—11—
Brett woke me with a polite knock at the door.
I didn't bother getting out of bed. 'Come in,' I said, and he instantly appeared just inside without opening the door, as his hands were full.
He carried a breakfast tray adorned with a red rose, and set it on the bed. I threw the rose on the floor and smiled at him. He was trying.
I offered him the foot of my bed to settle on, and he did. I sat up, still in my pongy shirt, and examined my breakfast. It was the same as I'd ordered before. That reminded me. His clothes.
He didn't have BO, his smells being related to his moods and health. His clothes still looked fresh, but I was sure he had no others. Each item fit idiosyncratically, like factory rejects, pulling around the shoulders on the shirt, tight in various places on the jeans, nothing quite symmetrical. I wondered about the state of his socks. He had a habit that I'd noticed, of easing the laces on his boots. A half-memory of something when he was in Kate's house fluttered around my brain.
'What happened to your trunk and bag?'
'They're here,' he said.
I'd expected so.
He watched me eat, and I forbore asking if he'd eaten. Not asking restored a bit of my dignity, and also helped me build up the courage to tell him we couldn't stay here. We'd have to move today. But where?
And now, that perfect name we had made was ruined. I loved the idea of being Desirée Lily, but now she couldn't be.
I was swallowing the last dregs of my procrastination when he announced a 'wonderful surprise'.
'I've taken care of your problem,' he said, 'so we can go to work with no further interruption. And do you want some clothing advice?'
He put the breakfast tray on the floor as I sat up to hear what he had to say. He was so confident, he gave me confidence.
But he wouldn't explain more. 'I've saved the sporting part for you,' he said, as he led me to the lounge, and in there, to the gym.
Jim was stretched there in an extreme athletic position, his arms, legs, head and mouth bound with strips torn from his own clothes.
He opened his eyes. He must have noticed me but he looked at Brett. Big, blue, dilated eyes fringed with curly black lashes. Then he closed his eyes. I thought he might make a noise through his gag, some primal scream, but he made no sound at all.
Brett perched on a part of the gym's extensive anatomy. 'You have the choice,' he said to me. 'Draw and quarter, difficult in this space. Though for you...' And he bowed gallantly. 'Or boiling in oil, or impaling, or crucifixion of course, or the old intestine wrap, or a turn of the screw here...' And he reached to demonstrate, bringing on another display of eyeball exposure and lash-fluttering, but no noise.
I threw my hand up, which stopped Brett.
'Or,' he continued, 'there's always a simple hanging, though I wouldn't choose hanging as the ceiling here is a trifle inconveniently low.'
He looked to me, but Jim there was quite a gobstopper. I simply couldn't answer. I could only goggle.
'Well then, though we might be troubled afterwards by a gritty residue between the floorboards, you might prefer the currently popular burial in sand with only his head sticking out, and stoning him till he's dead. Or—'
I tore my eyes from Jim, whose eyes were now shut though his eyelashes trembled like leaves under rain. 'You're pathological!' I whispered at Brett with all my might.
He winced, I think.
'Where did you get him?' I asked, not that it mattered.
'Why, you were so upset, I grabbed him before he left, just in case.' And he smiled winningly.
'You mean he was here all along when we were discussing...' I couldn't continue. But I had to, so I forced myself. 'Listening to us?'
'If he could hear through my bedroom door. Is there a problem?'
I sat on an unoccupied limb of the cold chrome body of the gym. 'That was very considerate, Brett.' I leaned closer to Jim. He looked both exhausted and attentive to the drift of our conversation. It annoyed me that during his painful death being discussed and this discussion occurring after his night on a rack, he still controlled himself to a ridiculous degree. Not a quiver of muscle nor a dribble through the anal outlet.
He'd stay right where he was, I decided, until we decided what to do.
'Brett,' I said. 'Let's go to your room.'
His room was as bare as before, except for his bag and trunk at the head of his rice-cracker mattress.
I sat cross-legged at the foot of his bed and he stretched out at the head, leaning back against his trunk.
He waited for me to talk, so I did.
'Thank you, Brett, for thinking of me. No one else has ever been as thoughtful of my feelings. But you can't just kill someone because he's in the wrong place at the wrong time.'
'I don't.' Vertical lines appeared between his brows. 'You do.'
'I don't do anything of the sort!'
'Angela! Desirée. You. You people. You always have.'
He could infuriate. 'What are you talking about? Are you insane?' Why, indeed, was I asking?
Probably better if I hadn't asked.
'I hate false accusations,' he murmured. The room fogged with that choking smell I had tasted once before.
I struggled to breathe. To understand.
'Justice!' he yelled.
'Gawhhhh.'
'Justice,' he repeated in a conversational timbre, as he waved the fug away. 'Angela,' he said. 'Most of the people you condemn and kill were in the wrong place at the wrong time. And whether I meet them or the others do, or they disappear as if they never were ... is all a continuation of the same. The state of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, just like Jim.'
He sensed that I was not with him. 'Do you know anything about the Inquisition?'
I nodded. 'A bit. They killed a lot of people who didn't believe in Jesus, and killed more to make them believe. And there were a lot of people killed for reasons I never got down.' (History 101. I passed, barely.)
'Did the Grand Inquisitor,' he quiz-showed, 'when he died, come to hell or heaven's gate?'
It depended, didn't it, on what people thought of him? Mean old cuss, but then he was the Grand Inquisitor. Did he suffer his fall in respect before, or after death? I didn't know, so couldn't answer.
'And did,' Brett asked, as if I would know 'those judged and convicted by him meet blessed fates or fire and pitch?'
I didn't answer.
'Well, I'll tell you. So much depended on the state of the Grand Inquisitor's dyspepsia, the size of the crowd for an auto-da-fé—'
Like a good primary school teacher, he noticed my confusion. 'The kangaroo court?' he offered, and then went on. 'And then so much depended on whether the fire spluttered out before it reached those sinner's legs writhing at the stake. Or in other condemnations the rope broke, or the axeman missed, or the horse bolted with the damned on her back. Or the mob's wrath outgave... ahhh, revolutions...'
For a minute, he was lost in memories. Then he began all over again. 'Have you ever thought of the witches of Salem?'
'Of course.' I had a good grounding there from the Higher Light, where one shelf was 'Wimmin, Wiccans, and Goddess Worship'. I'd read every book in the shop by my second month there, not that I was into the stuff. It was something to do, and it did make me laugh
'I'll tell you a bit,' he said, generously, meaning that he didn't think I knew a thing about the witches of Salem, or any other witches. He spoke like he had firsthand knowledge.
'If you had a wart,' he said,' or were uncommonly beautiful, or a widow with property someone else wanted, or liked little kitty cats, or noticed your neighbour doing something he hain't supposed to do, then all it took was a dunking. Dunk and if she drowns, she's innocent. Or was it guilty? Witches in Africa, witches in Europe, witches, witches, witches. Stick her hand in boiling oil, and if she blisters, she's a witch. Light a fire under her, and if it goes out before it reaches her toes, she's a witch. If so, burn her! And to find her in the first place? See that woman walking down the road, leading her pig to market? We're in need of a fine witch. Might as well be she? Or...' And his words ran dry.
We sat for a while. I thought. He looked lost in thought. Maybe he was just waiting.
But that was historical, and we were in Now. 'Justice now,' I pointed out.
'Throw the cards in the air, and they don't come down fair, me pretty!'
And here, he uttered a high, screechy cackle that grabbed the back of my neck in shivers.
He stopped and regarded me with the impersonal affection of a city person to a brown egg. 'I don't mean to scare you, my dear,' he smiled. 'But the way of the world has been that justice comes to those in the wrong place at the wrong time. Always has.'
'But we've progressed!' I protested.
'Hoo hoo!'
'Democracy, and all that.' I was going to lecture him when he interrupted.
'Do you read, child?' he asked, not unkindly, but this tone does make me want to punch someone's lights out.
'Yers.'
'Do you follow the War on Terror?'
'Yes!' But I lied. I'd had enough of it, didn't own a TV or radio, and bad news had cured me of reading the papers.
'Angela?'
'Well, not too much. But you should be much more busy because of it. Especially as the evil is so clear-cut.'
He leaned forward and peered at my face, looking for all the world as if he was searching for blackheads.
'Do you mind?'
'Don't you care what's happening, Angela, in your world?'
He was in some respects, so otherworldly, and curiously dense. 'Brett,' I told him, keeping my sneer as safe as I could make it, 'You might have power in your place, but a person like me has none whatsoever here.'
He accepted that. However, it didn't deter him. 'Don't you care?'
If he were Gordon, I would have clouted him. 'Care,' I explained patiently, 'is only worthwhile when it's something that does something for you. I don't get off on demos, and ... but this is beside the point. There is justice, you know. Not perfect, but then nothing is.'
He waved his hand in a swirling motion, and a heavy pile of newspapers fell upon the bed in front of me.
'Read' he commanded, in a tone that brooked no argument as to the humanly impossible. I scanned as fast as I could. I scanned to the last grubby broadsheet.
~
'And?' he asked.
'Well...'
'They shoot suspects, don't they?
'Mm.'
'You're saying they might be just poor bastards guilty as chooks?'
'I hadn't thought to describe them so colourfully.'
And the bombs going off against anyone in their range, condemned by the bomber, terrorist freelance, terrorist state. And a lot more that was the reason I didn't do the news, and wouldn't again. I felt sick.
'And now, it's your justice to keep,' he said, sweeping the papers to the floor. 'What is your sentence?'
I couldn't talk. Politics and history and news and morality bore me utterly. That's why I love living for art.
But I couldn't shirk my responsibility in the present situation.
'What will happen to him?' I asked.
Brett sat up, suddenly agitated.
'What do you think will happen to him?' He seemed to want to ask something, but didn't. His face took on a greenish tinge. He was growing ill at an alarming rate.
'Are you ...?' This time it couldn't be garlic.
'Nothing.' He waved his hand impatiently, and shot out a question. 'Do you believe in fate?'
'That's a crock,' I laughed.
'Crock? Crocodile?'
'Crock of shit.' I blinked. The expression suddenly sounded crude in his presence. Funny, that. The image of shit in actuality struck me as natural in his context, but the language was crude ...
'And ... heaven?' he interrupted.
'Never thought of it before you came along,' I answered immediately, and completely fair dinkum, expressing for the first time what I had always felt but never said, even to myself.
He hesitated, but blurted. 'Me?'
'You're here, aren't you? So yes, and I guess that means that heaven must exist, too, but like getting married, I never expected to go there.'
'What did you expect?' He looked enthralled, and terrified.
I'd never thought about it. But now that he asked, 'The worms crawl in. You know the rhyme. You know pinochle?'
'I think so.' I think he didn't, but he didn't want to stop the flow.
And I am also sure that he wanted to ask another question, but couldn't. His sickness seemed to grow, flicker, and then fade away. Maybe it was like, as my gran used to say, when someone walks on your grave.
We eye-balled each other, and he didn't have to tell me that I was procrastinating. I knew.
'Do you think he was a happy person, someone who has friends?' I asked.
His left brow jerked upward, and he nodded his head.
'Then can you kill him in a humane way?'
'If that's what you want?'
'Maybe he'll go to heaven,' I said, though when the word 'heaven' poured from my mouth, it left a saccharine aftertaste. There isn't any heaven, that taste told me—and I couldn't really imagine a believable hell, though the Devil was there in front of me, who could deliver newspapers with a flick of his wrist, and possessed a tail more beautiful than Boofhead's.
He stood up and reached his hand out. 'Proceed?' he asked.
'Yes,' I answered, feeling that it was my responsibility, as a human being.
We walked out together, but Jim must have had a heart attack during our conversation, because his muscles had slackened to their final resting place, and then grown stiff.