…look, if you need any money, just to tide you over, I can—”

  “Money? What gave you the idea I needed money? That’s the only problem I don’t have.”

  “Well, you’ve no hat—your hair looks like something out of Dali. And I know you pawned your watch—I can see the little stickum patch where it used to be on your wrist.”

  He looked blank for a second, and then suddenly burst into laughter. “I will be go to hell!”

  She looked politely puzzled.

  “That’s just too perfect.” He gave himself to his laughter for a moment. “No, it’s all right, I’ll tell you. Look, let’s go into the living room; this is going to take a while.”

  They took freshened cups of coffee relaced with Bushmill’s. It was excellent coffee, and he was faintly miffed that she had not commented on it. Perhaps in the circles she’d been traveling in, first-rate coffee was taken for granted.

  “Now, what’s so funny?” she said when they were seated.

  “The watch and the hat. The watch is at this moment lying on the bottom of Halifax Harbor, and the hat is almost certainly floating somewhere in the selfsame harbor. That’s the funny part. If it wasn’t for that hat, I’d undoubtedly be down there with the watch—do you know I simply never gave it a thought until you mentioned it?” He chuckled again.

  “What do you mean?” she said, and being self-involved he missed the urgency in her tone.

  “Well, it’s kind of embarrassing. What I was doing—about the time you were talking Julius into letting you in here, I think—I was committing suicide.”

  He glanced down at his coffee, and so he failed to notice that at that last word she actually relaxed slightly.

  “Seems silly now, but it made sense at the time. I wasn’t toying with the idea, I was fucking well doing it—until I was stopped by a Bad Samaritan.”

  He narrated the story of his interrupted suicide, cheerily and in some detail.

  “You see?” he finished. “If I hadn’t tried to save that idiot hat, he’d never have gotten me, I’d have been over the side and gone. The damned thing was important enough to give up dying for, and from that instant until the time you mentioned it, I never gave it another thought. It must have blown off the bridge while I was being mugged!”

  He began to laugh again, and to his utter astonishment the fourth “ha” came ou
t “oh!” as did the fifth and sixth, each harsher and louder than the last, by which time he was jack-knifed so drastically that he fell forward between his own knees. She had begun to move on the second “oh!”; her knees hit the carpet at the same instant as his, and she caught him before he could land on his face. With unsuspected strength she heaved him up into a kneeling position and wrapped her arms around him. It broke the stuttering rhythm of his diaphragm, and like an engine catching he settled into great cyclic sobs that filled and emptied his chest.

  They rocked together on their knees, clutching like a pair of drowners, and his sorrow was a long time draining. Well before awareness returned to him, his hips began to move against her in the unconscious instinct of one who has been too near death, but she did something neither verbal nor physical, that was neither acceptance nor rejection, and something in him understood and he stopped. It did not come to his conscious attention because he had none then; his memory banks were in playback mode. Firmly but not suddenly, she moved so that she was sitting on the rug and he was lying across her lap, and he flowed like quicksilver into the new embrace without knowing it. Something about the position changed his weeping, or perhaps it was sheer lack of air; the sobs came shorter and closer together, the pitch rose and fell wildly. He had been weeping as a man does; now he wept as a child. It might have been neither the position nor anoxia, just childhood imprinting of the smell of Big Sister, who has time for your smashed toe when Mother is at work and Dad is drinking. More than one species of pain left him in that weeping, more than one wound or one kind of wound closed over and began to scab. After a time his sobs trailed off into deep slow breathing, and she stroked his hair.

  His first conscious thought was that something was hurting his cheek. It was one of the silver cashew-shaped buttons of her blouse, and when he moved he knew it had left an imprint that would last an hour or more. With that, reality came back in a rush, and he rolled away and sat up. Her arms, which had been so strong a moment ago, fell away at once when he moved, and she met a searching gaze squarely. He looked for scorn or amusement or pity, and found none of them. As an afterthought he looked within himself for scorn or shame or self-pity, and again came up empty.

  “Lord have mercy,” he said shakily. “I thought I got it all out in that laugh before.” He grinned experimentally. “Thanks, sis.”

  She had found Kleenex. “Sure. Here.”

  Why do people always roll up their eyes when they wipe away tears? he wondered, and thought at once of the last time he had wondered that. “God, I missed you at the funeral, Mad.”

  She smiled briefly.

  “I’m sorry, stupid thing to say, of course you couldn’t come. I just meant—”

  “It’s all right, Norman. Really.” She patted his hand. “I said goodbye to both of them in my heart before I left for Europe, and they to me.”

  “Yes.” They both smiled now.

  “Can you tell me about it now?” she asked.

  “Why I was trying to do myself in tonight? I think so.”

  He sat on the couch again and lit a cigarette. Seeing this, she produced a pack of Gauloise from her vest and raised an inquiring eyebrow. This surprised and pleased him. To a smoker of North American cigarettes, Gauloise smell like a burning outhouse—a fact of which most Gauloise smokers are sublimely unaware. She had not smoked since she arrived, had not even asked until she was sure that he smoked himself.

  He nodded permission at once, and she lit up gratefully. “Now we’re even,” he said, making them both grin.

  “All right,” he went on. “Lois. I suppose I should start from the beginning. I’m just not certain where that is.”

  “Then do it backwards. Where does she live now?”

  Norman pointed toward the living room window. “About a thousand meters that way and eight floors down. A second-and-third-story duplex apartment across the street. They’re away for the moment, at Lois’s place in the Valley. She’s living with a third-year plumbing student named, God help us all, Rock, and she’s still working at the V.G. Hospital up the street from here. She’s got a floor now, Neurosurgery.”

  “How long has she been gone?”

  He smiled. “That’s another of those difficult questions.”

  “When did she move out?” she amended patiently.

  “Well, over a period of several months, but she took her TV six months ago, I’ve always sort of considered that conclusive. After that she came by about twice a week for a while, to pick up something or other or share some new insight, and since then she seems to find some reason to drop by on the average of every other week. Her appearances are always unannounced and usually inconvenient for me, and I always let her in. I would estimate that we fuck two visits out of three. She is always gone in the morning. It’s a lot like having a leg rebroken every time it’s begun to knit.” His voice was calm, unemotional.

  “What is this Rock like?”

  “Aside from biographical trivia, location of aunts and so forth, all Lois has ever seen fit to tell me is that he is nineteen, that he lets her be herself, and that he is a better lover than me. From my own experience I can report only that he is very large and very fast and all over hair and has knuckles like pig iron.”

  “You fought with him?”

  “Oh, yes. As you saw from my entrance tonight, I haven’t lost that fine edge of physical conditioning I had in the army. The trained killing machine. I lost a tooth I was fond of, and a suit I wasn’t. So I sucker-punched him. Lois gave me hell, and carried him offstage cooing sympathetically.”

  “Why did she leave you?”

  He made no answer, did not move a muscle.

  “Why did she say she was leaving?”

  The answer was slow in coming. “As nearly as I can understand it, her gist was that in living with her for six years I have acquired some sense of who she is and what she’s like. This, to her way of thinking, limits her. Makes it impossible for her to become something new.”

  “You disagree.”

  “Not at all. I see and concede the point. People tend to behave the way you expect them to, in direct ratio to your certainty and their own insecurity. It is why marriages often require extended solo vacations. I would happily have given her one if she’d asked for it. Instead she—”

  “Perhaps she didn’t want to ask.”

  “—had to go and—what?”

  “Nothing.”

  “—to go and throw everything away, smash the whole business. I came home one night at the usual time and found her in bed with another man. Absolutely the first I knew of any serious discontent, and my God, the blowup we had. You know, she had never once yelled at me before, never once lost her temper and told me to—I—she walked out and didn’t come back for a week. I—this is only my perspective, my biased—I don’t believe that I ever got a single opening, from that day on. She never gave me a chance. You should smoke the new ashless kind.”

  She carefully conveyed her hand to the ashtray beside her chair, nicked ash into it.

  “I know,” he went on, “to be surprised by the whole thing implies that I had blinders on for years. How well could I have known her, to be so stunned? Well, I’ve run that mental loop about six million times, and I can’t buy it. Oh, to some extent, of course—you can’t be fooled that well for that long without wanting to be fooled. But God, Maddy, I swear there were no clues to be seen, no hints to be picked up. She never paid me the compliment of telling me what she disliked about me and our life, never trusted me to help anything. I could have tried.” He stubbed out his cigarette angrily, “I would have.”

  She sat perfectly still. He lit another cigarette, drew on it harshly, and during this she was motionless and silent. Norman felt that his relationship with his sister had come to another crux. For all of his life Madeleine had been four years older, smarter, stronger, more knowledgeable, and by the time he was twenty and the age difference would have begun to mean less, she was gone to Europe. At the time of her departure t
hey had been on friendly terms, but not friends. He had not seen her since, had seldom heard from or of her, had never had an occasion or an opportunity to put aside a lifetime of subconscious resentment. And from the moment of her reentry into his life he had behaved like an idiot, blundering into his own fists, waving a safetied gun like a spastic desperado, weeping in her lap. Norman perceived his resentment now, to which he had not given a conscious thought in years, tasted it afresh and in full. Against it he balanced the fact that she was an extremely well-mannered house guest who had brought him an extremely valuable guest’s gift.

  No. It was more than that. It was valuable to him. She had remembered his tastes in music, picked one that would have endured for the decade she had been gone.

  He hadn’t the remotest idea what her tastes in music were.

  “That came out rather glibly, didn’t it?” His decision process had lasted the span of a deep drag on his new cigarette.

  “She’s been gone for six months,” she said at once. “The story gets polished with repetition.”

  He smiled. “Almost enough to be really convincing. Thanks, Maddy, but I’m a liar. The signs were there. Some of them were there the day I met her. I chose not to see them.”

  “And she chose to let you.”

  He nodded. “That’s true.” He got a thoughtful look, and she left him with it, finishing her coffee. Presently he said, “And ever since she left I’ve been behaving like a perfect jackass. It hasn’t seemed like it. I haven’t felt as though I’ve even had any choices—more as if I were on tracks. But what I’ve been doing is systematically harvesting every opportunity for pain that the situation affords. Because…because she enjoys it, and I—I seem to feel I owe it to her. I’ve known this all along. Why didn’t I know I knew it?”

  “You weren’t ready yet.”

  “It has been harder saying this—to you—than it was weeping on your collar. Why is that, I wonder?”